Engineering Windows 7 : Platform

Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

e7blog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has been a global software company for a long time and has always put a lot of effort into engineering our products for a global customer base. It is also an area where the engineering is complex—probably a lot more complex than many might think—and one where we are always trying to learn and improve. Building global software is a responsibility for everyone on the team. We also have feature teams dedicated to developing both global and market specific features—whether it is font handling or doing East Asian language input as two examples. We of course have a significant engineering effort that goes into localizing (“translating” is not quite accurate) Windows into nearly 100 languages. Julie Bennett represents the global development and localization teams and she and John McConnell on her team collaborated across the team to author this post that provides an overview of engineering for a global market. --Steven

Many of the readers of the e7 blog are located outside of the United States or speak a language other than English, so we thought it would be useful to share the international and multi-lingual improvements in Windows 7. Our goal for Windows 7 is to deliver exciting features that benefit users worldwide as well as features that make Windows feel local to every user. Like Windows 7's focus to improve the fundamental scenarios of performance and reliability, we improved our processes to allow us to deliver a great customer experience in every language and every country we serve, including delivery of Windows 7 as close to simultaneously as possible worldwide. This blog entry discusses some of the new features and improved processes that we believe make Windows 7 a great worldwide release.

Features

The international features of Windows 7 are pervasive across the system, from such low-level aspects as the supported characters in NTFS file names (now upgraded to match Unicode 5.1) to such high-level aspects as the selection of backgrounds and themes (now including locally-relevant photos). But there are certain features which are intrinsically critical for proper support of the world’s many languages and cultures, and we will describe some of those here.

Fonts

Language and writing are at the heart of any culture and thus support for fonts is essential to supporting international users. Windows 7 significantly increases both the range and quality of fonts. We have added fifty new fonts:

As you might guess from the font names in the above table, many of the new fonts are for non-Latin scripts. In fact, Windows 7 will be the first version of Windows to ship with more fonts for non-Latin scripts than for Latin-based scripts. One major area of improvement is for the languages of India. To the nine (9) fonts for Indian languages that shipped in Vista, Windows 7 adds forty (40) more. Windows 7 will now include multiple fonts (often in multiple weights) for each of the official languages of India.

Aparajita: A New Devanagari Font in Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold-Italic

Besides new fonts, we have also improved many of the existing fonts. For example, we have added over two thousand (2,000) glyphs to Consolas, Calibri, Cambria Bold, and Cambria Math. But the most dramatic improvements have been to some of the non-Latin scripts. For example, Windows 7 does a much better job rendering the common Lam-Alef ligature in Arabic (see the illustration below) and in the placement of vowel marks.

Left: Lam-Alef Ligture in Vista Right: Lam-Alef Ligature in Windows 7

Changes to fonts (even clear improvements) are always tricky because of backwards compatibility issues. For example, if a character changes width or position, it may cause existing documents to reflow (repaginate), which is unacceptable. Therefore, whenever we change a font, we must run extensive verification tests against the changes to ensure the font metrics and other tables are unchanged. In the case of the Lam-Alef fix shown above, we discovered that there were existing applications that relied on the (undocumented) order of the glyphs within the old font. These applications would break if we simply replaced the glyphs. The font team worked closely with the international application compatibility team to ensure that changes we made did not affect the order of glyphs within the font, thus providing backward compatibility.

Font Control Panel

With so many new and expanded fonts for Windows 7, we also wanted to help users manage their fonts more easily. For the first time in years, we have done a complete overhaul of the font control panel.

The first picture below shows the font control panel with the large icon view. The most obvious change is that the font icons now convey much more information about the appearance of the font. The content of the icon gives a hint as to the glyph repertoire of the font. The style of the icon matches the style of the font. Non-Latin fonts show typical glyphs from the script for the font to see how it is designed. A more subtle change is that some font icons are faded to indicate fonts that are installed, but hidden. Hidden fonts will not show by default in the ribbon and font dialogs. Users can now use the font control panel to tune the fonts that they regularly use. By hiding fonts they never use, users can simplify choosing the correct font within applications. By default, only fonts supporting languages that can be written with the users installed input locales (keyboard layout plus language) will be shown. For example, users with English and French input locales will see only the Latin fonts, whereas users with the Japanese input method installed will see only the Japanese fonts. Users can override these defaults by right-clicking on any of the fonts in the control panel. Hidden fonts are still installed so an existing application that uses a hidden font will behave identically.

