Posted 20 December 2008 - 03:00 PM
Libraries are amazingly cool. For a long time now, I've had my music and movies on my file server. Now, I could always change the shell paths to point there, but that also allows whatever program that decides to take a dump into those folders the directions to do it where I can see it. Now, I can add my things to the library, and just remove the default ones; programs happily dump into the default folders, but now I don't have to see and deal with Adobe, Autodesk, and whatever other folders that respawn if I try to delete them. It's very, very cool.
The new taskbar is also rather nice. Mixing Quicklaunch with regular programs seems at first to be messy, but it works in practice rather well. Aero Peak is very handy, because thumbnails aren't enough 90% of the time. I have yet to see the power that Jump Lists portend to have, but at least they make for handy MRU lists for now. My only wish would be that Microsoft allow more than "large" and "small" size icons. Large is a bit much and small is way too small for icon-only use.
Overall, the little tweaks and improvements are very nice. There's still a lot of stuff I'd like to see fixed up, but it's unlikely to happen (little snafus in UI interaction, mainly due to the very bolted on approach of UAC). I'd make this my main desktop OS if it wasn't for the hangups of certain programs, Live Mesh being #1 and the broken text rendering in Word 2007 being #2. Oh, and the fact that ATI is being lazy about OpenGL in x64 again.