Advances in typography and text rendering in Windows 7

Even with the pictures and videos so commonplace on PCs, many of us spend most of our time looking at and interacting with text. Yet few of us stop to think about the depth of technology required to render text well and that this is an area that continues to benefit from improved technology in displays, graphics cards, as well as the APIs available to developers. In Windows 7, The support for text and fonts in GDI continues to provide the foundation for compatibility and application support. Building on the foundation of the modern DirectX graphics infrastructure, Windows 7 enhances the text output available to developers with DirectWrite. This is a new API subsystem and one that over time you will see adopted more broadly by applications from Microsoft, independent software developers, and within Windows itself. This post will also talk about improvements to ClearType and the Fonts, both available as part of the improvements to the GDI-based text APIs. This work was introduced at the PDC (pointers towards the end of the post). This post is by Worachai Chaoweeraprasit, a development lead on our Graphics feature team. –Steven

One of the high-level goals of Windows 7 is to have even better graphics – graphics with higher fidelity. To that end, my team is looking into how to improve one of the most basic graphic elements in Windows, and that is text – the thing that’s always right in your face, but we hope you’ll never actually see it.

The need for good text

About 80% of the time people spend with their PC is to either read or write. This should come as no surprise when you realize that text is essentially how the machine talks back to you, and until we have a technology that would allow it to interject thought directly into our brains, text would probably continue to be the way we receive information from the computer screen.

Studies have shown that good text leads to better productivity. Essentially we are wired as human to be incredibly good at capturing words and making a smooth, rapid transition between them – the basis of reading. We’re so good at it that we can do it unconsciously with incredible speed given that the text is optimized for that process. This might explain why many can sink in to a good book for hours, but some quickly become tired after staring at the computer screen for a while. Any visual-related factor that could disrupt the reading process effectively slows us down. Good text, therefore, is text that is tuned to support the human reading process with minimal distraction possible.

The evenness of the white surrounding each letter, word, line, and paragraph plays a huge role in keeping the pace of reading while the black elements holds our attention together. A line too long, a word too tight, a paragraph too uneven, any of these conditions take us farther and farther away from the message being delivered but closer and closer to the mere medium delivering it. The art of text is essentially to make the actual text itself disappears before your eyes, so that the ideas it delivers reappear in your head. The study of how to prepare proper text is known as typography. And, as a typographer would say: good typography is not to be seen; only the bad ones are. As a platform, the role of Windows is to deliver great presentation of text and offering software developers great tools for creating the best presentation possible in the context of the software they develop.

Improving current techniques

People tend to develop habits and often over time these become the preferred way of getting things done. The more mundane the activity is, the easier we become attach to it, and the harder we’re willing to change. When it comes to text on your screen, the same screen you look at days in and days out. It could quickly become awkward if that completely changes overnight – even for the better. So, how do we go about improving on what we all become so used to? We want to make sure to support what is there and improve it, while supporting existing methods. But, before we get to understand the improvement, let’s first take a closer look into the current implementation really is and what challenges it presents over the years.

The current implementation is the product of text rendering design based on device pixel. The dimension of text at a certain size eventually translates into a fixed number of pixels in horizontal and vertical direction on the device surface. A 10-point text would translate to roughly 80 pixels height on a typical printer device of 600 dpi, while the same text would merely acquire 13 pixels on a 96 dpi monitor. This physical screen condition was hardly adequate for the quality we’re seeking for good text on screen.

Fortunately, the advent of ClearType during the past decade has largely improved the clarity aspect of quality. ClearType leverages the anatomy of the LCD pixel structure and takes advantage of the human visual system to distribute the energy typically emit to a whole display pixel, across the neighboring sub-pixels in the LCD’s typical 3-color channels making up each individual pixel, to create the visual illusion of higher resolution raster quality on a lower resolution device. As the result, ClearType text looks significantly sharper than the typical text on an LCD display, mitigating a large portion of the quality problem on a display technology that would become hugely popular a few years later.

Another pleasant design of the original ClearType in Windows was that it has improved the clarity of text without breaking application compatibility – that is, it doesn’t change the actual size of each individual glyph in either direction, nor did it change the distance between the two adjacent ones. This is the reason one could turn it on or off at will without having to “store” the selected option in the document or application. It is entirely per-user rendering preference. In Windows 7 we also improved the ClearType Text Tuner in keeping with our theme of being in control of your PC experience, by providing even more granular choices when tuning ClearType (and of course you can still turn it off).

