How Windows 7 Makes The Designer’s Life Easier
Windows 7 has many new features, and a number of them make digital design and Web work a lot easier. Whether you are developing static sites, sites to host presentations for your company or a commercial Web offering, the presentation and production tools now incorporated into Windows 7 will help you tremendously. Migraine Headache Information . In no particular order, here are some features you should check out.
Windows Mobility Center: Through the uncluttered Mobility Center interface, you can control presentations when you want to run your ideas by your team or even your clients. It could be a PowerPoint presentation or a slideshow, but whatever it is you can present it without embarrassing interruptions or lengthy setup time. Simply set your PC to Presentation Mode (press the Windows logo key plus X) to open Windows Mobility Center. You can control display parameters, adjust volume, disable screensavers, hide or camouflage the desktop wallpaper to neutral tones and bar interruptions from your Instant Messaging (IM) client.
Text tuning, color calibration: For plasma screens and LCD monitors, you now have two great, simple tools to manage color and readability. After setting external displays to their default settings, you can use these Windows 7 tools to adjust them to your liking. The ClearType Text Tuner, located in the Control Pane (or enter cttune.exe in a command line) will display optional views of type from which you can choose. There is also a Color Calibration tool in the Control Panel (dccw.exe for command line) that will guide you through a set of adjustments to brightness, contrast, gamma settings and color to optimize your display.
PowerShell v2: For advanced users, the Windows PowerShell offers a command-line interface and scripting tools for making cmdlets, small applications that perform single tasks. You can also write scripts that comprise a number of different cmdlets and run more complicated, multiple-step tasks.
Action Center: The new one-stop-shop metaphor centralizes device management tasks, and helps you deal with troubleshooting, maintenance and security issues. The Control Panel applet called Action Center gives you enhanced flexibility for dealing with settings, alert messages and notifications. You can now turn many of the bothersome notifications off so you do not keep closing message boxes while you are trying to meet a deadline.
Credential Manager: Similar in some ways to Vista’s password manager, the Windows 7 Credential Manager is way more powerful. All of your passwords and certificates are taken care of, for all computers you use regularly, all your e-mail accounts, Web sites, memberships, etc. This is very handy to have when you are dong demonstrations and presenting Web site mock-ups at password protected locations. The Credential Manager keeps all the passwords and certificates in one, centralized place (by default it’s the Windows Vault) but can also be used to back up and restore the Vault itself. You should also back up another copy to removable storage or an external drive (flash memory, network drive, even a DVD) so you are able to restore the Vault after hardware or software crashes. The alternative, reentering all of the passwords and certificates (assuming you even have a comprehensive and updated list), is absolutely scary to imagine. This is a production artist’s best friend if there ever was one.
A better backup: Previous versions of Windows had decent backup tools, but the backup routines have been tremendously improved for Windows 7. How To Install WordPress Theme . Vista’s backup utility was rated well for user friendliness but not flexibility, while the Windows 7 iteration gives you much more control over what you are doing, from choice of destinations to scheduling, choosing folders and directories, managing the CPU resources wisely and being wonderfully transparent.
Full speed ahead
There are other improvements to Windows 7 that aid in general computing, not that artists and production personnel will not enjoy them tremendously in their own workflows. The upgraded window management, the “snap to screen edge” cleanup feature and other advances may save only a few seconds or keystrokes each (and each time), but add up the savings over a day and you have a goodly number of extra minutes to do productive work, not manage your workstation. This is the trend for the modern operating system (OS), to be unobtrusive and take care of the background details in, well, the background!
Macintosh users and Linux lovers have their own potent OS, too, and beauty (plus effectiveness) is in the eye of the beholder and the hand of the mouse-holder, so to speak. All the modern systems are trending toward more efficiency and less hassle, and Windows 7 is the one millions choose for their own. It is worth watching the development of them all, however, since many artists use two or all three of them!
About the Author: Moonrise Productions is a web design company specializing in both custom web development and design. Whether you need social network web design or mobile web development, contact us and we’ll get it done right!
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