In the past I’ve made references to the fabled “Task Bar”—it’s another one of those things that been around since Windows 95, but most folks don’t give it a second glance. It’s just there, and most of the time it does its job quietly in the background. So let’s take a closer look at the Task Bar and what it can do for you.
As with most core controls like scroll bars, window frames and such, the look of the Task Bar has changed over the years, but the components are for the most part the same. Consider the next images. All three current versions of Windows have the same root elements.
Pictured above are taskbars for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Perhaps the most radical change has come with Windows 7.
On the left end is the “Start Button” with the Windows logo (in Windows XP it also features the word “start”). Clicking this brings up the “Start Menu” and similarly dismisses the menu on a second click. This is the same behavior we saw previously by pressing the WinKey. It’s just another one of those wonderful redundancies built into Windows that means we don’t have to hit the keyboard if mousing or vice-versa.
Where Do Tasks Live?
On the far right is the “Task Notification Area” (also known as the “System Tray” or simply “the Tray”). The Task Notification Area typically contains the clock, an icon for the speaker volume, as well as optional icons representing your battery status or wireless Internet connection signal strength, etc. In a perfect world, the Task Notification Area is used by programs that don’t need a window to run. A perfect example is the system speaker volume icon: it is running from the time you boot up Windows until you shut the computer down, and when clicked provides a simple interface to change the volume.
Sadly some programmers have misused the Task Notification Area, resulting in very crowded and overpopulated conditions down in that corner. But fortunately in Windows XP we gained the ability to hide unused icons while still having them just a click away. We’ll cover how to do this in a future tip, so if you’ve got a dozen or so icons in your Tray, patience will be a virtue.
Finally, the Task Bar
The area between the Start Button and the Task Notification is the Task Bar proper. When you have a window open, there is generally an icon representing that window on the Task Bar. Remember in our discussion of window size that you can minimize, maximize, restore or close by right-clicking an icon on the Task Bar. Some dialog windows and other windows don’t have Task Bar icons, but they’re usually not around long enough to worry about. Below the three versions of Windows with Windows Notepad (a small text editing program) and two “instances” or open windows running Internet Explorer 8. Note that because Notepad is currently the active application, its Task Bar icon representation is different.
In Windows XP the icon for the “active application”–that is, the window you are currently interacting with—is darker than the other application icons. In Windows Vista the current application’s Task Bar icon shows up as solid black against the other icons that are more transparent. Windows 7 again has the most significant change in that it has grouped the two Internet Explorer icons into a single icon with a second “shadow” behind it. Hovering over that icon pops up a peek at the two windows and allows you to select the one you want.
This “grouping” feature I’ve described in Windows 7 has been around since Windows XP. To see it for yourself, in Windows XP or Windows Vista, open as many Windows Explorer windows (remember the WinKey + E trick) as you need to until you see them collapse into an icon indicating how many windows are collapsed. Clicking on the icon brings up a list of the windows by name (in Windows Vista and Windows 7, hovering over an application icon displays a snapshot of the contents of each window). We can control this feature by customizing the Task Bar options, but we’ll save those details for a later column.
Coming Attractions: Quick Launch
I’ve teased many times about the Quick Launch toolbar and how it is coming more front and center as to how we interact with the Task Bar. Suffice it to say this is a tip or more by itself, but in case your computer has the Quick Launch toolbar option enabled, I’ll discuss it very briefly. We’ll take a deep breath and go into much more detail on the Quick Launch toolbar in a future tip.
In a nutshell, the Quick Launch toolbar is a container for “shortcuts” that you might want to have always available for fast and easy access. When enabled, the Quick Launch toolbar is usually docked just to the right of the Start button. If you add your most often used applications here, they are readily available. Also, as we learned in Tip 3, in Windows Vista you can launch a Quick Launch shortcut by pressing WinKey + # where “#” is a number from 1 to 9 based on the order in the Quick Launch toolbar. This becomes even more compelling in Windows 7 where the line between the Task Bar and the Quick Launch toolbar is even more blurred.
So just consider that I’m trying to give you a little advance notice of more new Windows-ey goodness coming soon to a computer near you when Windows 7 becomes available.
Next time, we’ll look a little more into the mouse, cursors and pointers. See you then!
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