But like many other things in the world, the coin comes in two faces. While it is able to preserve backward compatibility, it is limited by its own leverage unable to advance the state of the art. The width and height of the individual glyph and the nominal distances between the adjacent two remain fixed to the rounded number of screen pixels at a given size.

One of the graphics improvements we made in Windows 7, therefore, is to move from the physical pixel model of the past, and instead creating a new design around what we call the “device independent pixel” unit (or “DIP”), a “virtual pixel” that is one-ninety-sixth an inch in floating-point data type. In this model, a glyph (or any other geometric primitive for that matter) can size to fractional pixels, and be positioned anywhere in between the two pixels. The new ClearType improvement allows sizing and placement of glyph to the screen’s sub-pixel nearest to its ideal condition, creating a more natural looking word shape and making text on screen looks a lot closer to print quality.

The following figure shows the side-by-side comparison of the same word between the original or today’s ClearType (above) and the Windows 7 improvement – Natural ClearType (below), which does require calling the new APIs to render. Notice the width of the letters in the word and the spacing between them, as well as how the more consistent width and spacing improves the overall appearance of the entire word. Note that all the letters are placed with its nominal spacing and there is no kerning adjustment being applied here. A great article by Kevin Larson – a researcher in the Advanced Reading Technology team, discusses in details the scientific aspect of word recognition.

The ability to be more precise in approximating the screen placement of natural text also lends itself to a very nice side-effect, and that is the fact that text can now be placed on the line with no regards to the actual display device’s resolution. It means a UI designer can design an application UI knowing it’ll look the same on all other screens as it appears on his or her screen regardless of what type of display device the users might have. This fact is also particularly handy for software localization where the translated text produces the same layout everywhere.

This improvement could also offer a more realistic view of a print document on screen, or make the screen document looks closer to its print counterpart. It could also improve the quality of document zooming. Imagine document zoom that could go in and out in the same manner as what you would see when pulling the actual print page closer and farther away from your sight. It could mean a more joyful experience for online reading.

Fonts and Font Management

The Font is the heart and soul to typography, much like photo is to photography. A lot more fonts are shipped with Windows these days while even more are developed around the world. Windows Vista shipped with 40% more fonts comparing to Windows XP. Windows 7 is expected to ship with 40+ new fonts, just to underscore this trend. We’ve also added some additional viewing/categorization capabilities using the Windows 7 Explorer to improve working with a large library of related fonts.

The default common controls’ font dialog and the font chunk in Windows 7 Ribbon are also updated to be more intelligently selective of what fonts to be present to the user of the current user’s profile. Depending on a number of settings including the current UI language, the user locale, and the current set of keyboard input locales, the font list hides fonts of languages not typically used by the user of different culture and locale. For example, all the international fonts are automatically hidden away from a typical English user to reduce clutter and promote better productivity in common system applications such as NotePad, WordPad and Paint. Third-party application utilizing the Ribbon or the common controls’ font dialog could also have the same benefit. The user still retains the option of selecting any desired font back to the view by explicitly marking it in the Windows 7 Control Panel’s Font applet.

Operating System	Fonts shipped “in-box”
Windows XP SP2	133
Windows Vista	191
Windows 7	235 (currently planned)

This growth, however, introduces some new opportunities for improvement. We’ve long treated fonts as system-wide resources. It gets “installed” on the machine and kept in a single flat namespace managed by the core part of the operating system. It may be interesting to some that the font named “Arial Black” isn’t really in the same grouping as “Arial Narrow” or “Arial”. This is because as far as the operating system is concerned, they are just different fonts with different names. And because font is uniquely identified by its name, you can’t have multiple versions of the same font at the same time.

Because font is system resource, non-traditional usage of font such as font embedded within the document, and font used exclusively in an application is done through the mechanism known as private installation, which involves making sure the font name is unique before installing it programmatically but doing so by hiding it from others to see. Private font is just like font installed publicly as far as the operating system internal is concerned.

An important improvement in Windows 7’s new font system is the notion of “font collection” which allows partitioning of fonts sharing the same usage into a separate namespace. The system collection is similar to what exists today and is created and managed by the system whereas custom collection can be created and managed, as many as needed, entirely by the application program. This allows document to have its own set of fonts local to it, and third-party application or plug-in to ship with its own font used exclusively within the program. This partitioning not only reduces unnecessary system-wide font update and allows update to happen only locally as needed, it also allows access to multiple versions of the same font in different collections.

