The UI really does look sharp, and the video at the end of the article goes to show its not just a fancy new box joining things together, you have graphs that will really make performance monitoring on network copys much easier, and visually appealing even moreso than teracopy ever had.

It’s actually a little scary when i saw the screen to the left, why? Because its actually like Microsoft unlike some other companies has started to listen to it’s customers, and implement features that set it apart and actually make the computing experience, dare i say… Better, with filtering by location for conflicts, as well as highlighting differences between the conflicts so you can make smart choices on which one you really intend to keep.

The video below is of the demonstration and goes to show the above 2 scenarios as well as some other adjustments in the copy and paste process that really just are great improvements that have been coming for a long time. You see this is a proper OS update, New entire UI’s bringing features and improvements people have been wanting and asking for, unlike a certain Lion that turned out to be quite lackluster and sort of useless.

According to Janice Chaffin, president of Symantec’s Consumer Division, “Microsoft’s free product is basically a stripped down version of the OneCare product Microsoft pulled from the shelves. A full Internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected.” which I find to be COMPLETE AND UTTER BULL.

As a computer technician, and network engineer let me just break it down for you. Microsoft already has a “Suite”.

Firewalls have been built in to XP and Vista, in fact Vista supports bi-directional filtering. But even when it comes down to this it doesn’t really matter to the average consumer sitting behind their linksys router NAT’d and firewall’d already so why do we need additional firewalling? Oh ya so that Norton can randomly screw up and blog mail and messenger and other oddities that I’ve seen over the past 3 years.

AntiPhishing… last I checked this was built into IE8

AntiMalware… Windows Defender in Vista and Windows 7

AntiSpam… Windows Mail / Outlook already have spam filters and their constantly getting better.

and now Microsoft is moving Morro to be a free Antivirus to complete the security “Suite” as the Norton and Mcaffee schills continue to sound their “we’re better because you pay for us” Bulls*it. The fact of the matter is in the modern day and age if you do your windows updates, and run a basic free antivirus your pretty much as safe as you ever will be, What Norton and the big Antivirus manufaturers want is to scare consumers into thinking they need their bloated slow and useless software when the simple fact is.

Ok i’ve rambled for long enough, on to the goodies care of neowin for the leak. Remember Morro will apparently be releasing for free before the end of 2009 to work side by side with Windows Defender (hence the similar look).

Desktop and User Interface:

• Gadget view options
In the Windows 7 beta it was impossible to separate desktop icons from gadgets under the View setting available by right-clicking on the desktop. Now there is the option to hide just your gadgets or just your desktop icons.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Windows Flip (ALT + TAB) with Aero Peek
Aero Peek is now enabled for Windows Flip (or more commonly known as ALT + TAB).

• Improved Windows Logo + # keyboard shortcut
Pressing Windows Logo + # (where # corresponds to an item’s order in the taskbar) in the beta would only launch the program in Windows 7. In the release candidate, it can both launch and switch between Windows. For example, if IE wasn’t running and the second item on the taskbar, Windows Logo + 2 will launch the program. If IE is running with a single window, the same shortcut will now switch to the program. When IE is running with several windows or tabs, holding down the Windows Logo and tapping the 2 key repeatedly will actually cycle through the open IE items off the taskbar (with Aero Peek). Letting go simply switches to the corresponding window. It works really similarly to the ALT +TAB shortcut.

Multitouch:

• Aero Peek for touch
First, the taskbar’s thumbnails now support a gesture so you can drag your finger across the taskbar and it will trigger Aero Peek. The Show Desktop button is improved so a press-and-hold will allow the customer to peek at the desktop. A regular tap still allows you to switch over.

• Windows Explorer
Multi-touch zoom is now enabled for Windows Explorer.

Power Options:

• Faster access to High Performance power plan
Clicking on the battery icon in the taskbar notification area offers two different power plans: Balanced and Power saver. Windows 7 laptops are configured to use the Balanced by default. Now in the popout menu, you can see all three options.

Taskbar:

• Increased taskbar space
There is even more increased space on the taskbar now. The release candidate will feature 24-39% more icons before the taskbar scrolls (depending upon resolution, icon size and the default notification area).

• Increased flexibility and changes to Jump Lists
When there are too many things pinned to Jump Lists, it defeats the whole purpose of easy access. Jump Lists now only automatically suggest the first 10 items (there is still the option to customize the length of the list).

Now you can also pin files and folders to programs that are not handle that file type. Pinning the item in most cases will create a new registration so that launching it from the Jump List will always open the file with that specific program (ex. a pinned HTML file to Notepad will always open the file in Notepad).

The Control Panel jump list will now list your most recent items.

• Newly installed programs
When a program is installed, it automatically and temporarily surfaces at the bottom of the Start Menu. It lets the user see it, giving them the option to launch it or drag it to the taskbar.

User Account Control:

• Increased security
There will be two changes to the release candidate to UAC settings. The first change is that the UAC control panel will run in a “high integrity” process (thus requiring elevation). The second change will now prompt for a confirmation when you are changing the level of UAC.