Font Control Panel with Large Icon View

The next picture below shows the font control panel with the detailed view. Now users can see much more information about the font. For example, the user can sort fonts by style, whether they are hidden, and information about the creator of the font. Font files generally contain information only in the design language of the font (e.g. a Japanese font might contain only information in Japanese). In Windows 7, we needed a solution that would work for all languages and for all fonts, so we created a hybrid approach that combines information from the font itself with metadata (an XML file that provides the information about the fonts on the system).

Font Control Panel with Detail View

Local Packs

Windows 7 has increased opportunities for personalization. New themes, backgrounds, and sounds make it easy to customize Windows 7 to match your personality. To the extent that our preferences are influenced by our language and location, Windows 7 reflects this with the introduction of Local Packs. Local Packs provide customized Windows 7 visual themes for a specific region. These visual themes contain locally relevant wallpaper images, custom aero glass colors, and regional sound schemes. Windows® Internet Explorer® Favorites and RSS feeds may also be updated when the Local Pack is activated on an end user’s computer. For example, adding and enabling the Local Pack for France will add a market-customized theme for France to the end user’s Personalization control panel and a number of links to useful French Public Sector websites and RSS Feeds to the user’s profile.

Customized Themes in the Personalization control panel

The Local Pack content provides users with seamless local experiences right out of the box. Users are never exposed to Local Packs per se, they just select their Location as normal during Windows Welcome, and appropriate local content is exposed to them based on that setting.

Users looking for visual themes for other countries, or indeed any other areas of interest, can find them on the Windows Online Gallery, which is accessible via the “Get more themes online” link in the Personalization control panel.

Other Features

Other new features include five (5) new locales (bringing the total number of locales supported to two hundred and ten (210)), twelve (12) new input locales, and improvements to sorting for traditional Chinese characters. Also, we have generally updated our system databases to the latest version of the Unicode Standard (5.1). There are also interface improvements that should allow developers to create better globalized applications. Extended Linguistic Services (ELS) is a cool new feature we describe below in the International Timeliness and Quality section.

Perhaps one of the most important improvements outside the core international features has been in Search, which now recognizes more languages. For example, Windows 7 desktop search now recognizes Russian morphology (the rules for single and plural, tenses, and case). This means that searches for a particular word in Russian will now match not only that exact word, but also the common variations of the word, yielding significantly better results.

International Timeliness and Quality

In previous versions of Windows, final delivery of every language to every market took several months. For Windows 7, we changed how we worked on international releases to significantly shorten this delta so that all users worldwide can enjoy Windows as simultaneously as possible. This goal had far reaching implications on how we perform our work as engineers and on how we interact with partners and customers during our public testing phases.

To understand our approach, we should first explain two important concepts: localization and globalization.

Localization is the process of adapting the user experience into another language. Beyond the translation of strings, it can also include activities such as resizing dialogs and mirroring icons for right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic. Localization bugs, such as the mistranslation of a menu item, are defects introduced during this process.

Globalization, on the other hand, is the process of producing a product that works well in every country no matter the user interface language setting. A globalization bug may be as simple as showing a UI element in the wrong language and as complex as not properly handling right-to-left scripts. Globalization bugs are inherently more serious than localization bugs as they usually affect many or all languages and often require re-thinking the technical design. In past Windows releases, repairing globalization bugs contributed to the necessity of the long release deltas. For Windows 7 we worked to prevent, find, and fix globalization bugs as early in the development process as possible.

Pseudo-Localization

To prevent common globalization bugs, pseudo-localized builds were created. Pseudo-localization is a process that creates a localized product in an artificial language. That language is identical to English except that each character is written with a different character that visually resembles the English character. Except for being entirely machine generated, we create the pseudo-localized builds exactly the same way as we create the localized builds. Because even monolingual US software developers can read pseudo-localized text, it has proven to be an excellent way to find globalization problems early in the development cycle. In the Windows 7 beta, some UI elements were still in their pseudo-localized form, causing some interesting theories about what the meaning might be. We hope we have solved the mystery with this blog post. :-)

Control Panel Dialog in Pseudo-localized Windows 7

Pilot Languages

Beta is always an exciting time for us as it is our first real chance to hear from you about our efforts. We are thrilled that people from over one hundred and thirteen (113) countries downloaded the Windows 7 Beta. With such a large and diverse beta program, we must have highly scalable processes to gather and incorporate your feedback. In Windows 7, we are very excited about some new approaches we took here.

