Hi. I'm *nix, and Windows 7 was my idea.

There's an old saying that the eyes are the windows of the soul. In this case, the windowing manager is the window of the OS's soul. After gazing longingly into the eyes of Unix and Linux's window managers, Microsoft has incorporated some fun eye-candy into it's latest operating system.

First up is the Aero Snap effect. This is Microsoft's implementation of tiling for Windows 7. Tiling is nothing new. It's merely resizing windows so that they can be displayed side by side, either vertically or horizontally. It is also possible to cascade windows, so that they are neatly stacked one ontop of another. Old school users will remember that PARC's Star (the GUI copied by Apple, which was copied by Microsoft) was the first tiling window manager. That was in 1980.

What Microsoft does is apply a little flair to the tiling.

Here's Microsoft's commercial:



And here's another demo:



You'll notice that the Windows have a slight 3d effect to them, and there's a nice transparency effect. The interface has been simplified a bit. It has been combined with keyboard shortcuts (windows key + left/right/up), as well as the use of screen edges. (More on screen edges later.) All in all, it's a nice update to an old feature. These features were in beta in 2008.

Now let's take a look at what Linux was doing in 2005 and 2006:



This video is from May of 2006. The user is showing off several Compiz features, including tiling and scaling.





Here's a more specific example. Seems a little familiar? Here, the user is demonstrating tiling in the Beryl compositing window manager. Beryl is a fork (an off-shoot) of the Compiz project started by Novell back in 2004. They released Compiz as an open-source project back in January 2006. Novell's spin on tiling included some transparency, some very nice 3D effects, customizable keyboard shortcuts, you get the picture.