Color, a Microsoft design team discovered with the aid of a focus group, is quintessential to a positive user experience. In advising developers to add delight to their apps, a team leader made a revelation about Windows 7's mission.

LOS ANGELES - During a mid-day session on best practices for designing applications to take advantage of Windows 7, Microsoft's principal design manager Samuel Moreau told attendees that his team was charged with the task of building new visual elements into the new user interface specifically to make users feel better about the operating system.

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Finally following through on a partnership that was announced over four years ago, Netflix subscribers will soon be able to stream movies directly to their TiVo DVR.

A limited beta test has begun where TiVo users can browse more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes available through Netflix's "Instant Watching" service, where it streams video over the Web instead of mailing a DVD. The companies expect to expand the capability to all TiVo users by early December.

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Will users feel better about Windows 7 when they have the option of turning off one of Vista's least understood features? Or will they instead make the attempt to understand it? That's the problem which Microsoft's Mike Nash is now facing.

LOS ANGELES - Since the original RTM version of Windows Vista, a Registry-based switch has existed for changing the running state of User Account Control -- the feature that stops processes from performing tasks that haven't been launched by human users. So even today, it's feasible, albeit not easy, to turn up the volume and have UAC prompt for passwords (as was originally planned in the early betas), or turn it off.

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It's six days until the American elections. Do you know whether your electronic voting machines are behaving?

The overwhelming majority of voters on Tuesday will encounter machines from Premier Election Systems, Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, or Election Systems and Software (ES&S). For your consideration, we present a roundup of problems currently known to be manifesting or to have recently manifested in testing and early voting, sorted by vendor.

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Yesterday we asked you to tell us what you wanted to know about Windows 7. We posed many of these questions to Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Product Management. Read on for the answers.

Note: Not all of the questions were answered, so we will post a follow-up later this week with more details on icons, SSD drives, security, file copy speed, Aero and more.

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Although much better known in the US for its Eee MID device and its motherboards, Asus also builds phones, including the first dedicated Skype device. Now the Taiwanese manufacturer reportedly plans to follow the footsteps of G1-maker HTC.

Asus plans to launch its Android phone during the first half of next year, possibly selling it under its own brand in the Taiwan first before rolling out custom editions for overseas customers, says an account today in the English-language Taiwan industry publication DigiTimes, which cites unnamed sources at Asus.

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At PDC 2008, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 7 and showcased its new dock-like Taskbar. But the revamped Taskbar isn't in the pre-beta build distributed to attendees, so we went hunting for more details on Windows 7's most prominent new feature.

First up, Quick Launch is officially dead. Microsoft will be leaving the Quick Launch folder in Windows 7 for backwards compatibility, but any shortcuts stored there will never show up. Deskbands (like an address bar in the Taskbar) still exist in Windows 7, but must also support rendering on the transparent Glass UI.

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A discount-priced G1 phone, slated for availability today in Wal-Mart stores, has now been pushed back to about November 3 by a shipping delay, BetaNews has learned.

Wal-Mart does plan to sell T-Mobile's Android-enabled G1 at a discounted price -- but starting on about November 3, instead of October 29, as originally expected, a spokesperson for the retailer told BetaNews today.

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A Facebook worm wending its way through the address books of unwary users is gaining trust by pointing to two equally trusted sites, researchers warned on Wednesday.

The worm aims to trick the unwary into installing malware on their own systems. That malware is disguised as a new ActiveX video codec.

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