In the past, localization languages for Windows beta releases were selected for a mix of pragmatic reasons. While this ad hoc approach had benefits, too often we found that serious globalization defects were not reported because they did not manifest in the chosen languages. For the Windows 7 Beta, our priority was to find globalization bugs and therefore we have concentrated on four languages (plus English) that experience has shown are most likely to find specific types of defects:

German - Because it contains some very long words, German can reveal dialog size and alignment defects better than other languages.
Japanese - With tens of thousands of characters, multiple non-Latin scripts, alternative input method engines, and an especially complex orthography, Japanese is a great way to find defects that affect many East Asian languages.
Arabic - Written right-to-left and with contextual shaping (character shape depends on adjacent characters), including this language in the Beta helped us test code paths not exercised by German and Japanese.
Hindi - Windows 95 and Windows 98 never supported Hindi and support for this language relies entirely on Unicode. Testing Hindi helps find legacy (non-Unicode) defects that affect all such languages.

By concentrating on these four languages during Beta, we maximized our chances to find and fix the globalization bugs that affect many languages. This in turn gave us more time to improve the localization of all languages before we release the actual product. The pictures below show two bugs found during Beta that illustrate the advantages of focusing on these pilot languages.

Globalization Defects Found During Windows 7 Beta

In addition to our goal of finding globalization bugs via these languages, we also asked some of our OEM customers to provide feedback on the language aspects within their manufacturing processes. Since many of the OEMs are located in East Asia, we also localized Windows 7 Beta for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

RC Language Packs

In part because of the engineering process improvements described above, we were able to deliver more language packs for Windows 7 RC than we have ever been able to do in the past for Windows. For those of you running the Ultimate version of Windows 7 RC, you will have noticed the following thirty-two (32) Language Packs available for download on Windows Update:

32 Windows 7 RC Language Packs on Windows Update

One thing we will do differently in the future is to ensure that all languages available at Beta are also available at RC (e.g. not including Hindi for Windows 7 RC). We will correct this for future versions.

Understanding feedback from around the world

With Windows 7 beta localized into five languages and globally enabled for hundreds more, we received beta bugs from customers all over the world. We rely on these bug reports to help us improve Windows 7, so we devote much time to reading customer bug reports to determine product issues. Because bugs come from worldwide customers in many languages, we look for ways not only to understand their feedback, but also to address it as quickly as possible. The faster we can understand the issue, the better chance we have of addressing the feedback. As we receive bug reports in all the many languages that our customers speak, this has sometimes posed quite a challenge.

In the past, we have handled multilingual bug reports using manual processes, where individual bugs were examined and then manually translated one-by-one for appropriate follow-up by the feature team that owned the affected component. This is a time-consuming and error-prone exercise that scales poorly to a program as large and diverse as the Windows 7 beta. In the worst case, valuable international feedback has missed the window to affect the final product, and thus slipped to a Service Pack or subsequent release.

In Windows 7, by using the language detection API in the new Extended Linguistic Services (ELS), we have been able to automatically detect the language of customer bugs as they are reported. ELS functionality is new for Windows 7 and available to any developer who wants to leverage advanced linguistic functionality in the operating system. Beginning in Windows 7, developers may use ELS to provide language and script detection of any Unicode text, as well as transliteration to map text between writing systems. To use these Windows 7 services and all further services that we will add in subsequent releases, developers need only to learn one simple and unified interface. The ability to detect over one hundred (100) languages is available for all Windows 7 application developers, and we are happy to be able to apply this functionality to triage and handle beta feedback you send us from around the world. We use our own international developer functionality to improve our ability to respond to customer issues globally.

Once we have detected the language, we take the resulting text and use the machine translation support that is available online from Live Translator. This allows us to translate the text to English to get a sense of your feedback. Our engineers can then search our feedback database for specific features or areas of functionality. This also helps us in our efforts to ensure international application compatibility, as we can learn about potentially problematic international application experiences as soon as customers report them. Machine translation does not provide a perfect translation, but it does allow us to determine which issues might require further investigation. This in turn allows us to hear and respond to customer issues with a much faster turnaround time than we have had in previous releases, which means better quality in Windows 7 when we release it to the world.

By the end of Windows 7 Beta, we had used this process to translate 35,408 issues and comments submitted using the Feedback tool.

