The first surprise was the apparent optionality of the update.  In Windows update Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows was unticked.  Presumably this would only remain so for a short period of time before it becomes mandatory.

Upon restarting my PC, which wasn’t required, I was faced with both a notice about the ballot screen and a new icon on my desktop.

In addition, and as expected, the IE icon in my taskbar had disappeared.

The ballot doesn’t deactivate Internet Explorer, so simply closing this window won’t do any harm, you’ll still be able to get online and indeed Internet Explorer was still in my Start Menu and could be both run and repinned to the taskbar.

What I was interested in was that would happen if you did exactly that and just closed the window.  Well closing the information window will pop up the ballot whether you like it or not, ironically in Internet Explorer, but that too can either be happily closed or you can press a Select Later button, in which case you’ll be prompted the next time you start your PC.

The purpose of wanting to find this out was because a great many, indeed hundreds of thousands of people around Europe will wonder what this thing is that’s just popped up, not bother to read it and close it straight away.  They will then, should they have IE in their taskbar or Quick Launch area, wonder where it’s gone.

At least the Browser Choice icon will help in this regard, the the program remains in your \Windows\System 32\ folder as browserchoice.exe should you ever want to run it again.

It’s good that European users will get this browser choice and, in a way, a shame that people outside of the EU and also people who don’t currently have IE set as their default browser, are being denied it.  It’s a shame though that it’s not being used more forcibly against people running the notoriously buggy IE6 to force them to upgrade.  On the flip-side it’s an annoyance we could all well do without and is bound to cause a lot of confusion regardless.

Now I’d like to set aside for a moment the two things that you know already, that a true three-dimensional desktop space is something PC users have been longing for now for many years, and that it would also make gaming, especially first-person online shooters something absolutely amazing.

What I’d like to talk about are the potential health benefits.  I know, you’re now wondering why I glossed over the gaming in order to go off on the tangent of the decade… how could 3D possibly be good for your health!?  I’ll come back to the gaming in a little bit but hear me out first.

The sheer number of people who suffer from headaches and other medical conditions each year because of the thousands of hours we all spend staring at computer screens, might just have a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel now (if you’ll excuse the pun), at least if 3D is done right.

At the moment there are issues about 3D movies themselves giving you headaches, with people not able to watch something for too long before the backs of their eyes begin to warm up and eventually explode (slight exaggeration there for dramatic purpose).

Dozens of companies are now working to either find glasses that don’t do this, or to develop screens where you don’t need glasses at all.  But these glasses can have tremendous positive benefits on their own, potentially screening out the bright lights and radiation that give you a headache in the first place.  Wearing 3D glasses at your computer all day might make you look silly, but it could also make it much more pleasurable to sit there.

But there’s a hope that whatever format wins the 3D war will ultimately do so partly because of the health benefits.  There’s a very good chance this will happen too because the medical downsides of watching 3D are well documented, and high on the agendas of developers.  Mix this with the effects of, essentially wearing thick dark glasses, and bingo, everyone’s happy.

Back to gaming, because I know this is really what you want to talk about, this would also be the technology that further drives the graphics market forward and gives all those multi-stream processors in PCIx cards we all keep reading about, a proper job to do rather than just blowing smoke (it’s pun central here today).  But the health benefits here are even more tremendous when you think about it, as gamers are much more likely to stare intently at a screen for a long period of time as someone browsing the web or compiling a spreadsheet.

So, no matter how pointless I might personally think the whole concept of 3D is, in the real world the health benefits of the technology could be well worth looking a bit silly for.

In the last few years we’ve seen a monumental shift in the way we interact with the internet, and in what we define as the devices we need to do so.

90+% of the activity we use PCs for, at least in the home, is internet-based, be it email, shopping or social networking.  Indeed as a power user the extra software I have on my PC that I use, Microsoft Visio and Publisher and Nero are the only ones that get used with any regularity, and in some cases that’s less than once a month.  The rest of the time I’m living in my browser, or, as in the case of Live Writer and Live Mail, I could be.

In the last month however there has been a monumental shift in computing technology with two products announced that could revolutionise computing in the home.  These are Apple’s iPad and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series.

