Liking the taskbar

Although I'm disappointed to see that Windows 7 doesn't include native Blu-ray playback support, I am feeling the taskbar is already growing on me.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. I liked to organize my XP and Vista taskbars by having the taskbar two tiers high...the top tier consisting of all of my QuickLaunch icons and the lower level having the taskbar buttons of running applications.

Windows 7 seems to have married the two together. When you launch an application, an icon for that application appears in the taskbar. When you close the application, the icon goes away. But you can also "pin" an application to the taskbar--essentially giving you QuickLaunch functionality. Pin an application to the taskbar, and its icon appears. Click the icon, and it launches.

In both cases, when you have an application running, a transparent outline forms around the icon. Thus you can quickly determine by looking at your taskbar icons which ones are actually running apps. Hover over running apps and you'll get the preview like you did in Vista (with Aero turned on). If you have multiple instances of an app open, like Explorer or Word, this transparent outline "stacks," up to three high, so you can see there's more than one instance.

But it gets different here. In Vista, hovering over a taskbar button of a running app showed you a preview of what's in that window. But since they all "collapse" or group into a single taskbar icon, hovering over the icon yields a preview of all running instances of that application. So if you have three Windows Explorer windows open, you'll get three previews. Hover over the one you want and click it, and it'll come to the foreground. Hover over any preview long enough, and all other windows will temporarily "hide" so you can see just that window.

The trick is that if you have a running instance of the app, clicking the icon won't necessarily start a new instance. In the QuickLaunch days, clicking an icon would launch a new instance. In Windows 7, if you need a new instance, right-click the icon and choose the application's name from the list of options and you'll get a fresh running instance (separate running executable process).

A nice thing about the new taskbar is that the icons are bigger, and because you can have quite a lot of them there, you don't get the "squishing" effect of taskbar buttons from previous Windows versions, where the buttons would get smaller and smaller everytime you opened a new window.

I have a lot of icons pinned to the taskbar, and since I always had it two levels high, I have it two high in Windows 7 as well. Plenty of real estate...

~M