Putting it all together

The end result of the work to improve globalization and localization quality is reflected in the announcement that all fully localized releases of Windows 7 will be available within two weeks of the initial release wave with all languages available in October. We hope (and believe!) end users will find the overall quality of these releases to be the best ever.

36 Windows 7 language releases available in October 2009

In addition to the 36 languages that will be released in October, there will be additional languages available for download as Language Interface Packs (LIPs) onto any Windows 7 edition as part of the Local Language Program (LLP). The LLP is a partnership with governments, universities, and language experts from around the world. (You can find more information on the LLP at http://www.microsoft.com/unlimitedpotential/programs/llp.mspx.) Work on a LIP starts at RTM and continues for many months based on the schedules of our partners. Two (2) LIPs will be available for download when Windows 7 is available in October – Catalan and Hindi. Additional LIPs will become available for download over the following months based on the schedules of our partners. We are happy to have improved the delivery time of the first 38 languages (36 + 2 LIPs) and recognize that future releases are an opportunity to improve further. Creating a track record of dependable release schedules on our part will help everyone around the world plan better for a more unified release timeline.

More information about Extended Linguistic Services (ELS) and other cool new features of Windows 7 are available on-line on MSDN. In particular, you can download the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and read about what is new in the ‘International’ section. Also, the new Go Global Developer Center on MSDN has a wealth of information about international technologies.

If you want to send us feedback, please comment on this blog entry or use the Feedback button in Windows 7. We love to hear from you (in any language).

-- Windows International Team

Beta to RC Changes – Turning Windows Features On or Off

e7blog — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:00:00 GMT

The theme of “choice and control” has been applied in many aspects of how we have designed Windows 7. We’ve certainly received lots of positive feedback about the theme and about the choices we’ve made in the design, and we’ve also received a few suggestions for how we might continue to implement this theme in the future. We’ve received feedback for features that should be even more customizable (such as Explorer or the logon screen) or features that should be added to Windows (such as a PDF format reader, security tools, or disk utilities). And we’ve received feedback that some users might prefer to run Windows without certain features. This post is about a point of choice and control in the Windows 7 control panel called “Windows Features” which is where you can choose to turn various features of Windows on or off. This continues our discussion of changes we have made based on feedback from the Beta as we progress to the Release Candidate. This post is by Jack Mayo who is the group program manager for our Documents and Printing team and also worked on Internet Explorer 8. --Steven

“Turning Windows Features On or Off” has a long history in Windows, going back to the earliest days of the 32-bit code base. We’ve received a lot of suggestions about features that you would like to turn on or off using your own criteria for choice. For Windows 7 we’ve engineered a more significant list of features and worked to balance that list in light of the needs of the broad Windows platform as well. We want to provide choice while also making sure we do not compromise on compatibility by removing APIs provided for developers. We also want to strike the right balance for consumers in providing choice and balancing compatibility with applications and providing a consistent Windows experience.

We know many have specific ideas of what constitutes a “feature” or a “program” in Windows and what constitutes an identifiable “part” of the operating system, and yet we also know different people can have different points of view, often strongly held. Some might take an end-user approach and identify a feature based on a window or start menu shortcut. Some might take an approach based on one perspective of architectural subsystems, such as storage or security. Some might take an approach based on what to some are alternate choices to some similar functionality. All of these are valid in some context, but would not result in consistently identifying “features” considering these varied points of view. As engineers we know that no software system can be decomposed into an arbitrary set of layers or parts and any decomposition is likely to change over time.

We don’t want the discussion about this feature or these choices to digress into a philosophical discussion about the definition of an operating system, which is ultimately a challenging exercise (judging by the revision history on the community page), but we do want to improve a feature centered on helping to meet the feedback expressed by some over the summer when this blog started.

In the Release Candidate for Windows 7 we have extended the control panel called “Windows Features” which is available from the standard “Programs and Features” control panel (we often call this ARP, for the original name of Add/Remove Programs). This location is unchanged from Vista and XP, though the wording has been clarified. In Windows 7 if you bring up the Windows Features control panel by clicking on “Turn Windows Features on or off” (or just typing “Windows features” in the start menu) you will see the following in the Release Candidate (by default the hierarchy is not fully expanded, but in this screen shot I’ve expanded some elements for additional information):

For those familiar with the Vista version or the Beta version of this dialog you will notice the list has grown. Let’s talk about what we’ve added and briefly how it works.