These two devices are bringing together all the things we do for 90% of the time into, wait for it, consumer electronics devices.  Nothing short of the holy grail of home computing.

No installing or reinstalling, no maintenance, no worrying.  Just an OS on a chip that starts instantly, works without trouble and is virus and trojan resistant.  What household could resist such a future?

This is a future that’s about to take the world by surprise, as all of a sudden, everything we need to do around the home that we would ordinarily have a computer for is subsumed by these other handheld devices.  For proof you only have the look at the growing popularity of laptops over desktops in the home in the last few years.

So what does this mean for home computing, Microsoft and the internet?  So far as home computing is concerned this is a wonderful thing.  Having a tablet such as the iPad or Microsoft Courier, running a bespoke OS on a chip, that you can just pick up and use without ever having to worry about a virus or a reinstall, is more than compelling, it’s inevitable.  But there could be serious repercussions elsewhere.

But what about the software that people want to run at home?  Just look at web 2.0 apps such as Pixlr to see how advanced these are becoming.  With the launch of things like the online Microsoft Office apps, we’re seeing a new wave of web 2.0 applications that will quickly replace the need to have this software installed on your PC at all.  Furthermore, the move towards people using these new devices will drive innovation in Web 2.0 apps more quickly.

As for gaming, the PC has lost that battle some years back with the reinvention of the console.  Never again will the PC be the dominant ‘player’ in the gaming market.

Microsoft would be the first to suffer as sales of copies of Windows would plummet.  The OS would return, pretty much, to where it was in the mid 90’s with only businesses and enthusiasts owning a PC.  As a company they’d have to move with the times and reinvent themselves in a new consumer electronics market.

This wouldn’t be a problem for Microsoft as they’ve been doing this for years and, frankly, some of their own products are the ones that are driving this new technological wave forward.  The consequences for the internet could be much more serious.

The problem with devices on a chip, nice as the idea is in principle, is that it locks the abilities of those devices down firmly.  This means that upgrades only really appear when there’s new hardware, but this can have a knock-on effect with innovation.

Why should anybody innovate with new technologies on the internet when most of the devices out there won’t be able to use them?  New technologies come along all the time and there’s usually widespread adoption.  This however is because with PCs and Macs it’s a quick and simple task to update the support in software.  As an internet company though would you want to use the next big thing on the internet if you knew that the support for it in the hardware people own wouldn’t come along until you’d already been running it for a while?  Conversely, as a hardware company would you build in support for a new technology that nobody’s using yet, or that’s not on all devices because of the fractured nature of the new multi-OS ecosystem.

I believe, firmly in fact, that the entire home computing market is going to make a monumental shift towards these new consumer electronics devices in the next couple of years.  These new devices will save households money, do almost everything they need them to do, and do so in a worry-free and hassle-free way.  By 2012 it could be common to see households either completely without a PC or Mac, or where such a computer has been mothballed.

This is no bad thing in principle, but in practice we need to start thinking seriously about what the repercussions of this will be and if we’re happy for our current level of internet-based technology to remain static for the next decade.

What this service does is creates a custom installer for you that will automatically install the latest versions of a great many software packages including Firefox, Chrome, Filezilla, iTunes, Gimp, Acrobat Reader and a great many more.  We can also expect many more software packages to be added to the list over time.

Installation is as simple as clicking the software you want and downloading your custom installer.

On the downside, you can probably expect Ninite to install every software package with its default options.  This could mean the installation of toolbars or custom settings you may not want, but for a great many pieces of common, and extremely useful software, it’s nothing short of a fantastic time-saver.

Despite the best efforts of Dan and Microsoft to make search in Windows 7 as easy and as intuitive as possible the use, a great many people still find some aspects of using search, especially some of the more advanced search options, frustrating.

So as a special freebie for Windows7News readers I’ve compiled a unique 18 page guide explaining every aspect of how to use search in Windows 7, covering everything from how to get the best out of simple keyword-based searches, to the Advanced Query Syntax system that’s new to this version of Windows.

The guide contains a full chapter and an extra appendix from my book, The Windows 7 Power Users Guide, and is FREE for everybody to download and share.

You can download your free search guide HERE.

Don’t forget, as an extra for readers of Windows7News, you can still download another 21 page sample chapter of the book from this link.

