Windows 7 – Common Ribbon can be hidden

Since I know someone who went to the Microsoft PDC, I got a chance to play with Windows 7… (I should pester another someone who was supposed to get me into the now-rubbish Media Center “Fiji” beta–but forgot to–and see if he could get me into the Windows 7 beta program before it becomes publically available…)

Just as the full-blown ribbon found in Office 2007, the common ribbon (that should be seen across all sorts of applications in the future) will still let you hide the ribbon, should you find it taking too much space for too little reason:

When it’s hidden it works just the same as in Office 2007:

Windows 7 – Improved Sound control

Since I know someone who went to the Microsoft PDC, I got a chance to play with Windows 7… (I should pester another someone who was supposed to get me into the now-rubbish Media Center “Fiji” beta–but forgot to–and see if he could get me into the Windows 7 beta program before it becomes publically available…)

One of the things I noticed was that the sound properties includes the ability to un-mute the microphone, which wasn’t always easy in Vista (at least not on my 2 Vista machines).

Above, you see the microphone input is muted, which is quite similar to what is seen and accessible in Vista. What differs, however, is below:

In the microphone properties you can see that there’s finally an easy way to listen to the microphone through the speakers. Again, in Vista this could be done in most cases, but it seemed to be up to the device manufacturer to implement a workaround…

Windows 7 – Custom Libraries

Since I know someone who went to the Microsoft PDC, I got a chance to play with Windows 7… (I should pester another someone who was supposed to get me into the now-rubbish Media Center “Fiji” beta–but forgot to–and see if he could get me into the Windows 7 beta program before it becomes publically available…)

With Windows 7, not only do you get to customize what each of the default libraries contains (as in: which folders are linked to it), but you can also create your own libraries:

But what makes this useful for us minimalists, is that we can hide that library from the main view:

This lets us create less-used compilations of folders (such as certain network folders that are only occasionally used) into one complete view, without them always being right there.

Traveling with Photoshop – Kim Jong-Il edition

So with the magic of Photoshop I’ve been traveling around a lot lately. Today I show you a picture of me meeting with Kim Jong-Il and his advisors shortly after we had watched a soccer game and did some shopping. The mood was great – he even had his prized grand-champion dog with him (a rarely-seen animal).

We got to drink some of the amazing North Korean 막걸리 (Makgeolli – Rice Wine), which attributes to our defiance of gravity and all other major world annoyances (like democracy, freedom, and such).

Where will I turn up next?