If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer. These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD.

For any of the features listed you can change the state to enable it or disable it. The Vista and Windows 7 beta control panel lists a wide range of features. Some are targeted towards Developers working on a client workstation (IIS, MSMQ, etc.), others are utilities for network administrators and enthusiasts (RSM, SNMP, Telnet, etc.), and some are features customers have asked us to make optional (Games, Fax and Scan, Tablet PC components).

In Windows 7 we are expanding the number of features you have control over in this regard, giving customers more control, flexibility and choice in managing the features available in this version of Windows. In addition to the features that were already available to turn on or off in Windows Vista, we’ve added the following features to the list in Windows 7:

Windows Media Player
Windows Media Center
Windows DVD Maker
Internet Explorer 8
Windows Search
Handwriting Recognition (through the Tablet PC Components option)
Windows Gadget Platform
Fax and Scan
XPS Viewer and Services (including the Virtual Print Driver)

It is worth describing the details of “remove” since this too is a place where there are engineering and customer decisions to be made. We’ve already seen one decision which is to make sure we keep the features staged for future use so that a DVD is not required. A second decision is that we also continue to support the APIs available for features where these APIs are necessary to the functionality of Windows or where there are APIs that are used by developers that can be viewed as independent of the component. As many of you know these are often referred to as “dependencies” and with Windows the dependencies can run both internal to Windows and external for ISVs.

It should be no surprise, but when we develop new features in Windows we tend to use the underlying infrastructure and associated APIs rather than duplicate code which would create extra working set, slow performance, and increase the surface area that needs to be secured, etc. We all know code reuse is a good engineering practice. As a platform, Windows tends to emphasize the creation of APIs for many systems, even when those subsystems are viewed as part of a larger system. When we have APIs that are used, we faced the choice of breaking software that just expected those APIs to be there or to continue to support the API. When we continued to support the API our approach was to remove a feature by making sure that an end-user could not invoke the feature via traditional end-user mechanisms. These are often difficult decisions as we work to balance the expectations of developers, the shared desire to deliver a robust release of Windows 7, and to maintain the goals set out by the feature “Turn Windows Features On or Off”. Because there are so many combinations of dependencies just represented in this list, selecting some options might provide you with some explanation as to the challenges in selecting a combination (for example Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center share a lot of code so turning one off might introduce a pretty complex situation for the average end-user).

Finally, we know some have suggested that this set of choices be a “setup option”. Some operating systems do provide this type of setup experience. As we balanced feedback, the vast majority of feedback we have received was to streamline setup and to reduce the amount of potential complexity in getting a PC running. We chose to focus this feature on the post-setup experience for Windows 7.

--Jack

Showcasing Windows 7 Platform with Applets

e7blog — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:00:00 GMT

About every decade we make the big decision to update what we refer to as the applets (note we’ll use applet, application, program, and tool all interchangeably as we write about these) in Windows—historically Calc (Calculator), Paint (or MS Paint, Paint Brush) and WordPad (or Write), and also the new Sticky Notes applet in Windows 7. As an old-timer, whenever I think of these tools I think of all the history behind them and how they came about. I’m sure many folks have seen the now “classic” video of our (now) CEO showing off Windows to our sales force (the last word of this video is the clue that this video was done for inside Microsoft). Windows 7 seems like a great time to update these tools. The motivation for updating the applets this release is not the 10-year mark or just time to add some applet-specific features, but the new opportunities for developers to integrate their applications with the Windows 7 desktop experience. While many use the applets as primary tools, our view of these is much more about demonstrating the overall platform experience and to provide guidance to developers about how to integrate and build on Windows 7, while at the same time providing “out of box” value for everyone. There’s no real “tension” over adding more and more features to these tools as our primary focus is on showing off what’s new in Windows—after all there are many full-featured tools available that provide similar functionality for free. So let’s not fill the comments with request for more bitmap editing features or advanced scientific calculator features :-).

The APIs discussed in this post are all described on MSDN in the updated developer area for Windows 7 where you can find the Windows 7 developer guide. Each of the areas discussed is also supported by the PDC and WinHEC sessions on those sites.

