Microsoft has always had trouble with there User Interface (UI)… Gone is the infamous mobile smart menu and instead the main menu is now a grid-like interface, something microsoft is calling “tiles”, which are vertically scrolled and be personalized to be quick launches or separate widgets… The look of the interface has obviously been completely retooled too… Gone is the cumbersome navigation, and now it resembles the Zune HD UI, replacing small icons with big, gorgeous icons and grid structures… Social networking plays a major role in Windows Phone 7, as well…

The most important note here is that, Microsoft wants more control over phone manufacturers by making the manufacturers make Windows Phone 7 Phones with specific specs… Also, phone makers cannot use their own interface customizations that we have been seeing more recently (such as HTC’s TouchFlo)…

Availability is expected to be around the end of 2010 is it an IPhone killer we will see but with the huge install base for the apple IPhone it will be a tough battle…

Windows posted a walkthrough video, to give potential customers an idea of what to expect:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is also a pretty good interactive demo up at the official Windows Phone 7 Series site…

After a little bit of googling I found out this post and his solution works… This is what you have to do to fix this issue….

Download this plugin: (I uploaded the plugin to my site, just in case if the author removes it)

mmkeys.dll

Copy the file to iTunes Plug-ins folder…

For XP Users: “C:\Program Files\iTunes\Plug-ins”
Vista Users: “C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunes Plug-ins”
In each case, you have to create this folder if it doesn’t already exist…

Now restart iTunes and your multimedia key should work…

As a browser, Lunascape probably has the most to offer to web developers, who can use a single application to check how their work looks in three different rendering engines, namely Trident, Gecko, and WebKit. It also comes with features like script and Java blocking, and when using the Trident engine, you can block ActiveX too.

This new version adds a number of very welcome features, the most important would be that it is compatible with Firefox add-ons. You can now utilize the vast array of add-ons for Firefox in addition to IE add-ons and Lunascape plug-ins, in a single platform.

Other new features include:

• New interface design (Orion) – sleek, simple, and easy to use
• Split tab display – you can view a website in 3 engines side-by-side (hooray for web designers and developers!)
• Sidebar 2.0 – The floating sidebar can handle multiple sidebar add-ons (e.g. minimap) at a time (only from beta) and can be separately displayed anywhere including another monitor.

The interface has also been given an update, but in my short period of using it, I found this by far the weakest aspect of Lunascape. It uses Qt4, but redraw performance (for instance, when resizing) is absolutely terrible, there are visual artefacts all over the place, and it doesn’t follow any of the Windows Aero UI conventions – it’s all custom.

However, the main attraction is it’s triple rendering engine, which could make the browser an invaluable tool for web developers. It’s still in beta, so things could still improve, too.

Lunascape is a Windows browser, and you can download the new beta from their website.

Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is slated as the next release of Microsoft Windows. Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade with the goal of being fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware. Presentations given by the company in 2008 have focused on multi-touch support, a redesigned Windows Shell with a new taskbar, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and performance improvements. Some applications that have been included with prior releases of Microsoft Windows, most notably Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Photo Gallery, are no longer included with the operating system, they are instead offered separately as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

What does this mean to the general user? Well, probably the biggest fault in Vista was that it was released under the flag of “Vista Ready”. In the end, this wound up being a huge PR flop for Microsoft as many of the products being pushed weren’t ready or were ready with limited quality. Now Apple and the Linux world have both taken full advantage of this slip-up and have truly profited by it. So this could be a very big step, not only in terms of quality but market share. Ultimately though, MS has such stronghold on the market that it’s hard to imaging that there was any sort of a real dent made by either Apple or Linux. Will Apple and Linux take over? I don’t think so, not any time soon at least.

Review

When I heard that Windows 7 beta was “out in the wild”, I had to try it. Since I had no intentions of messing up my laptop with an install gone wrong, I created a new Virtual Machine (VM) to install it in. The “machine” I’ve installed it on has a 10GB “dynamic disk” (which starts small and grows as is needed), and is limited to 512MB of RAM. Apparently Win7 is supposed to run on Vista’s requirements, which state 512MB, a 1GHz processor, and 15GB HD for the Home basic version, and it seems to do pretty well.

A couple of other things I noticed: During the install, and even starting up normally, the VM experiences several “window resets”. I notice this because I run Compiz with the desktop cube plugin, and I normally have the VM loading on a side face of the cube, whenever it changes the “screen”, the window pops up on the active cube face. This happened several times during the install process (it even rebooted about halfway through, and finished the install from the files copied to the hard disk), and I believe it happens three times during bootup, though putting it into fullscreen mode keeps it from popping between cube faces.

Windows networking, for some reason or other, wouldn’t connect with \\vboxsvr (used for virtualbox shared folders). Audio does not work in the VM — I was unable to even “add new hardware” so as to install the driver form the Additions disc, as Windows insists on trying to auto-detect any new hardware. I especially like the new photo-realistic device icons, and the overhaul of the way Windows handles and ejects USB storage devices.

Overall and so far, it seems pretty nice, gives a signal that Microsoft has spent a lot of effort with Windows 7 on delivering a solid operating system.

Is Windows 7 enough to kill Linux on the desktop?

For the past three years I have been a Linux fan-boy using Ubuntu most of the time and Windows XP/Vista when I needed to play games. But my experience with Windows 7 was pretty good. If I am right Windows 7, would result in the move away from Voleware to Linux and OSX being stopped in in its tracks.

Personally, though, I am sticking to Linux.