The new font system also improves the way fonts are organized within the collection. It supports the notion of weight-width-slope variation where fonts with the same stylistic root but vary in its weight (thin, light, bold, black, etc.), width (wide, narrow, etc.), or slope (italic, oblique) are grouped together in the same font family. For instance, “Arial Narrow” becomes a variation or face in the “Arial” family. This grouping model is advocated by the CSS recommendation.

Font Art

Fonts also represent art and artistic expression. The technology helping create font is therefore the artist’s tool of expression. An important technology called OpenType emerged during the past decade. It enables new ways type design can be realized. OpenType allows designer to define how glyphs interact and transform in stages. The designer then exposes this function as an executable unit known as the “font feature” for application programmable access.

OpenType was an offshoot of the TrueType Open technology Microsoft developed in 1994-95. The TrueType Open technology added the GSUB, GPOS, BASE, JSTF, and GDEF tables to the TrueType format. The primary usage at the time was to help with the creation of Arabic font due to the inherent complexity of the task. Microsoft chose to rename the technology to OpenType in 1996 and Adobe added their CFF glyph outline format to the technology in the same year. Today OpenType is used to improve readability of text as well as to express new and exciting type design in various languages.

However, despite its long-time presence and availability, the usage of OpenType in the Windows world remains largely in specialized programs. The Windows native graphics system has not fully embraced OpenType for its mainstream usage of text. This absence discourages many designers as there is no standard way in Windows to test the feature they produce. Likewise, its limited exposure doesn’t encourage discoverability for mainstream application developers. Improving this and transitioning to this improved rendering technology is a multi-step and multi-release investment done so as to maximize the benefit while minimizing the disruption that might be introduced as incompatibilities. Windows 7 takes another step on this path. We know for many that care deeply about this area there is a strong desire to move faster. We are doing our best to balance the speed of transition with the desire to maintain compatibility.

Windows 7 new text system not only uses available OpenType features internally but also allows access to any feature made available in the font in the high level programming interface, making it easier for application developer to discover and exercise the font feature in mainstream scenario. Windows 7 also ships with a brand new OpenType font “Gabriola” developed by a well-respected typographer John Hudson. Gabriola makes heavy use of contextual letterforms and offers an unprecedented number of stylistic sets for different usages of the font in different occasions. The figure below enumerates all stylistic sets available in this font; notice the subtleties and not-so-subtle way to distinguish each stylistic set.

The figure below also demonstrates the power of contextual letterforms in the eighth rendition of Gabriola’s stylistic set (“ss07”) to produce different ways the same word is rendered depending on where it’s at in the line.

New APIs

Rendering text is complex and involved, even though it seems like something that should be straight forward. There are probably hundreds of ways to format text in a document and often many paths that ultimately yield the same results. HTML/CSS is a complex standard and is a great example of the richness of how text may be formatted and typeset. Underneath the formatting logic lies the language requirement – the rule of writing for the language. Windows has long been supporting Unicode – another complex standard for global data interchange. Windows supports an increasing number of Unicode script in every single release. The mapping from the input text to the final glyphs in the font requires intricate transformation, which involves parsing of font data and analyzing the language writing pattern. Once the glyph is finalized, it is then rasterized, merged and filtered into the final visual on the display device.

Due to this staging nature, different types of applications require different support from the text system. While a typical application such as the legendary “Hello world” type application may be satisfied with only the ability to get some text out showing to the user. The same level of support is hardly adequate for document preparation system such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. Some of the more mature application code bases may also have to deal with different graphics systems. This makes it harder in practice for a text system that tie to a particular graphics model to really be widely useful across the wide variety of applications in the Windows ecosystem.

It became obvious to us early on during the planning stage of Windows 7 that text processing is not homogeneous, and different types of applications have different needs and requires different levels of support. The appropriate level of programming access to the text functionality is as important as the functionality itself. The new text system in Windows 7 is assembled into a self-sufficient system called DirectWrite. The API is provided in four layers – the interfaces for font data, rendering support, language processing, and typesetting, each built upon the others with the lower layer makes no requirement to the upper one, and none depends on a specific graphics model. To illustrate the latter point, the figure below shows a sample application that uses the new typesetting interface and language processor while the final rendering happens as an extruded filled 3D geometry from the 2D graphics environment also new to Windows 7 called Direct2D. Both systems were introduced in PDC 2008 as the new graphic foundation in Windows 7.

