Windows 7 UX tidbits: color hot-track
If you liked what you saw at the PDC08 Windows 7 keynote in terms of the user experience of Windows 7’s shell and taskbar, then get ready for more since what Sinofsky and Julie-Larson Green showed off is not all that’s on offer. Sitting in the session by Chaitanya Sareen titled “Welcome to the Windows 7 desktop“, a number of new features were shown off.
One of these new features is “color hot-track” for the Windows 7 superbar. Let me show you first before explaining what they are and why I think this is cool.
When hovering over the icons in the taskbar, the color highlight of the “glass” button is actually different from application to application. How it works is dynamically abstracting the color values of the application icon to find the most dominant RGB value. Besides the obvious eye-candy, this feature delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.
This is exciting, not because of the feature, but because the fact that something like this is there. If something like has been thought of and implemented at this point in time, then imagine what’s coming in 12 months. As a sign of even greater attention to detail, the “highlight” glow even moves around with your cursor.
For a photo-slideshow of the entire presentation then you can find all the photos on my Flickr.
Update: Tom Warren from Neowin has a video recording of the feature live.
Written by Long Zheng. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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