Advertisment

The Key Enhancements

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

We at PCQuest have been covering new features of Windows 7 for more than six

months now. In this story we give you a gist of what we've already covered.

Plus, we talk about a lot of new features of Windows 7 that would really help

enhance your productivity.

Advertisment

Sensor Platform-for developers



Sensor platform is a fairly new concept for laptops and personal computers

and essentially provides a unified layer for connecting and accessing different

types of sensors to your computing devices and access them through different

applications at a given point of time. These sensors could be physical sensors

such as GPS, accelerometer and light sensors or they could be logical sensors

such as WiFi triangulation resolvers, etc. The main aim of this platform is to

provide an interface and a set of APIs so that one can use and build location

and environment aware applications. To understand what such sensors do, let's

take the example of a light sensor which is connected to a laptop. Such a sensor

should automatically be able to decide the ambient light and based on the same,

should automatically adjust the brightness level of the display. Another example

of a location aware application that you can use immediately after installing

Windows 7 is the weather gadget. This gadget is capable of linking to your GPS

device or a GSM module (for GSM triangulation) if present and get your current

location and update it as you move from one location to another.

You might say, this kind of a location based development was even possible

earlier so what's the great deal now? The answer lies in the fact that most of

these sensors are essentially com port-based (physical or virtual) devices and

as com port is serial in nature you can only connect one application to the

device at a point of time. With the help of the new sensor platform, it's

possible to unify devices at a logical level so that any number of applications

can use sensors for getting location and surroundings data and automate

processes according to that.

With the new multi-touch feature in Windows 7 now you can

play around, shuffle, rotate and resize images with your fingers.
Remember the good old Calculator? Now it has been enhanced

by providing different views for programming, scientific and statistical

usage.
Advertisment

MultiTouch



After a long wait, finally we have a version of Windows which Supports

multi-touch natively. Till now there are very few hardware devices available

that support this functionality. Multi-touch can't work with just about any

touch screen based system but requires a special touch hardware which supports

multiple touches as multiple inputs simultaneously. Right now you can get such

machines which support Windows 7 multi-touch functionality from both HP and

Dell. We got our hands dirty on an HP TouchSmart PC. Most of the native

applications that come with Windows 7 now supports multi-touch so for instance

now you can paint in the MS-Paint application using multiple fingers. There is a

multi-touch keyboard which lets you type with both hands as you do on a regular

keyboard.

Microsoft has also revealed the Touch Pack for Windows 7 which comes along

with some very neat software like games, photo viewer and screen server which

can be controlled by multi-touch. This pack should be available for download for

genuine Windows 7 users.

App enhancements



Ever since we've been using Windows, we are familiar with some of the

applications that come along with it such as the Calculator, Paint, Word pad,

etc. In the following sections we look at the new enhancements to these tools.

Advertisment

Calculator



This tiny applet that has been around since Windows 1.0 and is amongst the

most used application to do small calculations. Calculator has not seen any

major improvement in all these years but finally it gets a massive makeover in

Windows 7. At the basic level, the Calculator app looks like its earlier

counterparts, but with some color changes. However, even in this mode, there are

changes that can really make a huge difference to how you use this app. The

first change is that Calculator maintains a history of all calculations you have

done. And you can browse through these by clicking on the desired one or by

using the arrow buttons on top of the 'screen.' Another major change is that you

can even edit a previous calculation in case you made a mistake in any of the

values you entered by simply double clicking on it.

The basic calculator looks similar to the earlier versions. The history

options let you see earlier results as well as edit the calculation itself. You

now also have a number of new modes other than the Basic and Scientific ones

that have been around. You also get Programmer and Statistics modes. Not only

this, you also get a number of handy tools to perform common calculations.

First, you get a Unit Converter that lets you convert between different units of

different types. For instance, you can select types such as Temperature, Angle,

Speed, Length, Area and many more and select to convert between different units

such as C-F, Meter-Feet, Mile-Km, and more. Next, you also get a nice date

converter that lets you find the difference between two dates or add/remove days

to a date. And finally you get an option to perform some template based

calculations for Gas Mileage, Lease Estimation and Mortgage Estimation. If you

are planning to take a loan to purchase a car or house, this last one can be a

huge timesaver.

Advertisment

Paint



This is another app that has been around for ages without any significant

changes. The user interface now looks like that of an Office 2007 application by

the inclusion of the Ribbon control. This lets you work with a much larger

number of tools and has a number of enhancements to what Paint can do. Although

it is not something that you can use for editing photos or very precise

graphics, this is much better than what was there earlier and can be used for

simple jobs in a much easier fashion.

Word Pad



Always considered a simple word processor, WordPad too gets the new Office

2007 Ribbon interface to make finding and using features easier. Another

enhancement is that it can now open, edit and save in the new DOCX format as

well.

Next -Features

for Roaming & Branch Office Users

Advertisment