DirectWrite preserves developer’s investment in existing technologies such as GDI and GDI+ in three important aspects. First, the previously described layering design of DirectWrite allows for the clean separation between the two fundamental processes of  placing and rendering of text. It enables applications to use DirectWrite to place text while having it rendered onto traditional graphic surfaces such as GDI and GDI+. The reverse scenario in which the application may use GDI to place text while having it rendered through DirectWrite is also naturally supported. The second aspect of compatibility comes from the fact that DirectWrite also supports all existing methods for placing and rendering text found in GDI. A DirectWrite application can use DirectWrite to place and render text in the same manner as GDI does without actually using GDI. Text placed and rendered under this compatibility mode is indistinguishable from GDI text from the user’s point of view, and as such preserving existing layout of application UI and text document. Lastly, DirectWrite exposes a set of APIs that interoperate with GDI. An application selecting a GDI font object can turn it into a DirectWrite’s font object and vice versa. Since the font system is at the low end of the DirectWrite API layer, it provides a natural interoperability point that is fundamental enough to ensure high degree of data preservation and correctness. Once the application is able to acquire a DirectWrite’s font object, it can in turn use it in any other DirectWrite API requiring a DirectWrite font from that point onward. The conversion from a DirectWrite’s font object back to a GDI font object allows the rest of the GDI-based application to function with no change while still being able to reap the benefit of using DirectWrite’s new and improved font model. As in some real world examples, the XPS print rasterizer in Windows 7 is implemented on top of DirectWrite and utilizes DirectWrite’s interoperability API to convert back to a GDI font as part of the conversion of an XPS-based print job for a non-XPS printer driver. The Windows 7 XPS Viewer also uses DirectWrite alongside the GDI+ graphic rendering for its onscreen display.  

There’s a lot more to the details of the API. In the PDC session linked to above, Leonardo Blanco and Kam VedBrat go into the details of DirectWrite and Direct2D and how to develop applications such as this.

The world has changed a lot since the first text APIs of Windows GDI, such as TextOut or ExtTextOut in Windows NT 3.1 (or the subsequent API additions). The evolution of support for text is a critical part of the underpinnings of Windows 7. We continue to improve this most “basic” element of a graphical operating system so that regardless of the language, script, or device used to render text, Windows will offers a great set of tools and APIs for developers and a great experience for end-users.

–Worachai

Recognizing Improvements in Windows 7 Handwriting

Microsoft has been working on handwriting recognition for over 15 years going back to the Pen extensions for Windows 3.0.  With the increased integration and broad availability of the handwriting components present in Windows Vista we continue to see increased use of handwriting with Windows PCs.  We see many customers using handwriting across a wide variety of applications including schools, hospitals, banking, insurance, government, and more.  It is exciting to see this natural form of interaction used in new scenarios.  Of course one thing we need to continue to do is improve the quality of recognition as well as the availability of recognizers in more languages around the world.  In this post, Yvonne, a Program Manager on our User Interface Platform team, provides a perspective on engineering new recognizers and recognition improvements in Windows 7.  –Steven

Hi, my name is Yvonne and I’m a Program Manager on the Tablet PC and Handwriting Recognition team. This post is about the work we’ve done to improve recognition in handwriting for Windows 7.

Microsoft has invested in pen based computing since the early 1990s and with the release of Windows Vista handwriting recognizers are available for 12 languages, including USA, UK, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean. Customers frequently ask us when we plan to ship more languages and why a specific language is not yet supported. We are planning to ship new and improved languages for Windows 7, including Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Russian, and Polish, and the list continues to grow. Let’s explore what it takes to develop new handwriting recognizers.

Windows has true cursive handwriting recognition, you don’t need to learn to write in a special way – in-fact, we’ve taught (or “trained” as we say) Windows the handwriting styles of thousands of people and Windows learns more about your style as you use it. Over the last 16 years we’ve developed powerful engines for recognizing handwriting, we continue to tune these to make them more accurate, faster and to add new capabilities, such as the ability to learn from you in Vista. Supporting a new language is much more than adding new dictionaries – each new language is a major investment. It starts with collecting native handwriting, next we analyze the data and go through iterations of training and tuning, and finally the system gets to you and continues to improve as you use it.

