This post discusses some of the platform innovations in Windows 7 (download link) and how Windows 7 applications have adopted and showcased these innovations, and is  organized by each subsystem, and how Windows applets are using that particular subsystem.

• The Windows Ribbon User Interface is the next generation rich, new user interface for Windows development that brings the now familiar Office 2007 Ribbon user interface to Windows 7.
• Multi-touch platform: Windows 7 provides support for multi-touch input data, as well as supporting multi-touch in Win32 via Windows messages.
• Taskbar: Sticky Notes (or just Notes) is an extension of a TabletPC applet available in Windows 7. One of the things which was key to the Notes experience on the desktop was to have the ability to quickly take all the notes away and get them back, but still making sure it is really easy to create a new note. Taskbar also caches the preview thumbnail images so once the preview is given to the Taskbar, the application does not need to keep it around – the application does however need to send an updated preview whenever it changes.

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