This post was written by several folks on our applications and gadgets team with Riyaz Pishori, the group program manager, leading the effort. --Steven

This blog post discusses some of the platform innovations in Windows 7 and how Windows 7 applications have adopted and showcased these innovations. This post details some of the platform features that developers and partners can expect in Windows 7 and how Windows 7 programs have showcased these innovations. This post also discusses how applications have been given a facelift both in terms of their functionality as well as their user experience by focusing on key Windows design principles and platform innovations. Finally, this post can serve as a pointer or guide to application developers and ISVs to get themselves familiar with some of the key new Windows platform innovations, see them in action and then figure out how they can build on these APIs for their own software.

The post is organized by each subsystem, and how Windows applets are using that particular subsystem.

Windows Ribbon

The Windows Ribbon User Interface is the next generation rich, new user interface for Windows development. The Windows Ribbon brings the now familiar Office 2007 Ribbon user interface to Windows 7, making it available to application developers and ISVs.

There are several advantages of adopting the Windows Ribbon user interface, many of which have been talked about in the Office 2007 blogs. The Ribbon provides a rich, graphical user interface for all commands in a single place, without the need to expose various functions and commands under different menus or toolbars. The Ribbon UI is direct and self-explanatory, and has a labelled grouping of logically related commands. While using an application that is built on the Ribbon UI platform, the user only needs to focus on his workflow and the context of his task, rather than worry about where a particular function is located or accessible. The Ribbon UI also takes care of layout and provides consistency as compared to toolbars which the user can customize in terms of their sizes, location and contents. It also has built-in and improved keyboard accessibility, and making the application DPI and theme aware becomes easier by using the Ribbon. Finally, development and changes to the user interface is very quick and rapid due to the XML-markup based programming model for the Ribbon User Interface.

Paint and Wordpad are two of the first consumers of the Windows Ribbon UI Platform. In Windows 7, both these applications are enhanced with a set of new features, and the user interface of these applications also required to be brought up to the Windows 7 experience and standards. The Windows Ribbon UI is a great fit for these applications to revamp their user experience and make it consistent, and make these applications rich, fun and easy to use. The tasks and commands in these applications were amenable to be applied to the Ribbon UI framework, and it also served as an opportunity for popular native Windows applications to showcase the Windows Ribbon UI platform to consumers, as well as developers and ISVs. Many has asked about the Windows Explorer and IE also using the ribbon, which we did not plan on for Windows 7. Our Windows 7 focus was on the platform and demonstrating the platform for document-centric applications such as Paint and Wordpad.

Both these applications showcase several elements of the Windows UI Ribbon. The Application Menu of both Paint and Wordpad exposes Application related commands that are typically available thru the ‘File’ menu of an application. Both the applications have a core tab set that consists of ‘Home’, which exposes most of the commands in the application, and ‘View’ which exposes the image or document viewing options in the application. The commands in both these tabs are laid out logically in groups of related functionality.

A quick access toolbar (QAT) is provided by both Paint and Wordpad, which comes with certain defaults like Save, Undo and Redo that are meaningful to the application. The user can customize the QAT by using the QAT drop-down, or right-click on any command or group in the ribbon and add it to the QAT.

Several ribbon commands are used in both these applications, like command buttons, split buttons, galleries, drop-downs, check boxes and toggle buttons.

Further, both applications provide a ‘Print preview’ mode which shows a print preview of the image or the document in context. In a mode, all the core tabs are removed and only the mode is displayed for the user to interact with. On exiting a mode, the user is returned to the core tab set.

Paint also exposes a contextual tab for the Text tool, which is displayed only when a text control is drawn on canvas. A contextual tab shown next to the core tab set when the text tool is in focus, and removed when the text is applied to the image on the canvas. The contextual tab set contains the tools that are specific and relevant only to the text tool.

Both the applications provide live previews through ribbon galleries, for example the font size and font name for Wordpad and Paint while formatting text, bullets and lists in Wordpad, and color selection, outline size selection and outline and fill styles for shapes in Paint. A live preview allows the user to see the changes instantaneously on mouse hover, and then apply those changes on a selection. These previews are one of the key elements of the ribbon UI and demonstrate why the metaphor is much more than a “big toolbar” but a new interaction style.

By adopting the Ribbon User Interface, both the applications inherit built-in keyboard accessibility support using ribbon Keytips, have tooltips on all commands, and have ready support for DPI and Windows themes.