Data Collection

The development of a new handwriting recognizer starts with a huge data collection effort. We collect millions of words and characters of written text from tens of thousands of writers from all around the world.

Before I describe our collection efforts, I would like to answer a question we are frequently asked: “Why can’t you just use an existing recognizer with a new dictionary?” One reason is that some languages have special characters or accents. But the overriding reason is because people in different regions of the world learn to write in different ways, even between countries with the same language like the UK and US. Characters that may look visually very similar to you can actually be quite different to the computer. This is why we need to collect real world data that captures exactly how characters, punctuation marks and other shapes are written.

Setting up a data collection effort is challenging and time consuming because we want to ensure that we collect the “right kind of data”. We carefully choose our collection labs in the respective countries for which we develop recognizers.

Before we start our data collection in the labs, we configure our collection tools, prepare documentation, and compile language scripts that will guide our volunteers through the collection process. Our scripts are carefully prepared by native speakers in the respective language to ensure that we collect only orthographically correct data, data from different writing styles, and data that covers all characters, numbers, symbols and signs that are relevant to a specific language. All of our scripts are proofread and edited before they are blessed to be used at the collection labs.

Once our tools and scripts are ready, we open our labs and start to recruit volunteers to donate their handwriting samples. Our recruitment efforts ensure that we have balanced demographics such as gender, age, left handiness, and educational background that represent the majority of the population for that country.

A supervisor at the lab instructs the volunteers to copy the text as it is displayed in the collection tool in their own writing style. What is important to note is that we want to collect writing samples that accurately represent the person’s natural way of writing. We therefore encourage volunteers to treat “pen and tablet” like “pen and paper”. If one of the volunteers tends to writes in big, curvy strokes, then we want to collect his/her big, curvy strokes during the collection session. High quality data in this context refers to data that was naturally written.

Here is a snapshot of what our collection tool looks like:

Figure 1: Collection Tool

A collection session lasts between 60-90 minutes at which point our volunteer has donated a significant amount of handwritten data without feeling fatigued. The donated data is then uploaded and stored in our database at Microsoft ready for future use. The written samples contain important information like stroke orders, start- and end points, spacing, and other characteristics that are essential to train our new recognizer.

Let’s take a look at some of our samples in our database to illustrate the great variation among ink samples:

Figure 2: Ink samples illustrating different stroke orders.

The screenshot shows how three different volunteers inked the word “black”. The different colors are used to illustrate the exact stroke orders in which the word was written. Our first two volunteers used five strokes to write the word “black”; our third volunteer used four strokes. Please also note how our third volunteer used one stroke only to ink the letters “ck”, while our first volunteer used three strokes for the same combination of letters. All of this information is used to train our recognizers.

Neural Network and Language Model

Once we have collected a sufficient amount of inked data, we split our data into a training set, used by our development team, and a “blind” set, used by our test team. The training set is then employed to train the Neural Network, which is largely responsible for the magic that is taking place during the recognition process. Good, naturally written data is essential in developing a high quality recognizer; the recognizer can’t be any better than its training set. The more high quality data we feed into our Neural Network, the more equipped we are to handle sloppy cursive handwriting.

Our Neural Network is a Time-Delay Neural Network (TDNN) that can handle connected letters of cursive scripts. A TDNN takes ink segments of preceding and following stroke segments into consideration when computing the probabilities of letters, digits and characters for each segment of ink. The output of the TDNN is powerful but not good enough when handwriting is sloppy. In order to come within reach of human recognition accuracy, we have to employ information that goes beyond the shape of the letter: we call this the Language Model context. The majority of this Language Model context comes in form of the lexicon, which is a wordlist of valid spellings for a given language. For many languages, this is the same lexicon that the spellchecker uses. The TDNN and the lexicon work closely together to compute word probabilities and output the top suggestions for the given input.

Training the Neural Network is an involved process that takes time. We often experiment with borrowing data from other languages to increase the size of the training data with the ultimate goal to boost recognition accuracy. Borrowing characters from other languages does not always lead to success. As I mentioned above, stroke order, letter shape, writing styles and letter size can differ significantly from country to country and can have a negative impact on the performance of the TDNN. It often takes us several rounds of training, re-training and tuning before we find “the right formula” that will lead to high recognition accuracy.

