Weve booted the machine, displayed stuff on the screen, launched programs, so next up were going to look at a pretty complex topic that sort of gets to the core role of the graphical user interfacemanaging windows. Dave Matthews is program manager on the core user experience team who will provide some of the data and insights that are going into engineering Windows 7. --Steven
The namesake of the Windows product line is the simple window the UI concept that keeps related pieces information and controls organized on screen. Well use this post to share some of the background thinking and pm philosophy behind planning an update to this well established UI feature.
The basic idea of using windows to organize UI isnt new it dates back (so I hear) to the first experiments with graphical user interfaces at Stanford over 40 years ago. Its still used after all this time because its a useful way to present content, and people like having control over how their screen space is used. The moveable windows feature isnt absolutely needed in an operating system most cell phones and media center type devices just show one page of UI at a time but its useful when multi-tasking or working with more than one app at a time. Windows 2.0 was the first Windows release that allowed moveable overlapping windows (in Window 1.0 they were only able to be tiled, not overlapping. This tiled v. overlapping debate had famous proponents on each sideon one side was Bill Gates and on the other side was Charles Simonyi). In addition, Windows also has the unique notion of "the multiple document interface or MDI, which allows one frame window to itself organized multiple windows within it. This is somewhat of a precursor to the tabbed interfaces prevalent in web browsers.