The next version of the Windows operating system is now available to trial from http://www.microsoft.com/windows-7. I have been using this on my laptop since Jan 2009 and am now using the final test release before this product is released to market some time late 2009.
I also have been running Zionworx on the laptop as a test. The PC at our church still runs Windows XP and is not good enough for an upgrade to Vista - but might be good enough for a Windows 7 upgrade, as the hardware requirements for Windows 7 are less than Vista!
I also used Zionworx 2.6 on Windows 7 live during our church weekend recently, as we used my laptop and not the church PC as we were not at the church.
So how did it fair, and what do you need to watch out for and does Zionworx need upgrading to work with Windows 7.
Well, as Windows 7 is very similar in its internal architecture to Vista, Zionworx's operates with just two issues that I have found, as the developers have produced updates on the product to work on both XP and Vista.
The first issue is to do with a new user interface feature of Windows 7 that fades out all applications apart from the one you are trying to locate if you hover your mouse over the taskbar icon or do an ALT+TAB key sequence. Hover your mouse for a few seconds or do not release the keys during ALT+TAB and all the applications fade to a border only, and only the application window you have hovered over is present. The problem here from the Zionworx viewpoint is that this series of steps fades out the presentation screen too. So move (maybe accidently) the mouse over the application view on the taskbar or spend too long doing an ALT+TAB and the presentation screen vanishes to be replaced by the desktop. I'm not sure if this feature of the UI can be turned off.
The second issue is with a feature called Aero Peek, which can be turned off. If your mouse goes to the bottom right of the taskbar then all windows fade out to the background. Aero Peek can be turned off in the Taskbar properties, and it might be possible to turn it off programitically during the running of Zionworx, just like the screensaver can be turned off. I can imaging the case where a mouse drifts across the screen (as they can do if dirty) and ends up in the middle of a service touching the bottom right of the left hand screen and all of a sudden the entire view disappears.
For completion on my report of issues found so far, Windows 7 Business, Enterprise and Ultimate will also support a feature called XP Mode. XP Mode runs applications in a virtual copy of Windows XP on the machine, but they appear to run on the desktop like any other application - its a cool feature that makes Windows 7 almost 100% compatible with Windows XP before the product is even released. Zionworx operates fine in Windows 7 as it operates in Windows Vista and so there is no need to run it in XP Mode. But if you do it does not work. XP Mode sees the two monitors as a single display and shows the presentation screen on the entire desktop (not just the projector) and the management screen on the projector screen. So don't attempt to run Zionworx in XP Mode even though it is a program that runs on XP. Older versions of Zionworx that do not work on Vista will also exhibit the same issues in XP Mode.