How do we know if we are headed in the right direction when we build a new recognizer? This is an important question that the test team and native speakers answer for us. The test team is responsible for generating our recognition accuracy metrics that reflect how good our recognizer is. These accuracy metrics are based on our blind test set which is the collected data that development could not use for training. In addition to our accuracy metrics, we work with native speakers in house and at our world-wide subsidiaries to get feedback and further input.

Improving the recognizers through personalization

In the previous paragraphs I have outlined how we develop high quality recognizers that can handle a wide variety of different writing styles. But there is more as each person can also train the recognizer his/her unique writing style. The training that is done to teach the recognizer a personal writing style is the same training that happens before Microsoft ships the product. The only difference is that we are now collecting unique training data from a specific person (and not that of thousands of people). We call this process “Personalization”.

Figure 3: Personalization Wizard (Sentence module).

As the screenshots of our Personalization wizard illustrates, a person is asked to write the requested sentence to provide his/her ink samples. The more data a person donates during the personalization process, the better the recognizer will become. In addition to providing writing samples based on specified sentences, a person can target specific recognition errors, shapes, and characters that will all be used for training. Our Personalization feature is complex and offers a variety of different modules that enable a person to optimally tune the recognizer. We are proud to announce that Personalization will be available for all Vista languages and all new Windows 7 languages. We encourage you to use this feature to improve your recognition accuracy.

We continue to work on improving our recognizers which also means that we are incorporating our customers feedback through online telemetry (anonymously, privately, voluntary, and opt-in). In Windows Vista we released a new feature called “Report Handwriting Recognition Errors”, which gives people the opportunity to submit those ink samples that the recognizer did not recognize correctly. After the person has corrected a word in the Tablet Input Panel (TIP), we enable a menu that allows a person to send the misrecognized ink together with its corrected version to our team.

Here is a screenshot of what our error reporting tool looks like:

Figure 4: With “Report Handwriting Recognition Errors” people can choose which of the misrecognized ink samples they want to submit.

We receive approximately 2000 error reports per week. Each error report is stored in our database before we analyze it and use it to improve our next generation of recognizers. As you can imagine, real world data is extremely helpful because it is only this type of data that can reveal shortcomings of our recognizers.

We value and appreciate every single error report. Keep sending us your feedback, so that we can use it to improve the magic of our present and future recognizers.

Thank you,

– Yvonne representing the handwriting recognition efforts

New Windows 7 Content on Channel 9

With the Windows 7 Beta announcement today at CES, we are transforming the Channel 9 theme into the Windows 7 theme. To  facilitate this, we are introducing new set of videos exploring key Windows 7 features and topics. Our goal is to provide a series of videos on key topics starting with overview videos but quickly diving into the guts of the technical details. We are coupling these videos with technical blog posts and code samples for you to download.

There is a lot of ground to cover and many topics to explore. We will start with a series of videos and blogs on the new Windows 7 Taskbar:

Windows 7 New Taskbar – An Overview is an introductory video to the new Windows 7 Taskbar. It provides a very good starting point for learning about all the cool new Windows 7 Taskbar features and it sets the context for the following videos.

Designing the Windows 7 Taskbar is a “personal” view of the User Interface and User Experience design process and an insider’s view of some of the reasons underlying Windows 7 Taskbar behaviors.

Windows 7 Taskbar – Behind the Scenes provides a technical overview of the Taskbar architecture, programming model, and API.

Jump into the Windows 7 Jump Lists is a technical deep dive into the Windows 7 Jump Lists programming model and APIs. It also provides an insight into the importance of providing Application ID for applications.

 

Windows 7 Taskbar – Part 1, The Basics is the first post in a series on code posts on Windows 7 Taskbar API and programming model.

 

More content comming soon.

Windows 7 Beta – Go Get It!

Today during CES, Steve Ballmer announced and presented Windows 7 Beta and by this Friday it will be publicly available for download from Windows 7 homepage. If you are MSDN Subscriber, you can download Windows 7 Beta right now! Here are the instructions on how to download and install Windows 7 Beta.

By making Windows 7 Beta publicly available we are hoping developers and enthusiasts will download it and the SDK, and will start testing this new Microsoft OS – Windows 7. Now that the beta is out and available, we can start engaging developers and can provide them with technical content so they can test and experiment with Windows 7.

You already found this blog, the Windows 7 Blog for Developers, so you are on the right track. Another awesome place to get great content is Channel 9, and specifically, Windows 7 on Channel 9. Obviously, Windows Development Center on MSDN is also a good place for Windows 7 technical content. You can also go to DevReadiness - a developer community site dedicated to assisting the Windows ISV ecosystem develop high quality applications for new versions of the platform.

