Inside Delphian

To my family, clients, friends, colleagues, and social media followers, may your 2010 bring you what you wish for, need, and will. Happy New Year!

Windows 7 – Calculator

Every version of Windows has included a simple utility (a small, usually single-purpose program) called Calculator. With the release of Windows 7, this useful little tool has changed in a big way.

Calculator in its default (Standard) mode or view works exactly as its name implies: it performs basic math calculations. It can be switched to Scientific mode for more robust and specialized work. Those features, however, aren’t new. The features that are can be accessed from the View menu. They include:

• Programmer mode – you guessed it, it’s used to help create programing formulas or code
• Statistics mode – used much in the same way as Excel Functions, to calculate sums, averages, deviation, and several other results.

In addition to Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics, the enhanced Calculator offers Unit conversion, Date calculation, and even a few tools for some of the more involved figuring we sometimes have to do in life—calculating a mortgage, for instance—in the way of built in “Worksheets”.

So now, from Calculator’s View menu, you can easily and quickly work on your programming, work out statistics, or if those activities aren’t your bailiwick, find uses to, say, convert ounces to pounds, months to weeks or days, or even work out how many days away from today your next birthday is. Yep, the new Calculator does that too!

Windows 7 - Themes

Are you a Windows Vista user? Do you like Themes? Windows 7 has expanded what you get with Themes, and even thrown in a few new ones.

A Windows Theme is a collection of colours, images, mouse shapes, sounds, icons, and desktop backgrounds. For example, if you pick the Nature Theme, you get very cool nature pictures, some interesting sounds (they call these sound schemes), a neat collection of changing mouse pointers, and so forth. Change the Theme and you get a different collection! Windows 7 has added a new feature (Slide Shows) to the mix, and added a few new Themes.

Getting to Themes in Windows 7 is easy: right-click on an empty desktop, and choose Personalize.

If you like interesting backgrounds like I do, you’ll want experiment with some of the new Themes; there are several new Aero Themes to play with, including Nature (my favourite), Architecture, and Landscapes.

One last thing you might want to be aware of: many Themes, and most Windows Vista or Windows 7 Aero features are processor-heavy. Though Windows 7 isn’t as much a processor or memory hog as its immediate predecessor, you should know that the most fancy features—Aero is one of those—require a lot of processing power. If your computer is underpowered, or acting sluggishly when all the bells and whistles of Aero are enabled, turn some of those off. In Windows 7, do the following:

• Right-click a blank area of the desktop and choose Personalize
• Scroll down through the Themes and look for Basic and High Contrast Themes, then click the one that appeals to you.

Windows 7 - Libraries

So a guy walks into the library, and voilà; finds everything he needs! Did you know that Windows 7 has added a feature called Libraries?

Have you ever had to search your computer for an errant document, photo, song, or other file? Organizing files on a computer can begin simply enough—after all, many of us just saved everything in the default folders (My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc.). But after a time, we may either inadvertently save a file someplace else, or want to, and there goes our organization. For those of you who are very organized (I’m not bad in that department), you’ve created your own folders and sub-folders for everything. Nice work, but time consuming to navigate through.

In Windows 7, a Library is a place that has references to everything you’ve stored. It’s not that all the files are on one drive or in one folder, but the references (the path) to them is. You can use the default Library (which, not so strangely, has folders for documents, music, etc.), or more likely, you’ll create one or more new Libraries of your own. One may contain references to everything to do with that new book you’re writing; images, documents, presentations, whatever. Another may contain references for all things financial. You decide!

Create a Library, tell Windows where to find your stuff (folders or files), and from that point on you’ll be more organized, and have a lot less searching to do.

Windows 7 - Jump Lists

I didn’t even have this on my Microsoft wish list, but they went ahead and added it: Windows 7 has added a unique and useful feature called Jump Lists.

Picture this … you click a running program on the Task Bar, or click the Start button and click the program, and voilà; enter the Jump List. What is a Jump List? How is it useful? Well, the List depends upon the program. For example, a Jump List for Internet Explorer 8 will show your most frequented websites. A Jump List for Microsoft Office Word 2010 (or any of the new Office products) will show the last few documents you did, and a list of commonly used commands. When you click an item in a Jump List, you go directly to that item. In Internet Explorer, you’ll go right to the website. In Word, you’d either go right to a recently accessed document or to a new document if you want.

For several months I have been a beta tester for both Windows 7 Ultimate, and Microsoft Office 2010. I have had the good fortune to see these two offerings from Microsoft paired together. Jump Lists work very well, are convenient, and are featured in every edition of the new Windows 7 operating system.

Windows 7

So the street (public) release of Windows 7--in all its variations--happened a few weeks ago. Thinking of trading up?

In the late summer I downloaded and began, unofficially, testing this new operating system (Windows 7 Ultimate). Then, as good fortune would have it, I connected with an educational publishing firm and contracted for two different projects that involved ... Windows 7. (One also involved Internet Explorer 8). In one contract, I was hired to do 'line-editing', so I really, really got to know Windows 7 well. In the other, I was updating content written for Windows Vista that had to, now, fit into Windows 7. Both textbooks are due out in early 2010.

As time goes on, I'll be speaking more about what I've found--good and bad--in Windows 7, as observed over the past several months. And it's looking more and more possible that I'll be putting together an e-book on Windows 7 (and possibly on Microsoft Office 2010) this coming winter. For now, here's a quick teaser on Windows 7:

• It has a gorgeous interface (hasn't quite matched the Mac, but it is nice)
• It has better virus protection
• It has a few bells and whistles that are worth the upgrade price
• It has changed how some of the functionality works

Power consumption seems to have gone down (a good thing), while start-up and shut-down times seem to have sped up (another good thing). More later...