Yes ladies and gents. Today I want to talk a bit about my favorite new OS, Windows 7. I am not coming to you as a loyal Microsoft employee trying to sell our newest iteration of Windows. I am here as a dude just excited about a new OS (and I just happen to get paid by the company making it – but we’ll ignore that ok?). So why am I excited?

For one, it works. It works really well specially considering it’s a beta. The OS is solid! I am using it at home right now on my machine. I upgraded from Vista x64 and the upgrade went pretty smoothly. It took quite a while, but eventually I was greeted with the new Windows 7 look! Here’s a run down of my initial reaction as I booted it up for the first time:

“hey! look at that! We finally put some graphic at the boot screen above the progress bar! Not sure WHY we didn’t before… but it’s ok. Looks cool”

“Hmm… boots quite a bit faster. Nice work.”

“Whoah! Check out this new Task bar! I got icons on it for the apps I use. I can drag/drop more icons.”

“Ok..that’s neat. I like how when I hover over the active icons (i.e. app running), it has this cool glow on it. Someone is paying attention to some eye candy! Hell…it’s about time! (Yeah… I still quote Starcraft II trailer :/ )”

“!!!! Windows update has what for me??? No way! NO WAY! A pre-release NVIDIA driver for Windows 7? DAMN! it works!” At this point, I near dropped dead from sheer shock. My #1 hair pulling frustration with Vista was Nvidia drivers. To actually have a WORKING driver for the beta blows me away.

The upgrade was awesome! The OS works pretty well and it is snappy! Lots of cool features I have yet to mess with are:

• Media/document libraries
• Home networking features that are supposed to make Windows 7 machines share stuff very easily. That is cool and I really wanted it.
• Other UI trickery like dragging windows to edges, etc.

Overall, I am quite happy with it. Vista had a rough start and is pretty good now in my opinion. Windows 7 improves on Vista and XP minus the rough start. I truly think people are going to be happy when the install it. Beta 1 should be available sometime in the coming few days to everyone. I’ll make sure to post a link to the download. When I do, get it… just get it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Alright…I’ll admit it… I am quite the fan of Mac OS X. I LOVE the Expose feature specially and how well it works. So when Vista came out, I set out to find something that can replicate that effect. I came across this C# application that a guy threw together in like one night that does a pretty decent job of imitating Expose. The guy posted his code in the forum thread on gamedev.net. His version supports live thumbnails as well, so it’s pretty damn cool.

What his version missed though was polish. It was an .exe that you had to run everytime you wanted the effect. So I modified it to become a tray icon application with support for hot corners. This way you can specify a corner on the screen where if your mouse goes there, the effect activates.

You can get my version from here. I included the source (which is not very sexy) incase someone wants to take this even further!

This is what it looks like: