While the good folks at ZDNet are still racing to catch-up, some others have been working with Windows 7 build 7048 for a while and have been posting more timely (and more accurate) accounts of the changes between it and earlier post-Beta builds. I've listed some changes myself, but David over at JCXP has sent along a bunch of additional stuff that should be of interest:
Brighter notification glow in the taskbar. It also doesn’t fade in and out slowly, but flashes.
New “missing image” graphic in IE (same link as above)
New Remote Desktop design and icon
Thanks David!
A few other notes from related articles on the Web. Ed Bott claims that "Aero Peek is now the official name" of that feature. That's been the official name since before PDC, and I wrote a Feature Focus article about Aero Peek back in early December 2008, over three months ago. (That said, Microsoft has changed the names of Scenes back to Themes and has changed PC Safeguard to Guest Mode, as noted above. These things do fluxuate.) Ed tells me that this build marks the first time the words Aero Peek have actually appeared in the UI, however. That could be, though I'm pretty sure "Peek at desktop" has been there a while.
ZD's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, who apparently blogs 24/7 ("Thoughts?") also points out a number of changes that actually occurred well before build 7048 (the Notepad and Control Panel icons, many others). No biggie, but if you've been reading along here you know about most of that already.
I should also mention that Windows 7 build 7048 is incredibly unstable. While it doesn't suffer from the weird file permission bugs of the past few builds I'd used, apps do seem to crash rather easily, especially Word. And when Word does crash, it takes the document you're editing with it. Yes, it literally deletes the document from your hard drive. Fortunately, each time it's happened--and it happens 2-3 times a day--the Word recovery feature brings back most if not all of the edited document. Still, it's a bit scary, and a heads-up that you use these ill-gotten builds at your own risk.
Update: I've seen similar instability with Windows Live Writer as well. It sometimes just hangs when you try to publish the post. You can recover the lost post in the C:\Users\[your user name]\Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts folder, thankfully, because it, too, disappears when the app crashes.
Update: I've reworded parts of this post so its not so snippy. That wasn't my intention. It's just that I'm very often asked about whatever Windows 7 feature, and when it's something I have in fact already covered--sometimes a long time ago--I'm curious why people think to ask me about it but don't know I already did it. The RSS feed's working, right? :)
