My Windows 7 experience

A few days ago, I managed to get my hands on a pre-beta of Microsoft Windows 7 “Ultimate”, as soon as I got the disc, the new toy was installing :) The first boot took ages, however after about an hour my Windows 7 System was running and running surprisingly well. My 2 year old, dust-filled, quad core machine starts Windows 7 in less than 15 seconds (from the moment I hit “Enter” on the OS selection screen, in comparison: default Vista takes about 35, my fine-tuned xp takes 18, ubuntu takes 20 seconds and my OSX86 takes exactly 40 seconds to boot. So Windows 7 is the fastest-booting OS on my PC so far.

The good points of Windows 7 (pre-beta):

1. It is fast. It is very fast.
   The eye candy in Vista turned out to be a huge head ache, the performance issues were vast to say the least. Windows 7 delivers the same experience, but it is a lot faster, the OS feels a lot more responsive.
2. The eye-candy…
   The effects still look great, in fact, they feel a lot smoother and more pleasant, as the whole screen feels like it’s alive (when you do stuff to it), the smooth fade-out when the window closes, the glow, shadow and the gloss effects that are present, all of these things, really add to the experience and make it as enjoyable, as you would want a well made OS to be.
3. It’s simple…
   There is no need to spend time learning how to use it, it is as simple as jumping on a new bike. All you need to do is adjust the seat height(personalize) and you are ready to go :). After using the system for about 30 minutes, the pattern seems much clearer: Windows wants their new OS to be intuitive. Everything you need is right, where you expect it to be. If you have used Windows before and are switching back (from Linux or OS X), it will be a very pleasant experience.
4. It’s stable…
   Yes, that’s a word that is very difficult to link to Windows, but I have used if for 3 days now and it has yet to crash or even to slow down on me. Photoshop and Dreamweaver (CS4) both install and work fine, look great and generally feel really awesome.

The bad points, well, there are none, everything I wanted to install (software wise), installs fine and works fine. The only problem that I faced is that the drivers that I need for my sound card don’t support Windows 7, same goes for my general chipset drivers (Intel P35),  however the compatibility mode fixed in seconds.

The conclusion: The OS is amazing, if they pull this off, I will start respecting Microsoft again, however, this is what I said when I tried Longhorn, when it was in it’s alpha stages… Microsoft have a skill of creating something that is really really great, giving us a taste and then totally ruining the OS up by it’s release… Let us pray that the same situation does not happen again.

For now, this will be my primary OS and if the MS boys to mess it up, I will just stick to the beta ;)

I don’t think that just another review is worth wasting time on, as the adobe web site already does that for you and zdnet offers an even better overview.

What I will do is point out a few uber cool features, I am quite sure they will make you want to give the new toy a go yourself.

So here we go, my top 5:

1. The new interface design - it is awesome, honestly, it is simple, attractive, sleek and really user friendly.
2. Document tabs - if you are like me and are always working with multiple windows open, you will find the tabs feature extremely useful.
3. Adjustments panel - no more navigating through drop-down menus. It features levels, hue/saturation, exposure, channel mixer, selective colour, colour balance, a revised version of curves and much more
4. Content aware scaling - you can re-size the images, change the overall proportions, while leaving the main elements intact.
5. SPEED - OK, this is not really a feature, but it is something definitely worth mentioning, CS4 is FAST, it feels a lot smoother, a lot more responsive and it actually uses the GPU for some processing so now you can make use of your Monster GPU (if you have one).

Hope that will make some of you try it for yourselves and I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I did.

I am quite busy trying to figure out a lot of different things. I wanted to take a brake and to make something that is nice to look at. Below are 2 devesto wallpapers 2 different sizes, that’s about it :)

Nice, neat, simple and not bright :) Just how I like my wallpapers.

http://devesto.net/img/wp/wallpaper-1280×1024.jpg
http://devesto.net/img/wp/wallpaper-1440×900.jpg

Hope you like them.

Today, I would like to look into something a lot of designers already use, adore and can’t imagine life without. A lot of bloggers and web sites have touched this subject, however I was not able to find a resource that gave me what I wanted to see, so I decided to create one myself.

Why reset?
If you ever coded css and then tried to get rid of the issues that come up when we try and do cross-browser checks, you will remember how furious the bugs made you. Now imagine if there was a way to eliminate all these issues, by simply including one file!

What does this thing actually do?
The css files takes all the commonly used styles and gives them default values, removes margins, paddings, defaults the link colours and manages different other behaviours. Yes, the browsers already do that, however their defaults are different, this creates the need for such an action. Once all the defaults are set, most of the cross browser issues are eliminated, this makes creating the template a breeze, as the look of the web site is consistent on all the browsers.

Note: Nothing is perfect, this reset file works as it is supposed to, however some minor issues may come up, if they do, please contact me or comment here and I will add the fix to the reset file.

Will this slow down my web site?
No, the only difference is loading a few extra bytes, if you are one of the people that use JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, mootools or prototype, you would already know and understand the benefits of such includes. The reset file is exactly 714 bytes. That’s less than this post and will be hardly noticeable, so don’t delay this opportunity to save yourself a lot of time and energy, give the reset file a go!

What do I need to do?

1. Download the css reset file.
   r.css (714 bytes) or r.zip (515 bytes).
2. Include it either via html or just use @import url(”r.css”);

A huge thank you goes to Eric Meyer. His css reset was the base for the one that I am offering, all I really did was remove all the spacing and shrink down the file as much as possible. The faster the site loads the better.

That’s it. Easy, wasn’t it?

Today, on the 20th September 2008, devesto was born. There will be a lot of areas this blog will explore, from web design tips to game reviews and conspiracy theories, devesto will be your your friend and companion.