Windows 7 Wishlist

As you know by now, I’d be the first to defend Vista. I personally feel it is the best OS available at this point in time and I’ve spent the last 9 months (since I began using it) evangelising it at every available opportunity, however I’m also just as ready to admit there are plenty of things in Vista that do need fixing.

This is my personal list of things of what I’d like to see changed, fixed or included in Windows 7:

Performance:
The biggie… I’m popping this in because it wouldn’t be a real wish-list without it. Personally I find Vista to perform great, better then XP definitely on decent hardware, however I’d love to see Windows 7 just kick Mac OSX and Linux’s ass as far as performance goes.

This is the major topic under discussion in Steven Sinofsky’s Engineering Seven blog. 

Faster Functional Desktop
Sure, I get a boot time pretty close to Microsoft’s benchmarks, however what they don’t mention is that even though the desktop is loaded, a lot of background processes are still going on in the background. It’s a good minute before I get a functional desktop after booting.

Windows Task Bar
I would love for Windows 7 to include some dramatic changes to the taskbar. I don’t mean visually or functionally but things like some new features for the Quick Launch bar, more options for creating menus and folders on the bar and things like that. Also why isn’t doesn’t the Quick Launch bar use the same theme as the taskbar? It looks ugly.

Bloody Annoying Deletion Bug
Sure you can use Unlocker but it would be really nice if Vista actually deleted what I wanted to delete! For me this is the single-most most frustratingly annoying thing in Vista.

Multiple Desktop Support
Everyone else has them, no third party app does it decently yet. It is time.

UI Consistency
Hopefully Windows 7 contain essentially the same Aero theme as Vista and the developers can work on fixing all the UI bugs and inconsistencies across the system. Check out Long Zheng’ Aero Taskforce for some examples.

Redesign ‘Personalise’
I have no idea what they where thinking when they changed all these options around but it’s really annoying trying to work out where is where and navigating between. Make it easier to change all appearance related settings from one place!

System Tray
Do something here, I’m not sure what. It seems especially buggy in Vista, icon menus freezing up and that kind of thing.

Improve Windows Search
Search is fantastic in Vista and I understand why it takes a few seconds to get results, however I really think for simply searching amongst start menu program icons it should be dramatically improved. When I’m searching for a file I can wait a few seconds, when I just want to launch ‘Word’ I’d like instant results as soon as I type ‘Wo…’

Also some more intuitive functions would be nice, similar to Launchy, learning from usage patterns and picking up on typos. I would also be more likely to use virtual folders more if performance was better.

Calculator functions from Start Menu
Why not? It seems pointless to open up the actual app when you could do it straight from the search box.

Multiple Monitors
It’d be great to have a taskbar which stretches across multiple monitors and options for wallpapers to do the same, or perhaps even choose two wallpapers for 2 monitors.

Annoying Notification Popups
Need I say more?

Explorer Doesn’t remember folder settings.

Networking and Sharing
This is a joke, the Network and Sharing center is way too many clicks away and sharing media between devices is incredibly convoluted and confusing.