Microsoft releases Windows 7 Touch Pack to the general public – free for download.
The Touch Pack includes: Microsoft Blackboard, an intricate game of physics in which you solve a puzzle by creating a fanciful machine on a blackboard.
Microsoft Garden Pond, a tranquil game that takes place in serene Japanese water gardens.
Microsoft Rebound, a game in which you use your fingertips to control Tesla spheres with an electrical field between them to catapult a metal game ball into your opponent’s goal.
Microsoft Surface Globe, a program that you can use to explore the earth as a flat 2-D map or as an immersive 3-D experience.
Microsoft Surface Collage, a program that you can use to explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background.
Microsoft Surface Lagoon, a screen saver and interactive water simulation, complete with a meditative rock arrangement and playful, shy fish.
Windows 7 has been well received both critically and on the street. And while Lifehacker readers love Windows 7, a well-built OS isn’t a perfect OS. Check out these five applications that tweak Windows 7 and customize it to your heart’s content.
A stock Windows 7 installation a fairly pleasant place to work, judging from our readers’ reports. Even so, a little tweaking of its behavior, looks, and other features lets you optimize and personalize that desktop. Check out these five great tools for doing so.
The “God Mode” in Windows 7 isn’t quite like a video game God Mode—alas, no infinite laptop battery life or unlimited bandwidth—but it is a pretty nifty hack, and doesn’t require any new installations. Create a new folder on your Windows desktop, save it with the name God-Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, though you can substitute whatever name you want for “God-Mode.” The folder will change icons, and when you click on it, you’ll see every configuration option available in the control panel. That’s the real power of the Windows 7 God Mode—it takes all the toggles you have to dig through the control panel menus and sub-menus to get to, and puts them right in one master list. It’s worth trying out God Mode just to see settings you may not have even been aware of.
The Windows registry is a treasure trove of tweak-friendly variables and values. You shouldn’t muck around in it blindly, but by reading up on specific variables, you can tweak all manner of things that slightly irk you. Stroll through #registry here at Lifehacker to read up on all sorts of neat tricks, like how to speed up the Windows 7 taskbar, customize the login buttons, and tweak Aero peek . While you’re learning about the registry, you’ll want to check out our guide to the registry and registry cleaning. If you’re not comfortable directly editing your Windows registry, we’d advise you to check out some of the other Windows tweaking applications in the Hive Five. Many of the settings they provide are just a neat graphic interface for the variables hidden in the bowels of the registry.
Windows 7 Manager doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with various pieces of freeware or registry tweaks, but it does roll together dozens of functions into a unified, simplified interface. Not only can you tweak the GUI of Windows 7 but you can also tweak your boot routines, find duplicate files, securely erase files, retrieve and backup software keys, and more. Windows 7 Manager comes with a 15 day trial, so you can pit it against the free options in today’s Hive before shelling out your hard-earned cash.
Rainmeter is a skinning application for Windows, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. You can do nearly anything with data using Rainmeter, from embedding the weather into your desktop to massaging the entire way you interact with your OS into something new. The best testament to the versatility and outright coolness of Rainmeter is wandering through the#rainmeter tag here at Lifehacker, and checking out all the unique desktops and tweaks readers have shared with us—also worth a peek is the best desktops of 2009, many of them featuring Rainmeter. If you look at your Windows desktop and go beyond thinking, “I wish the taskbar had different spacing,” and more toward, “I wish my Windows interface looked like something totally new and Star Trek-flavored,” then Rainmeter is for you.
For those of you that remember and loved the TweakUI utility from Microsoft, Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware tool that takes the concept of the old TweakUI and supercharges it for Windows Vista and 7. You can tweak hundreds of settings and variables—system tray icons, the menu pop-up speed, security settings for the control panel, and a lot of other things you can’t normally get to. It’s a 380 KB, stand-alone portable application, so if you’re curious to see just how many things you can tweak, it’s no hassle at all to take it for a spin.
