I got Windows 7... Wow.

Alright, so. Three summers ago I discovered Macs with a YouTube video demonstrating Mac OS X.4 Tiger on some guy’s new Mac Mini; and the rest, as is too often said, is history. Then my aspiration became owning my own Mac. ASAP. As I recall, I got one for that Christmas, or maybe the year after that…

I’m typing this on that White, 120GB MacBook with 1GB of RAM; only the user interface strangely looks like Windows, not OS X. That’s because it is. Using Apple’s Boot Camp virtualization utility, I, with the help of WiiGamin and another techie friend of mine, successfully installed the Release Candidate of Windows 7 as a secondary operating system.

And: I. Am. In love. With it. Seriously. It’s breathtaking. I partitioned it to a 21GB volume; now I think I’m wishing I’d given it more space than that. But anyway, I love Windows 7 so far. I love the new taskbar design, with pinning large application icons to the Quick Launch area and using those little pins as the taskbar representations of open application windows by lighting up the buttons of any open applications. If there are multiple instances or windows of a particular application currently in use, say FireFox for me right now, there will be tiny slivers next to the pin, 1 sliver per every extra (meaning that the highlighted pin represents the first window, then slivers are added as more instances of the application are added) application window.

And this group of features called Windows Aero, which is notorious for being somewhat graphics and RAM intensive, works beautifully on this MacBook. Examples of some cool interface enhancements, although some may have been in Vista (personally, I wouldn’t know; lol), are things like hovering the cursor over an open application’s taskbar pin to show a miniature preview of all open windows of that application, as they currently look. Then there’s a “Show Desktop” button in the bottom right next to the analog clock: clicking it minimizes all windows to show the desktop, clicking again restores all of those windows; hovering over it activates “Peek At Desktop” (unless you’ve disabled it; you certainly shouldn’t), which makes every open window a transparent mass, showing just the outline(s), as to give you an easy, quick “peek” at the desktop. And, a feature which I know was in Vista, Flip 3D is a part of Aero that allows you to scroll through all open Windows in a cool 3D animation; warning, this is obviously one of the more graphics intensive aspects of Windows Vista, and 7. Basically, as an Apple fan, I see Windows Aero as a counter to the sleek interface Mac OS X has had for more than five years now. And I think it’s just as cool, if not even better. Sorry Apple.

Maybe I can write a similar post for Apple when Mac OS X.6 comes out, as it will have dozens to hundreds of minor tweaks to OS X.5, many of which make it worth a low price of only $30. Don’t you just love the word “only”? Especially comin’ from the unemployed… lol.

Well, I say to Microsoft: “Excellent work, number two.”

nintendude794