The full book is available in paperback, and as an eBook for only £3.99

You’ll see that with Windows 7 it’s immediately considerably more difficult to do a contextualised search.  It’s still possible but you need to type text commands, and who is going to remember those?  I’ll publish a complete list in my Windows 7 Power Users Guide.

I did, it’s a shame that I had to, and in the next few days I’ll release that part of the book as a free download for you here.

Dan Plastina, the then group manager for “Find & Organize” in Windows 7, and the man responsible for leading the team that developed the libraries and the keyword search in that operating system, was quick to reply to my article.

For the masses, the biggest issue is one of users not discovering search features at all. In addition, the telemetry data we have indicates that keywords search is — by an extreme margin — the dominant type of search. Saved searches are not used that much (by the masses).

What he was saying is that search engines ever since the birth of the internet, have over-simplified the way we search for things.  In the beginning the internet wasn’t that large so a simple keyword-based approach was logical, but as the net expanded people had become used to this keyword-based approach so, while companies like Google still offer an advanced search for those who want it, engines like Bing took a different approach, trying to make the keyword search work smarter.

This approach was melded into Windows out of necessity, because we search for things on-line much more often than we do on our own PCs.  Microsoft offered two ways to search.  The keyword contextualising approach offered in the Start Menu and Explorer windows, and the Advanced Query Syntax (AQS).

A lot of the people who left comments on my original article over the last year however felt that these were the two extremes of what they were really after, and that the middle ground, better represented by the way you could search in XP, hadn’t been catered for.

Dan and I have been discussing Windows search on and off for the last year and, as I came to write this follow-up article he jumped in with more detail about Microsoft’s position.

I do hear your points so I don’t want to dismiss those. What I am suggesting though is that if you look at the problem from the angle of the masses – the typical Windows user – then you’ll see that they too can now do the powerful searches without having to know that the ‘advanced query syntax’ exists. This is a big win for the vast majority of the users.

I’d characterize this as Windows 7 having improved upon the path (slight detour?) taken by Vista with: Improved keyword search and broadened search scopes (e.g.: the control panel tasks from the start menu; HomeGroup search, all locations included in libraries, etc. ); a cleaner, more self-consistent Explorer experience over Vista; and the addition of search filter building for the ‘masses’.

I do also agree that Windows Vista did remove some of the more targeted search capabilities that existed in Windows XP. Windows 7 built mostly on the direction set by Vista, right or wrong.

Now I’m going to be fair and say that there’s a lot to like about the way Windows 7 searches for information.  The way it drills down into files and the multitude of ways that search results can be presented are extremely useful.  I’m hoping though that significant improvements are still made for Windows 8.

For example…  Should you wish to search your files and documents for PDF and Word files you, according to AQS logic would type type:(pdf AND doc), but this won’t work.  Instead, and Dan has enlightened me on this as even I hadn’t figured it out, typing type:(pdf OR doc) will produce the results you require, logical OR = English ’and’.  He goes on to say that the kind: command can also be used in this instance to search for all the main document types.

Clearly there are ways in which the AQS can be improved to both make it both more powerful and more intuitive.  Adding more of the helpful drop-down search filters when you begin a search would be a very useful addition for many, but you have to know at what point you draw the line.  Microsoft freely admit however that search in Windows 7 isn’t perfect and was such a departure from what was seen in Vista, that getting it right in a single release would be unlikely.  Some steps are just too big to take in one release!

Libraries are also an area where significant work can be done with Windows 8.  At the moment they are a straight replacement for the old shell folders from XP (Documents, Music etc) with the ability to add extra folders to them should you wish.

If this feature was further expanded and blended with the saved searches that were introduced with Vista, then we could have libraries of PDF files or files created by you at work.  Here we would have a genuinely powerful tool for organising files on our PCs.  Shell folders could be gone forever.

If you look at the way search works in the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system we can perhaps see the beginnings of a more logical approach to search.

Performing a search in this OS will bring up panels titled “Web, Local, News” and so on, categorising your search results in helpful and meaningful ways.  It’s only a matter of time before this works its way into the main Bing search engine, and it’s a logical progression from the aggregated and contextualised search in Windows 7, indeed this is already the way that the Start Menu displays search results to you.