Paint and Wordpad can serve as examples of how the Ribbon UI can be easily used in MFC applications. The Windows Ribbon presents new opportunities and options for developers and ISVs to develop applications with the Ribbon User Interface. The Windows Scenic Ribbon programming model and architecture emphasizes the separation of the markup file and the C++ code files to help developers decouple the presentation and customization of the UI from the underlying application code. The platform also promotes developer-designer workflow, where the developer can focus on the application logic, while the designer can work on the UI presentation and layout. The ribbon UI is a significant investment for us and you should expect to see us continue to use it more throughout Microsoft, including an implementation in the .NET Framework as was demonstrated by Scott Guthrie at the PDC, which will be built on Windows 7 natively in the future.

Multi-touch platform

Windows 7 provides support for multi-touch input data, as well as supporting multi-touch in Win32 via Windows messages. The investments in the multi-touch platform include the developer platform that exposes touch APIs to applications, enhancing the core user interface in Windows 7 to optimize for touch experiences, and providing multi-touch gestures for applications to consume. Developers on Windows 7 can build on these APIs decide on the appropriate level of touch support they would like to provide in their software.

Wordpad enhances the document reading experience by using the multi-touch platform and using the zoom and pan gestures. Zooming, panning and inertia lets the user get to a particular piece of content very quickly in an intuitive fashion. By using the zoom gesture, the user can zoom in or zoom out of the document which is akin to using the zoom slider at the right of the Wordpad status bar. On multi-touch capable hardware, the user can zoom in and out of the document by placing his fingers anywhere within the document window and executing the zoom gesture. Wordpad also supports the pan gesture to pan thru the pages of a document that is open in Wordpad. By executing the pan gesture, the user can scroll-down or scroll-up a document similar to using the scroll bar of the Wordpad application.

In Paint multi-touch data is used to allow users to paint with multiple fingers. It is an example of an application that allows multi-touch input without the usage of gestures. For Paint’s functionality, providing multiple finger painting ability was more compelling and enriching than allowing for zoom, pan, rotate or other gestures that act on the picture in a read-only mode and not in an edit-mode. New brushes in Paint are multi-touch enabled, and they handle touch inputs via multiple fingers and allow the user to simultaneously draw strokes on canvas on finger drag. These brushes are also pressure-sensitive, thereby providing a realistic experience with touch by varying the stroke width based on the pressure on the screen. While adopting the multi-touch platform to enhance the end-user experience in Paint, conscious design decisions were made to preserve the single touch experience for functionalities where a multi-touch scenario does not apply such as the color picker, magnifier and text tool.

By building with the multi-touch APIs, Paint and Wordpad have created more natural and intuitive interfaces on touch-enabled hardware and show “out of the box” how different capabilities can be exposed by developers in their software.

Taskbar

Sticky Notes (or just Notes) is an extension of a TabletPC applet available in Windows 7. One of the things which was key to the Notes experience on the desktop was to have the ability to quickly take all the notes away and get them back, but still making sure it is really easy to create a new note. We achieved this by having a single top level window for the sticky notes application. You can minimize all your notes and view a stack of notes in the preview on the command bar with a single click. The stacked preview has been achieved using the new thumbnail preview APIs that enable apps to override the default taskbar previews that are essentially a redirected snapshot of the top level application window, and provide their own. This enables applications to decouple their previews from the top level application window and provide a more productive preview based on the scenario. For example, this was very valuable in Sticky Note scenarios where a quick peek at a note that was last touched provides for quite a productive workflow. Taskbar also caches the preview thumbnail images so once the preview is given to the Taskbar, the application does not need to keep it around – the application does however need to send an updated preview whenever it changes.

Another nifty customization end-point on the task bar is the destination menu (aka jumplist). This menu comes up when a user right clicks on the application in the taskbar or hovers over the application icon in the Start Menu. The Sticky Notes application does not have a single main application window – this makes the application feel really light weight and fits in well into the Windows 7 philosophy of creating simple and powerful user experiences. The challenge then was exposing functionality such as the ability to create a new note from a central location or potentially other custom “tasks”. The destination menu helped exposing these scenarios in a simple yet discoverable way.

The new taskbar functionality and extensibility built in that has the potential to make it a lot easier for people to work with applications/scenarios in a more productive and efficient manner when developers integrate their software with the Windows desktop.

Search

Building on the long history of Search in Windows and the significant enhancements in Windows 7, there are APIs available to developers to deeply integrate their content types with the desktop search user experience affordances in Windows 7. Sticky Notes shows one example of how these APIs can be used.

