7 Taskbar Tweaker pwns the Windows 7 Taskbar

Finally! We have a TweakUI-like taskbar tweaking tool which allows tweaking the Windows 7 overrated taskbar as we like and not as Microsoft would like us to. Enter 7 Taskbar Tweaker. Bravo!!

 It:
-  Lets you keep the jump list on using left mouse click+drag but get back the good old right click context menu.
-  Lets you completely turn off grouping which means if you turn off combining as well (Never combine) your new taskbar is your Quick Launch. This is the real classic taskbar functionality Microsoft chose to limit.
-  Lets you choose what dragging and dropping a file into an application's taskbar button does - whether it'll be pinned to its jumplist or whether pass the document to the application, that is "Open with".
-  Allows you to configure what middle click does - start a new instance (like Shift+click), close the app or focus window.
-  Lets you completely disable the thumbnail previews.
-  Lets you configure the behavior when you click on an app button while switching from another app : whether to directly switch to the last used window or show the thumbnail previews. Many users felt this was the only customizability missing from the taskbar.
-  Lets you disable combining (Never combine), disable grouping yet hide labels.

Thanks to RaMMicHaeL for this. Native 64-bit version also available!

Edit: I couldn't agree more with one of the commenters who said: "It was so annoying how I couldn’t ungroup taskbar icons that were from the same program. Why in hell would microsoft take this feature out from vista? Yes, let’s just arbitrarily take out features. wtf are they high on H?" Unfortunately, that's the direction Microsoft is taking its products in. Every upgrade is a struggle to adapt to changes and compatibility issues.

The navigation 'pain' in Windows 7

Windows XP introduced a very handy feature in Windows Explorer called "Simple Folder View". Basically, it allows you to click just once in the navigation/left pane of Explorer to expand the folder you want to work with, while you can keep the single-click-for-everything-else feature turned off. What's more, if you click on another folder, it automatically collapses the earlier one and expands the new folder. As a result, you won't end up with lots of folder trees to collapse manually if you are working with lots of folders and end up scrolling less vertically. But for no apparent reason (Microsoft's stupid telemetry at work?), they've removed this nice behavior from Windows Vista and Windows 7. How many times do I have to curse them for getting rid of stuff for no reason? Just what was the harm in keeping this untouched especially if it could be turned on/off from Folder options? I smell lazy shell programmers who didn't bother to update the code for the updated shell.

As a bonus annoyance, Windows 7 Explorer has an extremely annoying bug wherein the navigation pane scrolls upwards when a folder is expanded or collapsed (happens usually when using the keyboard) instead of adjusting the view to show the expanded folder's subfolders or making sure at least the collapsed folder remains in view.

Few more bonus annoyances of the left pane of Explorer include not supporting single click to rename, not giving us a "Folders" button (like XP) to toggle the navigation pane like they have for the "Preview pane" (like Windows 7), not showing a horizontal scrollbar when items extend beyond the split adjustor (instead showing a tooltip only upon hover!), getting rid of the intuitive automatic scrolling introduced in Windows Vista, playing a dumb default sound (ding) for Alt+Enter instead of bring up Properties and making the thickness of the vertical split view adjustor so thin that it becomes very difficult to drag it. Kudos to the Windows shell team for doing this!

Quite a number of people (some since Vista) seem to be asking about Simple Folder View but all replies are in vain. Some others seem to be pissed off about the missing horizontal scrollbar or automatic Vista-like scrolling in the navigation pain pane.

A million thanks to Classic Shell once again which fixes all of the navigation pane bugs and usability issues.

16 bit apps get degraded treatment even in 32-bit Windows 7

The other day I migrated one of my laptops from Windows XP to Windows 7 and copied over the Microsoft Entertainment Pack games which I've always enjoyed playing. Guess what! The horrible Explorer wouldn't show icons for ANY of the 16-bit executables but instead shows a generic program icon! First, I thought I must have installed 64-bit Windows 7 by mistake but no this has got nothing to do with 32-bit or 64-bit. At a time when I used Windows XP Professional x64 edition, Explorer had no problems showing 16-bit icons. A little searching brought me to this article by Raymond Chen which confirms my fear - the "feature" was dropped in Windows Vista apparently because the code was obsolete and not so secure. 32-bit or 64-bit processes don't extract icons from 16 bit resources any more. But why does the shell team not understand that this decision degrades the user experience and just because they haven't come across anyone using 16-bit software today doesn't mean people don't. Instead of making the same old maintenance cost vs time vs value argument, why not prevent the experience from degrading? The current behavior essentially makes all Win16 apps look like MS-DOS apps. Sheesh!