We are also starting a series of Channel 9 videos, and posts on specific topics such as the Windows 7 Taskbar, Windows 7 Ribbon, Sensors, and Location Platform, but this will have to wait for another day.

Enabling Multi-Touch in the Windows 7 Beta

Now that the Windows 7 Beta has been out for a while, I’d like to highlight how folks can try out Windows Touch, Windows 7’s new multi-touch capabilities.

In order to take advantage of it, you are going to need a PC that supports multiple touch points. Today – there are a few PCs on the market to choose from:

• HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs (IQ500 series & IQ800 series)
• HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PC
• Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC

To enable multi-touch capabilities on these PCs running the Windows 7 Beta you will need to make sure you have the latest multi-touch beta drivers. The driver allows the digitizer screen to support multiple touch points. Remember these are beta drivers, they still need to pass through our rigorous Windows Logo process before they are final, we can’t guarantee that all pre-Windows 7 PCs will have logoed drivers.

• For HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs: The driver is available from Windows Update. After you have installed the Window 7 Beta, open Windows Update from the Start menu. You might have to click the “Check for Updates” link on your left so it will find the driver, it is Optional right now so you’ll have to select it before it will install.
• For the Dell Latitude XT and HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PCs: the drivers are available now on N-Trig’s website. N-Trig is the company that makes the digitizer in these PCs (you should read the release notes, there are some limitations, like no pen support you should be aware of and how to switch between Windows Vista and Windows 7). Please also note these are beta drivers and are not supported by Dell or HP.

Many features in Windows 7, which are available today in the Windows 7 Beta, take advantage of multi-touch capabilities and I thought I’d highlight a few with some tips here.

To make sure multi-touch is working try our new Paint. The latest version of Paint has some cool new brushes that are designed for multi-touch, click on the Brushes gallery and pick any one (I like the Oil Brush). Now try finger painting – this is also the easy way to see how many fingers your PC supports at the same time, some support two at a time, others support 4 or more.

Once you are done “painting” - try out Internet Explorer 8. The big touch feature here is panning; you can place your finger anywhere on a page and drag up or down to scroll the page – that’s a lot easier than trying to touch the scrollbar. You can also go back and forward between pages with your finger using Flicks: try flicking to your right (as if you were going back in a book) to go back.

You can also use touch to navigate along the taskbar. The new Jump Lists on the taskbar are touch optimized, instead of right-clicking on one of the icons on the taskbar, trying dragging up on it with your finger to literally pull the menu up.

Windows Media Center is also touch optimized. Ben Reed, Senior Product Manager for Windows Media Center, demoed this for Channel 10.

One last tip: To make buttons and controls bigger and easier to touch, you can tell Windows to display everything larger – this has really improved in Windows 7. Go to the Start menu and type display, and then open the Display Control Panel (which should be at the top of the Start menu). Choose the Medium (that’s what I use) or Larger size and you will find that everything is easier to target with your finger.

Windows 7 Enterprise Edition Customer Benefits

You may have caught Brandon’s post last week looking at our SKU strategy for Windows 7. In addition to the guidance we provided earlier today for commercial customers looking at deploying Windows Vista, I want to also take a closer look at Windows 7 Enterprise specifically and what it means for our largest commercial customers.

Windows 7 Enterprise edition is designed to address the needs of our enterprise customers who have needs around advanced data protection, enabling user productivity and streamlining their PC management. Windows 7 Enterprise is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop offering, which also includes the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) tools and will only be available to customers with Microsoft Software Assurance on their Windows client licenses.

If you are an enterprise customer with Software Assurance on your existing Windows licenses when Windows 7 is released, then you automatically get the rights to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise to PCs in your environment. Additionally, customers who buy Windows 7 Professional and add Software Assurance will also have rights to deploy the Enterprise edition.

