The GW Micro blog has been discontinued. For instant updates on GW Micro products and events, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.
Window-Eyes and Windows 7 XPM
by Aaron Smith on Friday, May 1 2009If you're not living under a technological rock, you've probably read about Windows 7's upcoming Virtual Windows XP environment (aptly named XPM) which allows you to install applications that only work under Windows XP while still running Windows 7. I sat down this afternoon to test Window-Eyes in the XPM environment. Not that I had any doubt, but it just works, and it's pretty cool. It's slow. Very slow. And that was on a machine that has quite a few horses under its belt. But even so, it's still fairly usable, much like connecting to a Citrix server and running a shared copy of Window-Eyes with a shared copy of some other application. After XPM was installed, and set up, I launched it, and it opened a desktop window, just like launching Virtual PC on its own. I then installed Window-Eyes, and Notepad++. Once you install an application in the VM, it shows up in the host's Start Menu, under Windows Virtual XP, Virtual XP Applications. There was a Window-Eyes folder, and a Notepad++ folder. I launched Window-Eyes Virtual from the host's start menu, and it came up talking. I then launched Notepad++ Virtual from the host's start menu, and it also came up, with Window-Eyes reading the text automatically. I was able to arrow around the editor area, and hear dialogs when they popped up. It all just worked, seamlessly. As I mentioned, things are slow, but this technology is still in beta, so I suspect some of that will get worked out. There are a couple of gotchas, too, like how you can't press Control-Backslash to get to the remote copy -- you have to Alt-Tab instead. But these kinds of caveats are the same when running Window-Eyes as a shared application under a Citrix session, so they're nothing new. I honestly can't imagine anyone using this unless they had no choice, but it's nice that Window-Eyes automatically supports the option.
