Regionalized Themes in Windows 7

posted on December 6, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan

Build 6956 was leaked to the public yesterday in the form of a virtual hard drive. Those who got it running probably didn’t take the time to dig deep, but our own Michael Frank took a look inside the build to see what he could find.

Right on par with some of the changes I mentioned would be coming to Windows 7, regional themes are now an option for different countries. It’s expected that more will be added as time goes on, but the five English-speaking countries currently ~~stereotyped~~ themed in build 6956+ are:

Australia
Canada
South Africa
United Kingdom
United States

The themes are nothing more than color and wallpaper combinations for now. I’m assuming that the appropriate theme will be chosen depending on the location of the person installing Windows 7, but that has yet to be seen.

Beta 1 is currently in escrow, so any other remaining hidden features should also be visible by the time Beta 1 rolls around on January 13th at the MSDN Developer Conferences*. We should have more information for you guys regarding these themes down the road, but for now, feel free to check out screenshots of the five country-specific themes below:

*if any of you are attending the MSDN DevCon in Washington D.C., I’ll gladly meet up with you at the event! Just drop me a PM on the forums in advance to arrange a meeting place.

Tags: Personalized Computing for Everyone, Screenshots, UnsureIfAwesome, Windows, Windows 7

13 Comments »

The Five Pillars of Windows 7 (part 3 of 5)

posted on April 4, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan

This posting is provided “as is” with no warranties, and confers no rights. All of the information herein could easily be right, wrong, up, down, in, out, backwards, forwards, heavily dated, or totally false. You can interpret it as you wish, or not interpret it at all. Also, in case you haven’t figured it out, all of this is non-static and heavily subject to change.

So far, we’ve discussed the Specialized for Laptops and Designed for Services pillars of Windows 7. The common thread between these two focuses on connectivity and utilization of online resources. The third pillar, unsurprisingly, shares the same common link with the other two pillars.

Part Three of my series on the Five Pillars of Windows 7 will expand on some of the elements of the Designed for Services pillar with Microsoft’s plan for personalization and access. Given how susceptible the User Interface of an application or operating system is to change, this pillar could see the largest shift in scope over the coming years, so don’t be terribly surprised if the information in this pillar sees the most change out of all of them.

Comments are appreciated. You can catch pillar three after the jump.
Read More »

Tags: Personalized Computing for Everyone, Screenshots, Windows, Windows 7

1 Comment »