The Windows 7 Taskbar

Martin | Nov 21, 2008 | Comments

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The Engineering Windows 7 blog is finally starting to integrate the operating system into their articles. Most of the previous articles that have been posted at the website were about theoretical aspects and things Microsoft learned from past operating systems.

The Windows 7 Taskbar is a very detailed article about the new and improved Taskbar in Windows 7. It features many screenshots and explains the whole new Taskbar concept in great detail. Some of the new features and concepts have already been mentioned before but the article does contain new information.

Take a look at some of the headlines of the article:

Refreshed Look
Pinning
Unification
Interactive, Grouped Thumbnails
Aero Peek
Jump Lists
Custom Window Switchers
Thumbnail Toolbars
Notification Area
Overlay Icons and Progress Bars
Color Hot-track
Start Menu

The first thing that might catch the attention is the Color Hot-track feature. This is a visual aid that becomes active when the user moves the mouse over a Taskbar icon.

When a person moves her mouse over a running program on the taskbar, she will be pleasantly surprised to find that a light source tracks her mouse and the color of the light is actually based on the icon itself. We calculate the most dominant RGB of the icon and dynamically paint the button with this color.

Overlay Icons and Progress Bars have not been mentioned before as well:

Cleaning the Notification Area warrants us to consider other ways that programs can surface important information. We’ll always had overlay icons throughout Windows (e.g. to show shortcuts in Explorer) so we decided to bring this functionality to the taskbar. An icon can now be shown over a program’s taskbar button. Furthermore, programs can also give feedback about progress by having their taskbar button turn into a progress bar.

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