WPF and extreme user interfaces like StreetSmart edge™

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), introduced with Windows Vista, is an state-of-the-art presentation system for building Windows client and web-hosted applications with visually stunning user experiences. Curiously enough, the encyclopedic books about Vista and Windows 7, like the traditional Resource Kits, mention this technology in passing, mainly because it is part of the .Net Framework and intended mostly for developers, as its cousin Silverlight. One of these developers, Projekt202, an Austin, Texas, company, which without a doubt knows a great deal of usability and UI design, used WPF controls in the design of Charles Schwab's StreetSmart edge™, a very intuitive online trading application that has received good reviews since its release at the end of 2010. It runs in Windows 2000 and up and also in Mac 10.3 or higher.

You are seeing my Windows 7 desktop

Finally I got my hands on the Windows 7 Beta version, Build 7000! This is a partial view of my desktop with some gadgets in full size, which now can be positioned anywhere on the desktop separately. The sidebar, the one you could open with WinKey + Space Key, is not exactly gone. What happens now in Windows 7 is that it has been renamed to "Gadgets" than can be reached by right-clicking on the desktop. Internally, the program continues to be called "sidebar.exe" and you can verify that by opening the Taskbar and looking in the "Processes" tab. The curious thing is that if you end that process, then ALL of the gadgets will close at once. Then, when you call back the gadgets ALL of them will open up at once where they were left off.

You are seeing the "new" Windows 7 desktop

However, this is, in essence, an enhanced Windows Vista desktop with some new functionality in the taskbar, Start menu and other elements. Some previous skeptics of Vista even like it (!), the whole OS. Let me say this: Windows 7 may be "the Mojave experiment II" for a discriminating audience, and it seems to be working. Not bad for a pre-Beta release! Watch the session of PDC 2008 where the new desktop was presented.