The Sticky Notes application now allows users to get back to their notes by simply searching for content through Windows Inline search within the start menu. This is in line with allowing users to reach the relevant note as quickly as possible even when the application is closed. Even though search could be done for both Text and Ink content, it is restricted to text because of lower success rates with varied handwriting styles in ink. The application registers a protocol handler that generates a URL for each Note. The Sticky Notes Filter handler gets asked for the content associated with each note that is then indexed by the Search infrastructure. These indexes are then used to perform a quick lookups when the user searches the Search interfaces provided by the Windows Shell. When a user clicks on a result, Search invokes the associated application with the URL corresponding to the one that the protocol handler had generated that the Filter handler associated with the content it sent to the Search indexer.

The search platform also has the ability to enable the filter handler to specify the language of each chunk of content passed on to it that overrides the default Search heuristics used to compute the language - this increases Search accuracy manifold and thereby enhances internationalization support of the entire ecosystem.

The reason Sticky Notes implemented a protocol handler in addition to a Filter handler was because it implements its own integrated storage schema on top of the Windows File system - all the notes are represented by a single .snt file. The protocol handler generates URL's to individual entities (in this case - notes); the filter handler picks out content for each of these URL's and gives it to Search for indexing.

This demonstrates the ease in which applications can plug into the search platform in Windows 7, and add search handlers which can enhance the overall user experience from the App as well as the platform.

Real-Time Stylus

Real-Time Stylus (RTS) is infrastructure that provides access to the stylus events coming from pen or touches digitizers. It provides information about strokes and points and provides access to ink-related events. Using RTS, applications can get access to stylus information and develop compelling end-user scenarios and experiences.

Sticky Notes now allows the users to Ink and Type on notes depending on the availability of inking hardware. Users can use keyboard input to type on notes and use the stylus to ink on notes. Though the experience has been designed keeping in mind that users will either use either ink or text on a particular note, it does allow users to ink and type on the same note. However these surfaces are maintained agnostic to each other. Sticky Notes also auto-grows the note while inking on the note, providing a real-time experience of the note adjusting its size to fit the inked content.

Real Time Stylus (RTS) is used for inking features provided in Sticky Notes. Inking gestures are also available to applications, and the scratch out gesture has been implemented in Sticky Notes to delete content.

In addition, Paint uses RTS to get a stream of positional input from mouse, stylus or touch which are used for drawing strokes on canvas. Paint also captures additional input variables like pressure and touch surface area when such input is available from the digitizer, and maps these inputs into the stroke algorithms that are used to generate Paint strokes on canvas. Using this algorithm, the user is able to modulate stroke width and other parameter based on the pressure or touch area on canvas.

Using RTS allows the development of applications and software that can build on the inking platform and provide ways to interact with the application that go beyond mouse or keyboard. Using stylus, inking and gestures, developers can create interactive experiences for end-users.

Restart and Recovery

The Windows Error Reporting (WER) infrastructure is a set of feedback technologies that is built into Windows 7 and other earlier versions of Windows client and server. WER allows applications to register for application failures and capture this data for end-users who agree to report it. This data can be accessed and analyzed and can be used to monitor error trends and download debug information to help developers and ISVs determine the root cause for application failures.

WER can add value to software development at various stages: during development, during beta testing by getting early feedback from end-users, after the release of the product by analysing and prioritizing the top fixes, and at end of life of the product.

Related to failure recovery, Applications can also register with WER for restart on application of a Windows patch that terminates the application and on application of an update that reboots the computer, as well as failure caused due to an application crash or hang or not responding state. Applications can optionally register for recovery of lost data, can develop their own mechanism for recovery.

Several Windows applications adopt the WER infrastructure to collect and analyze data. Calculator, Paint and Wordpad register for restart and additionally recover the current data in the sessions of the application that were running. Sticky Notes also registers for restart and recovery, and returns the user to the set of notes open on the desktop. Using WER, end-users would allow Windows to capture and collect problem data and then would be returned to the applications in the same state that they were in earlier.

As you can see, our primary effort for the applets in Windows 7 is to showcase some of the new platform APIs and innovations available to developers. As you get to try out these applications you will see that while showcasing the Windows 7 platform innovations, we have also added some commonly requested features and functionality. Some of them are: Check and correct, calculation modes and templates in Calculator, New brushes, shapes and multi-touch support in Paint, Open standards support in Wordpad and Ink and text, taskbar and search integration in Sticky notes. Maybe we won’t wait 10 years to update these again :-)

--Riyaz Pishori and team