Windows 7 pre-beta screenshots - UPDATE x4

Interested in how Windows 7 is getting along? Take a look at this series of screenshots to find out!

Full gallery here!

As you can see from the images below, the UI changes so far are modest. There's photo album improvements (image 13), we see the ribbon in Paint (image 18) and an improved theme picker (image 26). Oh, and we get to see a new, improved calculator (image 3). Also notice that the taskbar is significantly taller and taskbar buttons have been revamped (image 2). Right-clicking on one of these taskbar buttons reveals a Jump List" (image 34).

Late breaking from PDC!

Steven Sinofsky just announced the following:

• Plea to developers to develop to 64-bit.
• Beta will be feature complete, but not ready for performance benchmarking and edge-cases.
• Beta will have feedback tool to send comments direct to Microsoft.
• There will be an RC. When this will be released will be decided after the
• Beta is released. Sticking to the ballpark of three years after Vista release.

Scott Guthrie:

• Multi-touch gestures seems very neat - just watched a demo using an HP TouchSmart PC - Will Windows 7 mean new screens???
• Loads of new .NET stuff announced for developers.
• Next Visual Studio (2010) will be built on WPF and have multi-monitor support.
• Tesco.com demo-ed a neat gadget for grocery shopping - one cool feature was the webcam bar-code scanner that allowed you to add a new item to the shopping list.
• Silverlight installed on some 1 in 4 PCs connected to the Internet.
• Silverlight 2 allows you to run .NET inside the browser.

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Expect to see and hear a lot more about Windows 7 over the next few hours!