Hey! This is the old a broken mold. Newer stuff is at abrokenmold.net.
That being said, feel free to rummage through the archives over here. Also feel free to leave comments; we're still keeping an eye on this.

Maybe.

It's actually become fairly like the OS X dock. The idea is, "why show a button for an app that already has one in Quick Launch?" So Quick Launch is getting consolidated. This is actually a pretty big move, considering how long the taskbar has been relatively the same. And I'm told there will not be an option to go back to the old style. It's a pretty cool idea, but of course it has risks and naysayers. One person pointed out that taking the text off of the title bar could remove a source of information via changing window titles (e.g. a game score or inbox count). Good point. Also, it was asked in the comments, "how do you know what's running and what's not?" Also a very good point. I think if the W7 team can pull off making it concise, clear, and useful, it's worth it (and customers might even like it).

Also interesting: Aero Peek. Move the mouse over a window thumbnail from the taskbar and that window appears and others fade away. Sounds like a cool feature to me. Not actually switching, but you can get a bigger look if you want to.

This post over at the Engineering Windows 7 blog (yup, from the MS team) illustrates and talks about the new taskbar in depth. Definitely worth reading if your interested in that sort of thing.

2 comments:

Matthew said...

Hmmm. I thought I'd read a post somewhere that said there *was* an option to at least show text. Well, anyways...glad there's Linux to fall back on if need. =]

Matthew said...

You might also check this out.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F22%2F2338214