What the future holds for search at least is currently unclear.  Whether it lies in contextualised keyword-based search, an improved AQS, a drop-down entry system reminiscent of XP or any combination of the above remains to be seen.

So now we wait.  The good news is that I genuinely believe that Microsoft have taken on board the criticisms that I (and others) have made about the search and organise features in Windows 7.  The way the company structures updates now makes it unlikely that any revisions will find their way into this current version of the OS, but Windows 8, if done right, could revolutionise the way we interact with the documents on our PCs.

This comes about because of an anti-trust case instigated by Opera about the ‘unfair’ bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.  Late in 2009 Microsoft proposed a ballot screen for Windows users, though the EU didn’t agree in time for the initial rollout of Windows 7.

The update will see Internet Explorer unpinned from the Start Menu and Taskbar of users’ PCs, and a list of browsers presented “in random order” that people can choose to download and install.

Anybody choosing Internet Explorer will simply see their icons reinstated.

This all seems straightforward enough on the face of it, but it is certain to confuse a great many users who just think of Internet Explorer as “the internet” and who may never have heard of these other browsers.  The information provided for each browser may be of use to some people in making an informed choice, but a great many people will be sat scratching their heads wondering what’s going on and why they suddenly can’t get to their email any more.

The winners in this ballot screen are sure to be Microsoft (as people will already recognise the IE icon and gravitate towards it) and Google (due to their brand recognition).  It remains to be seen if this will have any positive effect for other browsers, especially Opera.

On the whole though any competition in the browser market is a good thing and can only encourage innovation which is hugely beneficial to end users.  I am concerned however where it will end if this is successful… a ballot screen for your media player, free CD/DVD burner, search facility?

It could all get very messy indeed.  If you want to see the browser choices you’ll be offered yourself, you can here.

Source: Microsoft

The Zune software, on the PC and the Zune HD has been praised for some time now and, to the surprise of a great many people including myself, the new Zune inspired software on Windows Phone 7 Series has caused quite a stir.

But if Microsoft were to extend this further what could a new interface for Windows 8 look like?

I’ve spent just a short while this morning making up the mock-up (below) as one example of how such a new interface could work on the desktop as a replacement for the Start Menu we’ve all come to love or hate.

This is only a sample, obviously there would have to be much more to the interface than this, but as an example of what the future could hold?  Well, what do you think about the future of the Windows interface?

Click on the image to view it full-size.

Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a quite remarkable product, and one that’s certainly taken the tech-world by surprise, a fully-featured new smart phone OS that appears to have every angle covered.

This is quite an achievement, especially when you consider what type of company Microsoft is.  As it’s such a behemoth there are a huge number of very big and very important departments, none of whom seem to talk to one another.  This looks like it’s finally begun to change with the Zune, portable music player, software not only being integrated into the new Windows Mobile, but forming the basis for the look and feel of the new OS itself.

Now this is where Microsoft have done a fantastic thing, but it’s very important that they don’t drop the ball and continue doing this with a fantastic suite of software (and services) right up until the crown in all of this, the launch of Windows 8 (or Windows.Next whatever it ends up being called) in 2012.  And you know what, I think they might just pull it off!

First, let me explain why what they’ve just done is so important.  We all use a broad selection of services, be they on hardware, software or in the cloud.  Companies like Microsoft try and lock us in to their own bundle, and they’re by far the most successful as they have the only suite that talks to each other properly.  Google do try, bless their little cotton socks, to pull this off but they’ve yet to succeed and Apple still insist on charging for these services, and don’t provide enough for the money.  This is especially when you compare them to the free suites by Google and Microsoft.

Finally, Microsoft have proven that you can have truly interconnected systems and services by integrating Windows Mobile, Zune and Xbox Live.  We’ve yet to see how well the cloud services integration works with this but I can only hope it’s better than the integration with Windows Mobile 6.5, supporting your Live Calendar and SkyDrive.

The important point here is interconnectedness. Windows Phone 7 Series (which is a bit of a mouthful frankly) doesn’t just aggregate these Microsoft services onto a single platform, it does the same with Facebook, Twitter and other services have been mentioned including Flickr and GMail.