For our enterprise customers, we’re especially excited about the following Windows 7 Enterprise features that deliver greater efficiency and cost savings:

• DirectAccess: Windows 7, along with the network technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2, provides this network technology that enables the user to seamlessly access corporate network resources when on the Internet, without having to create a VPN connection.
• BranchCache: Windows 7 together with Windows Server 2008 R2 offers an alternative to alleviate the problems of slow connectivity, delivering increased network responsiveness of applications and giving users in remote offices an experience more like working in the head office. When BranchCache is enabled, a copy of data accessed from an intranet web site or a file server is cached locally within a branch office.
• Enterprise Search Scopes: allows IT administrators to populate links to the commonly used internal sites — for example, SharePoint sites – to the Windows Explorer UI or to the Start menu or in Windows 7, using Group Policy. These links simplify access to the target internal data sources on the network for business users.
• BitLocker & BitLocker To Go: protect data on PCs and removable drives, with manageability to enforce encryption and backup of recovery keys. Windows 7 extends BitLocker protection to USB storage devices while making the original functionality even easier to use. Note: BitLocker for PCs and BitLocker To Go for removal hard drives such as external USB drives.
• AppLocker: is a flexible, easy-to-use mechanism that enables IT professionals to specify exactly what is allowed to run on user desktops. It restricts unauthorized software while allowing applications, installation programs, and scripts that users need.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Optimizations: delivers desktop functionality in Windows 7 using virtual machines hosted on servers—a solution known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI enables users to access their desktops remotely as well as the ability to reuse virtual machine (VHD) images to boot a physical PC. Windows 7 provides for better user experience in VDI scenarios, with better graphics, audio and local device support.
• Multi Lingual User Interface: the Language Packs in Windows 7 Enterprise enable you to support up to 36 different languages using a single Windows master image, rather than creating a separate image for each language used in the organization.

Other benefits to Windows 7 Enterprise include:

• Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA)
• License rights to run up to four additional copies of Windows in virtual machines
• License rights for network booting of Windows

Because each high edition SKU is a superset of the previous SKU, Windows 7 Enterprise includes all end user features available in Windows 7 Professional, as well as the DVD Playback Codec and Windows Media Center.

More information about Windows 7 Enterprise is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7-enterprise.aspx

Windows 7 Enterprise is another example of Microsoft’s commitment to delivering continual innovation to enterprise customers through Software Assurance. While we expect these features will be of greatest interest to our enterprise customers, any Windows client Software Assurance customer will have the rights to deploy the Enterprise edition. We look forward to sharing more information about Windows 7 Enterprise and what it has to offer our business customers.

More Windows 7 Themes Released

Throughout various online forums and bulletin boards, more and more Windows 7 themes are appearing.

Windows 7 UAC Control Panel

UAC Control Panel:

“The UAC Control Panel enables you to choose between four different settings:

1. Always notify on every system change. This is Vista behavior – a UAC prompt will result when any system-level change is made (Windows settings, software installation, etc.)
2. Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer. This setting does not prompt when you change Windows settings, such as control panel and administration tasks.
3. Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer, without using the Secure Desktop. This is the same as #2, but the UAC prompt appears on the normal desktop instead of the Secure Desktop. While this is useful for certain video drivers which make the desktop switch slowly, note that the Secure Desktop is a barrier to software that might try to spoof your response.
4. Never notify. This turns off UAC altogether.”

More proof that microsoft are really listening to their user base. For years people have been fustrated with the amount of prompts that pop up and ask you a silly question, you were/are able to dissable these but you would need to be on the nerdy side to even think of turning them off. Anyhow Windows 7 wont be anywhere as annoying as the previous versions of windows have been when it comes to the user control panel.

People using the older Windows 7 beta will not notice this change only those who are using Windows 7 build 7000. A nice touch from Microsoft.

Windows 7 Visual Style for Vista

As there is a lot of interest in Windows 7 we have decided to share with you some themes over the coming days. This theme today is a Windows 7 transformation pack for Microsoft Windows vista.

All files have been scanned and tested. Just please remeber to back up before applying any thems. Many people have are not going to format just to see what windows 7 is so you can now dress up your Windows Vista with this great Microsoft Windows 7  theme.

Windows 7 1st beta released

Windows 7 beta is only a few hours old and already the first windows 7 beta has been leaked. Windows 7 beta 1 has popped up on rapidshare, torrent sites and other file sharing services. Microsoft really need to tighten things up one would feel. I don’t believe in pirating software so I’m not going to provide you with windows 7 download links but that said you don’t need to look to far.

Please if you do download these “Windows 7 beta” versions please check carefully as many people are reporting spyware and viruses included in them from various releases (not from MS, but rather nasty people / hackers) looking to take advantage of your curiosity.

Anyway here is a screenshot from Microsoft Windows 7 beta 1: (Note this is considered Windows 7 build 7000)

Next Page »