Les Actualites

In the last year the most amazing thing has happened, all sorts of fantastic new operating systems have sprung up. Android, Chrome OS, iPhone OS and all of them really good whether they’re there for a niche market or not.

Now these operating systems have begun to propagate with iPhone OS and Android appearing on tablets, the kind of thing everybody would use in the home instead of a laptop. One of the biggest changes this will mean for users is that it will no longer matter what operating system we use and most people won’t even notice anyway.

If you look at the average things a casual user will do with a computer or computing device then, email, browsing and shopping, photo editing, playing music and watching video would all top the list. In fact these are the activities people would do 90+% of the time.

All of these OSes are either capable of doing all of these activities out of the box, or with the very simple and quick addition of a bolt-on bit of software. More’s the point it can easily be argued that the App stores for Apple devices and Google make it even easier on those devices than a Mac or Windows.

Despite the major differences between these operating systems, required to give each one its own identity and prevent litigation cases in court, they’re all fundamentally the same. Only things like the top-of-the-screen menu system on the Mac and the ribbon in Windows pose anything different to the norm.

Now at this point Ballmer and Jobs would disagree with me immensely and point out the huge and fundamental differences that make their operating system the best and easiest. Take Windows 7 for instance, it’s certainly the most flexible and for a power-user such as myself, more attractive because of that.

But this is nothing more than corporate greed playing on the pack-animal nature of humanity. When it boils down to it we’re all human and all in the same boat wanting to do the same things. Psychology plays a large part here though and major companies attract fans and loyal supporters the same way your local football or baseball teams might. For example, only this morning I received an email from someone who didn’t like the things I’ve been writing here about Apple recently, accusing me of all sorts of things and being a bit rude in the process. This was even though I’ve been quite complimentary about the company in recent days.

This is really quite clever on their part and I’m certain they all have psychologists on staff. What they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades is grooming us into becoming ambassadors for their companies.

None of this really has anything to do with how good the actual product is because if you take a step back and think about the things you want to do on your device for 90% of the time, any-old device will probably do and most of your stuff’s now in the clouds, USB hard drives or pen drives anyway.

Even the old familiarity argument is fading fast with people picking up and mastering iPhone OS and Android as quickly as they can get a new microwave to cook a lasagne.

It will be interesting to see what each company do with their operating systems in the future, especially Windows 8 which has a monumental battle to fight now to prevent Microsoft from losing market share. Looks like they’ll need those psychologists to rally the troops again.

Source: Windows7 News

One of the new features of the upcoming Microsoft operating system are libraries which basically is a collection of folders on the computer system. One major problem that many users experienced in previous Microsoft operating systems was that the Documents & Settings folder was not expandable; At least not in an easy fashion.

Most users did not only save their documents, images and other files into this folder but also to other places on the hard disk. This could mean chaos as files were spread all over the hard drive without a way of accessing them in one place comfortably.

Windows 7 Libraries address that problem by allowing the user to add folders to his libraries so that all locations where the files are stored can be included in a library so that they all can be accessed from one central location.

The Windows Blog has published an extensive article about Windows 7 Libraries that is worth the read if you are new to the concept of libraries in Windows 7 or want to get a deeper understanding of the concept.

Sources: Windows 7