Source: Gizmodo

Well the day is hear, ok it’s not RTM but Microsoft’s RC1 of Windows 7 has released and oh boy theirs some goodies inside. Personally I wasn’t expecting anything new for the Release Candidate of Windows 7 but apparently Microsoft didn’t want us to be disappointed with just a few bug fixes and included some odd yet awesome enhancements. No the “Windows 7 new user interface” wasn’t included that has been rumored to be coming, then again most people agree if that does make it into Windows 7 (any significant Windows UI changes) they will hold it off until the last moment with internal testing and finally RTM.

One quick new feature as Gizmodo pointed out earlier is the awesome new backgrounds that are both odd yet entertaining especially coming from Microsoft who’s normally very well… stuckup, but then again maybe their background choice group is being entertaining I mean first the “Beta” fish and now we have wacky backgrounds in our first Release Candidate.

Windows 7 Release Candidate.

1′s other noticeable feature is the fact that you can now stream your Media Library to other computers. It’s all covered via Windows Media Player’s Remote Media Sharing. It allows you to stream your media over the Internet via your Windows Live ID that you associate with your Windows 7 user account via a small downloadable file (wow Microsoft really isn’t including anything excess to protect from those antitrust buzzards aren’t they). But as other tech junkies have pointed out this should also allow them to leave the possibility of it being extended later to cover signings via OpenID or other services. Both your Main PC and your other PCs that your trying to share the library with need the same version of Windows Media Player, but once that’s done and both are using the same Live ID or your on a Live ID that you’ve shared your library with (yes you can share it). The library will be accessible via the “Other Libraries” right below your own local library on that computer and can be browsed and used just like the standard library. Definitely a big bitch slap to the iTunes lovers that think their bonafide text list is nice (Sorry guys I’m a zune marketplace lover).

If that wasn’t an awesome enough feature apparently Microsoft decided that sneaking in a nice home user feature wasn’t fare without also adding a secretish feature for the Workstation crew and to make all those business users that shunned Vista happy. A full Windows XP Mode is included with Windows 7 for those stubborn business apps that just refuse to get updated to work with the latest operating systems and API’s. It basically takes your app and runs it inside of a complete Windows XP virtual environment so that it has 100% windows xp compatability. The downside I suppose you could call is that that like the above sharing mode that WMP got, theirs a small download required to activate this feature, a small price to pay for full compatability. Personally I hope both items are included on the final RTM dvd, as their both pretty solid ideas with great potential for making lots of people happy.

Customization seems to be the other thing they decided to take a tap at and as you can see below, courtesy of Gizmodo there’s some pretty wicked and well trippy backgrounds that I truely pray aren’t a joke and do indeed make their way into RTM along with hopefully more, as I know I love the second one and people in my office and home have already picked their favorite Wacky Desktops. I suppose the only features that seems to still not be present that has me a bit upset that fits into this category, is the Desktop RSS feed editable via a decent builtin control panel page, and the ability to also easily set the logon ui without third party tools or having to edit the registry :( But hey we still probably have RC2 and RTM to go :)

That’s just the latest features to be discovered lets not forget the extensive list of previously mentioned updated features in RC1, as well as the tweaks to aeropeek, and general improvements and bug swashes that took place since the last beta. I’ll repost the list on a post soon of all the other features that Microsoft says they adjusted since the last beta into RC1.

Believe it or not I’m a Mac user, ok not 100% as I also use a PC 80% of the time for my home and work computers, but the other 20% that I’m on my laptop I tend to use MacOS X… I used to do a lot of bittorrent downloading before I switched to newsgroups, the issue I had though was sometimes I wanted to download things using my laptop and quickly bumped into a nasty thing in the world of the Mac users. Azureus is pretty much the standard freeware bittorrent app and just like on the PC it’s bloated as hell while not quite as bad as it’s windows counterpart. Now before anyone thinks I’m bashing Azureus it’s a great program it’s just way more feature rich than I need when it comes to grabbing torrents without impacting my PC’s performance.

Well amongst the millions of spam emails I got today to my gmail, from the usual “I love you long time” emails, and perhaps the slightly more on target acne treatment products was an email from my old friends at the uTorrent site! You see for those that haven’t used uTorrent on the PC (wait there are still those that don’t use it WTF?!?) it’s an extremely fast and extremely lightweight bittorrent client that works and looks great and clocks in at under 1 MB. It’s just the best bittorrent client on the net, the major draw back was that their wasn’t a native Mac version, I mean people wanted uTorrent on Mac so bad they were running it via emulators (crossover, VMware fusion etc). Well fret not my fellow Mac users the day is upon us. uTorrent has announced that they are ready to beta the native version of uTorrent for MacOSX. As always remember this is a beta so bugs are expected but that’s what they make the forum for… reporting issues… either way bittorrent is now Mac friendly!

Oh ya one little hitch, it’s currently Leopard and Intel only for now but hey it’s also only a beta for now but be happy it’s finally here for the most part!

Source: MacOSX uTorrent Beta