Now this interconnectedness needs to spread out from the centre with a ripple effect.  The Zune software, by far the best media player on the market in my opinion, needs to fully support Windows 7 by integrating support for tags, ratings and so on for more than just music (i.e. pictures) and wouldn’t it be great if you could interconnect the Zune player and your Xbox 360 with your Windows Phone in such a way that they’d alert you to new messages and calls when you’re out or reach / earshot of the phone?  This can easily be done over a home network or with location-aware software, something Windows 7 already has.

Finally the biggest piece of the puzzle will be the next version of Windows, due in 2012.  This really must integrate all of the above and be able to present it all to you on the desktop in a friendly manner.  It must be the most interconnected OS of them all, working seamlessly, no drivers, no additional software, with Windows Phones, your Xbox, Zune and the Zune player software, Windows Live suite and all the services you use in the cloud.

The interface on the Windows Phones must be replicated further into the Windows OS itself, not just in Media Centre and the Zune Player.  There are a great many areas where this could be possible.  Also the inroads that multi-touch is making should be complete by the time that OS comes out, if done properly.  They’ll need to use Windows 7 to do this, and they need to get started quickly to succeed.

This means that by 2012, Microsoft can release an OS not just to rival the iPad, but to far surpass it, running their new interconnected Windows.  Fully featured, finger friendly and, not to put too fine a point on it, the future.  You’ll have a suite of Microsoft hardware and software and you’ll use Microsoft services, but it won’t be clear at any time which one or ones you’re using, nor should it.  This seamless integration between everything they do, and with additional integration of the third-party services you also use, is the holy grail of usability for any OS.

The pressure’s on now and if Microsoft can pull this off, the turn around in fortunes and appreciation for the company could allow it to overtake Apple in the WOW stakes.

At a press event in Barcelona, Spain at the World Mobile Congress event, Microsoft have unveiled the new Windows Phone 7 Series, and it’s very different from any version of Windows Mobile that’s come before it.

Full multi-touch is supported including pinch-zoom and the whole UI, from what we’ve seen so far, looks to have been revamped to make it finger friendly.

The front screen is made up of ‘customisable ‘hubs’ and there are a great many of these you can use.  This new screen is reminiscent of what Nokia introduced last year.  I’m not entirely certain if it’ll be what users want from both a usability and aesthetic view, but only time will tell on this and I’m looking forward to the first, hands-on, reviews in the next day or so.

These first reviews will also give us a much clearer idea of how this OS compares, and how it can compete with iPhone OS and Android, which are both significantly ahead of the current Windows Mobile 6.5.

Microsoft have said that with the move towards ‘app-driven’ smart phones companies have forgotten how to interact with these devices as phones.  I couldn’t agree more.  They went on to say that they still love apps, but they wanted to create a connected environment in which these apps can work together and share information to help you organise your life.

The Zune influence is seen throughout the software and the Zune branding has made its way into the media player.

There’s also a full suite of connected apps for social and other networking and, in the way some companies such as HTC and Vodafone have already been doing, your contacts are connected throughout all the services you use in way that makes it easy for you to see what’s going on in their lives.

One thing Microsoft have said they wanted to do was to make the experience, where appropriate, much more like Windows 7.  In this they have said that multi-touch works exactly like it does in their current desktop OS.

The new OS is based around panels, similar to other mobile OSes, that you pan left and right on using finger gestures.  I can see a potential criticism of the new OS here however, as people have to pan left and right too far to get to the information they need in each panel.

In the hardware Microsoft are dictating that all devices running the new OS have three buttons on the front.  Search, Start and Back and there’s a new pop-up menu-bar that should make it very easy to use applications.

Applications such as the browser, contacts and email are also now better connected, automatically performing tasks such as linking phone numbers to web addresses.  Hopefully this should make having a better net-connected experience much easier.

There’s also a new integration with Xbox live for people who use that service and there’s a new “People Hub” (below) where you can keep in touch with people whatever service you’re connected with them on.

Microsoft haven’t shown what’s deeper in the OS yet, such as system settings and it will be interesting to see if these have also been given a finger-friendly makeover.  They will certainly need to have this in order for Windows Phone 7 Series to succeed.  In the mean time though it’s all looking very good indeed.

More images are below.