www.nickhodge.com

The new taskbar, also known as the Super­bar, is the first user exper­i­ence change you notice in Win­dows 7. For me, it has increased the speed at which I can con­text switch from one applic­a­tion to another. And jump­ing to a spe­cific open win­dow in an applic­a­tion; clos­ing win­dows quickly. With Win­dows 7’s applic­a­tion launch speed the concept of already run­ning applic­a­tions verses. already launched is negligible.

And it’s the small things:

The above “green” area pro­gresses from left to right over the applic­a­tion icon to indic­ate the com­ple­tion of a down­load task.

Sim­il­arly, Explorer shows the pro­gress of a copy to/from Windows.

When mul­tiple windows/instances of the same applic­a­tion is run­ning, there is this subtle “stack” behind the icon.

As you hold the mouse cursor over one of these stacked icons, the pre­view appears. Just click on one, and that win­dow appears.

Is the new Super­bar bet­ter than the MacOS X dock, which inher­its both from the single old Win­dows Taskbar (circa Win­dows 95) and the MacOS 9 Con­trol Strip and NeXT dock? More feed­back from Giz­modo: Giz Explains– Why the Win­dows 7 Taskbar Beats Mac OS X’s Dock

The beauty of the soft­ware industry is the intense com­pet­i­tion to improve user exper­i­ence. I am ultra-happy that Microsoft has re-entered the competiton.