Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration

Starturtle writes "Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7 at Walt Mossberg's D: All Things Digital conference. It seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it's the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu."

Alias/Wavefront the patent holder?

[Krishnoid]

I thought A/W was the patent-holder for 'Marking Menus' (at least it was in the 1990s).

OLPC pie menu?

[feranick]

The XO has exactly the same type of pie menu to switch from one application to another. Nothing new.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Drivers

[dgatwood]

I'm losing my chance to moderate so I can reply to this. Yes, it is an OS feature. Simple gesture support for devices is easy to do in a driver, but is nowhere near what you really want out of multitouch. An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet.

To handle such things, the application must be able to simultaneously get multiple touch events at different locations that indicate that a finger has gone down at a particular spot and now is moving in a particular manner. These finger events must then remain individually trackable. To handle this correctly requires significant extensions to the event system of the host OS, probably on an opt-in basis to avoid confusing applications that only support simple events like click/drag or lightweight touch events like zoom in/zoom out. Therefore, it pretty much has to be an OS feature.

The only way I can think of to do this without OS changes would be to allow an application to capture the device and take exclusive control and communicate with it directly outside of normal OS channels (e.g. a user client). Those sorts of designs are okay for specialized devices like tablets that only one or two apps will ever care about, but they are hardly ideal for input devices that are intended to be general purpose.

Re:Wonderful...

[sm62704]

Ever play Megatouch?

They're in all the bars. Small one piece computers loaded with games, no keyboards. Older ones have CRTs, newer ones have flat screens. A very few have joysticks, most don't. The only input devices are a coin slot, a dollar bill slot, and a touch screen. Despite the fact that dozens of people a day have their hands all over the screen (since that's the only way to play them), they in fact don't have fingerprints on them.

BTW, they run Linux as their OS, as I saw one day when a bartender accidentally unplugged one.

I wonder if "megatouch" is where they git the "multitouch" name. It's the same thing, only Windows instead of Linux.

Gorilla Arm?

[burning-toast]

It hardly sounds logical to insist that keyboards and mice will be replaced with touch screens which are doubling as your display.

Unless you expect to put your screen in your lap and cramp your neck looking down, or separate the display from the touch surface, this will not replace keyboard and mouse interactivity entirely.

There is a problem in that human arms are not designed to be held away from the body for extended time periods. Keyboards work well simply because you can comfortably hold your arms in that position for extended periods while looking ahead instead of down (and if it's in your lap and the screen is straight ahead, what good is a touch screen if you aren't looking at it?)

See Gorilla Arm: http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/gorilla-arm [hacker-dictionary.com]

Try this to see the effect:
Hold your preferred arm in front of your body and point with only your index finger away from your chest. Now draw small figure-eights and make a pushing motion like you are using an ATM. Now do this for multiple hours. Yeah, didn't think so.

I only see this being viable as an additional option useful for some applications like CAD or 3d Modeling work, but not as a primary navigation tool for my OS or ESPECIALLY web browser. I really don't feel the necessity to fake turning pages with my entire arm while reading document on my computer.

- Toast

I used to work like that...

[mario_grgic]

but since I switched to mac, I now use spotlight to do everything, from switching context between apps to launching apps to finding documents to open. Typing 3 letters is usually enough to do all of this and is infinitely faster than moving your hand to the mouse, navigating the mouse and clicking on some area.

I would say spotlight is bringing back the power of CLI to the GUI world (well almost).

CLI is still the fastest way to work and will always be, until computers become part of our brains.

Re:Why is this modded flamebait?

[Knara]

Dunno how this is a ruse, per se. Doing press bits and what not in order to influence people to value a stock in a certain way isn't particularly dishonest. There's no real requirement for MS to say, "This is exactly the feature set that will be in our new product over a year from now!"

Re:Nothing interesting here...

[nine-times]

Multi-touch isn't going to help me do my job any easier and I really don't want users pinching and dragging their dirty mits around the new LCD monitors...

Well certainly not anything in their multi-touch demo. A touch-screen piano on a laptop screen-- I doubt anyone who knows how to play a piano will find this is be a worthwhile solution.

The thing is, I'm sure multi-touch is a good practical solution for many things. And for many other things, it's a gimmick. What I wonder about this presentation is, am I supposed to be impressed? We've seen tech demos of this technology for over a year now, and we know you can use it to rotate and scale pictures. I've been scaling pictures and maps on my iPhone for a year now, and it's only worth mentioning there because it's a good solution for a device that has no keyboard or mouse.

But for general computing, it's not that useful to be able to arrange random photos on my desktop and set them at various sizes and rotate them to various degrees. That's a cool tech demo from a year ago, but in itself not a useful interface for anything. It reminds me of Active Desktop from years ago, or a little animated paper clip that answers your questions. It may be cute, but it's awful interface design.

The question for Microsoft/Apple is, can you create sensible interface conventions from this technology that will actually be of any use? If this demo is Microsoft's answer, then I guess their answer is "no".

Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents

[GeffDE]

I didn't watch the video, but, at least on iPhone, a pinch does zoom out while a reverse pinch (start with your fingers touching and spread) zooms in. I don't know if Microsoft got it backwards...maybe that's how their getting around Apple's patents: by making everything completely unintuitive.

Nothing new.. Linux can do this for 2 years

[miknix]

Microsoft is always late.. And when they finally made it, they act like they were the first. ROFTL

Linux (and not only) supports multi-input on X for at least two years. You can run whatever multitouch device you want with it.

Check out the multi-input X project website at http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/ [unisa.edu.au]

Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents

[Tom]

I want to see a touchscreen "panel" or "keyboard" or "control pad" - not this.

Google for "TouchStream" - they created a multitouch keyboard five or six years ago, if I remember correctly. I own one, great technology especially for that time. They went bancrupt because it was too early (and the stuff was too expensive for a mass market). Make a guess who bought them up?

That's right, Apple.

Re:Pie menu?

[Timothy Chu]

More direct link to piewm since the parent's post ends up in a DNS error: http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/ [crynwr.com]

I saw this interface probably 11 years ago in university. It was clean and quick. Logitech's implementation was slow and heavy (the ui widgets were huge), and didn't sync up with the Start menu, and I didn't miss it when I uninstalled that.

Re:Innovation Redefined

[Super_Z]

Bullshit. Microsoft demoed Surface with multi-touch long before the iPhone came out.

Multitouch was demonstrated [google.com] around 1992. By Xerox.

Re:Slow

[I'm Don Giovanni]

The computer in the demo is the Dell Latitude XT, which is a decent business tablet PC, but is one of the slowest Tablet PCs on the market. It uses either an Intel Solo 1.06GHz CPU or an Intel Core Duo 1.2GHz CPU. Like I said, it's all right for business uses (i.e. no multimedia/games/etc), but doesn't compare to home tablet PCs when it comes to power. In fact, at Dell's site, the Latitude XT is listed in the "business laptops" section, not the more powerful "home laptops" section.