Plus, the new taskbar ensures that users using 16-bit applications continue to have a degraded user experience. If a 16-bit program is pinned to the taskbar, it appears as a separate button (two instances) when launched/running. Looks like the Live Messenger 2009 team influenced this.

This issue has been discussed here on MSDN. I e-mailed Raymond Chen and he replied that he would add my request to the other requests being made of the user interface team so they can prioritize it appropriately. Which means that a feature that worked in previous Windows versions won't be fixed right away with a higher priority or may never be fixed (as MS crawls towards 64-bit).

Why Windows Explorer sucks in Windows 7: Obsession with hiding things

The left pane of Windows Explorer has fugly triangular arrows replacing the simple plus and minus signs. Why are they there in the first place, let's remind ourselves of that first. They are there to indicate that there are subfolders inside a certain folder. But why is the behavior in Windows 7 extremely annoying? At the first opportunity it gets (the moment the mouse pointer leaves the navigation pane), the arrows disappear. Now imagine if I have to drag something from the right pane into some folder in the left pane. How am I assured that the folder I am dragging to has a subfolder? Why can't the damn arrows in the left pane be set to always show? Why do they disappear when dragging and dropping if the user clicks in the right pane before starting to drag to the left pane?

And while we're on the subject, why not get rid of arrows and bring back the + and - signs? The developer division did that in Visual Studio 2010 when lots of developers complained. No one's complaining about this one, people are still drunk with the Windows 7 kool-aid. Oh well, Windows XP FTW!

And btw this annoyance also applies to Windows 7's evil cousin and is also mentioned on the excellent Windows 7 Taskforce created by Long Zheng.

Fortunately, a fastastic open source shell extension called Classic Shell fixes this problem in Windows 7 and in Windows Vista!!

 

Update: Despite Classic Shell, Windows Explorer still needs a lot of fixing in Windows 7 and Windows 8. See the more up-to-date post for Windows 8 for a list of things that need fixing and send your feedback to Microsoft to fix these.

How I feel about Windows (7)

How do I feel about Windows 7? Windows has been Microsoft's most phenomenally successful product ever and I have a huge emotional attachment to it.

Microsoft will be launching Windows 7 in October. How do I feel about it? Not so good and a bit worried for Microsoft. The future is not so good. Windows 7 makes some of the same mistakes Windows Vista did - changing the UI radically, having poor backward compatibility with Windows XP-era apps, removing a bootload of features (the thing I hate the most with a Voldemort like hatred) just like Windows Vista did and making some new design mistakes. Plus it has very little in terms of really new features for Vista upgraders (I really feel sorry for poor Vista customers victims). Windows 7 is Vista 1.5. That said, it is not a particularly bad annoying OS like Vista was but the venerable Windows XP remains my favorite OS and the dominant one (as of this writing). You may wonder why do I say this without anything to back my statements. Over time, I will write on why but let's say at the moment, the primary reason is removed features. I hate the way how Microsoft is dumbing down Windows with each successive iteration (and hence the blog name). Windows Vista received very bad PR (a bit too much if you ask me), it is not that bad for newbies, grandmas and Joe Average. Windows 7 is receiving the exact opposite treatment - it is receiving much more praise than it deserves. Just shows how much of the media and Joe Average never tried Vista. It will be interesting to see how it fares after launch.

Why am I and (will I) be writing with such negativity and making a huge fuss of this? Because it's a myth that Microsoft listens to feedback. It's an illusion they have very succesfully managed to create with Windows 7. I have been reporting the issues I will be writing about through every possible means: Connect, team blogs, forums, email. I understand that they can't listen to each and everyone's suggestion and that there are time and other resource constraints but hey don't you care about making sure the existing features of your OS are working or broken while developing new features? Are you trading new features in exchange for the working old ones?

If Windows 7 is SO good, Windows Vista wasn't THAT bad and if Windows Vista was THAT bad, Windows 7 isn't SO good. That's my point. The two OSes are more similar than any other Microsoft Oses, maybe Windows 98 SE and Windows Me.

Windows 7 sadly doesn't live up to the hype and my expectations. One only has to look at the consistent dumbing down of Microsoft products to see this. Windows XP remains more popular than its two successors combined. Why? Not because people are reluctant to change, but because each successive Microsoft product gives the user less options, less customization. For all its bells and whistles and "I'm a PC" BS, Windows 7 has simply enhanced the autopilot and hidden the manual controls even deeper. If something is good, let people choose it. It may not be good for everybody.