You Looked.

I love Windows 7 and its awesome new taskbar. However, as intuitive as many of the things on this new taskbar appear, I think missing the feature of letting include separators between pinned items on the taskbar is a big oversight. It is quite obvious that to exploit the Windows 7 taskbar and its purposefulness, one must pin as many of their most commonly used applications onto it. However, what that leads to is a whole list of seemingly unorganized icons in your taskbar.

With this clutter, it is only natural for someone who likes an organized desktop (pun intended) to be able to categorize the things he lays on it. I, not being any different tried to do the same but only drew up a naught. There is no such feature in Windows 7.

Here is my take on what the taskbar could have looked like -

Note, how the browsers are now in a separate group, and also applications for common documents (eg. word documents, excel documents and PDFs) in a separate one. Photo editing applications earn their own special spot too. As you can clearly see, this helps remove the clunky look to an overpinned taskbar. Considering that Windows generally lets you separate toolbars on the desktop already, it appears to me that adding separators for pinned items would not have been a big ask.

Another extraordinary feature would have been the ability to categorize applications. Meaning, that even if you didn’t have an application pinned to the taskbar, you could categorize it to be associated with a specific section in the pinned items on the taskbar. Thus, even though it was not pinned there, whenever that application would have been opened, its icon would have popped up in that particular section of the pinned items where you categorized it. For example, let us say that my most commonly used applications are Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. Since, both these applications are used with documents in general, I pin them on the taskbar in their own section “Document Editing Suite” (separated from other sections by separators). Since I do not use Microsoft Excel as often, I would not like to pin it. However, for ease of access, I want that every time I do use this application, its icon shows up in the section “Document Editing Suite” and not at the very end of all my pinned items. For this, I categorize this application to that section, and next time when I use it I know where to look for this item in my otherwise cluttered taskbar.

This feature does have a small drawback though. It pushes the other pinned items further to the right, thus never “fixing” their location. This can lead to some confusion, although, I think a user survey might lead to an interesting contest between the present version and the proposed one. Leave your comments and let know how you feel about it!