Opera Software today released Opera 10.50, which it touts as “the fastest Web browser thus-far produced for Windows computers” (which, in turn, calls for a comprehensive speed test – anyone?). The desktop browser has also been given a completely new design, adopting some of the style elements Google Chrome users will be familiar with.
Additionally, Opera 10.50 comes with a private browsing feature that enables people to browse for porn surprise gifts for their partners without leaving any traces.
The desktop browser, which is free to use, lands on Windows at a time when Microsoft has just rolling out its ballot screen for European users of the OS, presenting them with a choice in browsers (supposedly random, but not in reality, as we pointed out last week).
The Norwegian software maker calls Opera 10.50 the fastest browser they’ve ever produced, courtesy of a brand new JavaScript engine (Carakan) and a graphics library (Vega). The browser is also said to include improved standards support for HTML5 and CSS3.
For Windows 7 and Vista users, there are some more goodies: Opera now fully supports Aero Glass, Aero Peek and Jump Lists. You can easily access your Speed Dials, tabs and more from the Taskbar.
Opera 10.50 is available for Windows in 42 different languages – Mac and Linux versions are “coming soon”.
Remember that polarizing Windows 7 Activation Technologies Update we told you about? You know, the one that helps you to “verify that the copy of Windows 7 that is running on your computer is activated correctly and is genuine?” It’s available for download now through Windows Update, and it’s not particularly easy to spot. The main label simply says “Update for Windows 7,” though we’d be sure to avoid KB971033 if you weren’t up for having this thing looking into your business. Your call, though.
I just returned from the Microsoft campus (well, I stopped for a panini), where students from Carnegie Mellon University are showing off their awesome project, a version of D&D that runs on the Surface. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, just recognize that this isn’t just a holy grail for tabletop gaming nerds. I mean, it’s that too, but really it’s a proof of concept that shows how fun and intuitive something like this can be, and how accessible a team can make it. I honestly think that if they had these things scattered around like Golden Tee cabinets, they’d get a huge following.
The build we played with was last semester’s (it’s a student project, not a professional development), and since then there’s been a lot of bug-squashing and feature-adding, but the newest build isn’t playable. So they’ve got a short little scenario where we went from a zoomable map screen to a town where we… spotted some orcs! Roll for initiative!
They’ve really taken advantage of the Surface’s ability to recognize the little tags, and your “control” token lets you place your inventory, actions, and so on wherever is convenient. The game keeps track of your guy even if, say, you spill a drink and have to move him and clean up. There’s actually a whole dungeon-master backend on a separate screen that can be manipulated in real time, adding or subtracting monsters, guiding the characters, and so on.
Combat was straightforward, and they noted that a lot of that is being beefed up in the new version. Lots more moves, better dice, and so on. Of course there’s work to be done, but it seems really promising, and remember this is a project put together by a handful of students. They have some stated goals, but with some of the students graduating, the future of the project is uncertain (but not dire). I’m guessing Wizards of the Coast is going to pay through the nose for it — I’m sure they see what it could be with a budget and an extra couple devs working on it.
Now the take-away point here isn’t really “wow, you can play D&D on a touchscreen!” No — that’s very cool, but the point is that this kind of collaborative, intuitive gaming is something I can easily see in bars, lounges, and even schools all over the place. It doesn’t have to be D&D, though the game does lend itself to the medium well. The Surface lends itself to social activities around a table, and you could even connect multiple Surfaces over the net. This game is really just one of the first robust apps to take advantage of this in a cool, nerdy way, and I’m really looking forward to seeing more stuff like this.
Unfortunately, the cost (and bulk) of Surface units kind of limits the places to which they can be deployed. We know they’re going to have a cheaper, flatter version at some point, and it might be hard for something like this to hit critical mass before that happens.
The CMU Surface D&D will be at GDC and PAX East, if you’re dying to check it out.
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Osiris Development, maker of BatteryBar, probably the best battery app for your notebook / netbook (which I intro’d in May last year), has a special one year anniversary offer.
You can pay the price you want to for a full upgrade to the Pro version. Pricing ranges from $1 – $10 though you’d be better off paying $6 – $10 and getting a lifetime license if you find the app useful.
