Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration 329
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."
makes no sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance in the movie industry... in a highly anticipated movie, let's say a book-to-movie one, you never hear about what they've LEFT OUT until the reviews start pouring in. OTOH, we hear "all about the great scene from the book that's also in the movie"... well before the reviews in the previews or buzz...
Or with Apple announcements we hear at best rumors about what will & won't be in it...
and then we hear from Microsoft a while back (forgive me for not recalling the article) that there won't be much external buzz about the contents of Windows 7 & that development will be much more "sealed" or "internal" for lack of better words...
so why the change of heart? Why are we hearing so much about what will & won't be there? There has to be more reason to this than to just generate some sort of overall interest via marketing in this respect, and I'm wondering beyond the typical answer "...because their last OS sucked ass" mainly because that answer doesn't really answer anything... any more insightful ideas?
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides touch tech has been going back to the 1980's it just is starting to become practical. personally there are a lot of interfaces that are perfect for touch input methods.
Telemarketing call centers, restaurants are already using it, retail POS, kiosks, etc.
multi-point touch is going to be a key third input method. the mouse and keyboard are the first two.
Re:makes no sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sound familiar?
Next they'll be telling us Windows 7 is delayed... (count on it)
Re:makes no sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slow (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow -- it looks like running a modern paint program on an old machine.
This is not going to make for a pleasant user experience. Why is that stuff so uncrisp?
Re:makes no sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Fact is most UIs are lousy. I don't think adding multi touch really qualifies as an improvement on its own, more like an improvement to input devices, but if it happens to carry along smarter use of screen space and improved ability to size on screen objects to optimum, etc etc, I'm all for it. I'd like to see some work go into something other than decoration.
I just don't see screen smudging being a deal breaker unless you're the type who eats a lot of gravy with your hands.
Re:And glass cleaner sales go through the roof... (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to be hard as nails as well. Is it actual glass?
The only thing I'm dreading is the day a grain of sand gets into my cleaning cloth--I do wipe pretty hard.
Also, what's with those cloths that Apple puts into the notebook/iPhones? Those things are absolutely perfect. I've never seen a better "Wiping Cloth". Use it all the time for my glasses, screens and phone. I think it's some kind of a fine-mesh, soft felt.
Since I got those, seriously, I have had no need to use liquid glass cleaner on my iphone, glasses or LCD screens. I did breathe on my iPhone once to get a drop of something off.
Re:Slow (Score:2, Interesting)
And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow
My guess is that this is deliberate and to do with the input method (touching).
When you use a mouse or trackball its obvious what you want, separate buttons for clicking and a ball for moving.
When you have a touch pad (laptop) or touch screen you have one input (your finger). A press and hold by your finger starts some input and if you move it then the mouse cursor moves. A quick tap and you get a click. Same for double clicks.
Touch pads are easier than touch screens and you have other issues with touch screens (size - longer distance affects capacitive charge etc). I suspect all these things combine with the UI ideas they are trying to result in longer than expected times to decide "they want a pie menu", "they want a something else" decision. If they go into production with this they'll probably smarten all that up.
Then you have the issue of the video itself. How representative is the video of the real speed of the machine, or is it clever/unintentional editing that has resulted in some things seeming fast and others slow?
I find my Dell Inspiron's touchpad very useful, but occasionally the software misunderstands what I intended. I imagine this touch screen stuff will be good for some apps and awful for others (telephones aren't very good for painting pictures :-).
Is this practical? (Score:3, Interesting)
It looks neat but I wonder how practical is a multi-touch screen unless you can fully replace either a keyboard or mouse with it. We've all seen the applications of touch interfaces in movies. But in those cases, they could have used a mouse and keyboard. It wasn't vital that it had to be touch technology.
In applications were touch is essential, they are most often very specialized. If you look at the touch-screen applications today, they are for areas where a keyboard and mouse are not practical and often the interfaces are simplified to allow fewer choices. For example in restaurants, waiter use them as registers. Everything is usually driven by a limited number of screen buttons that they can push. For the iPhone, the screen is customized around specific functions like making calls, etc. You could use them to write term papers, but it wouldn't be very practical.
It would seem that adding multi-touch to a screen was be extraneous. Sure you could do a few things , but it would be another input device that you have to manage. These days, people have to break work flow when they switch between a keyboard and a mouse by going sideways. If you'd replace the mouse with the screen, you'd have to move forward and possibly shift your body. I just don't see that as practical.
What Kind of Fund Manager (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Sure microsoft delivers above-average returns and that's enough reason for hanging onto it. But stock prices have some -future prospects- built into it. I see none at Microsoft. Zero. Especially when they flush dev resources down the drain for their forthcoming knock-off iPhones that probably won't see the light of day for a decade.
Off-topic
My gut feeling is, there's a growing reality distortion field that most of the people/groups managing funds are working in. If I had to guess, I'd say their math/quant models are wrong because these are a relatively new set of economic conditions. News disguised as PR fills this gap nicely and brings some sense of equilibrium back.
Meanwhile some hack on
Flame on!
Re:Pie menu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why is this modded flamebait? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:great (Score:3, Interesting)
More tech without design (Score:5, Interesting)
Draggable freely-resizeable photo viewer? Amazing, MS, welcome to 2006! Pinch-zoom map viewer? Again, good to see you MS engineers watched Han's TED presentation on Youtube; I liked it too!
So they can integrate a (laggy) version of the tech into the OS. Step 1, done.
Now, how about some actual design? Copying two-year-old TED videos doesn't count; let's see some insight into how this tech can be used to make managing files easier, make navigating data relationships easier, and so on. Seriously, fire half your UI "design" team and replace them with the folks who built Photosynth; maybe bring in some of the Zune embedded UI team too; they might figure out how to actually make a decent multi-touch UI for Windows 7.
Or will Ballmer be content to just have "OH LOOK PHOTO SORTING" on top of a slightly less stable and slightly more DRMed future Windows release?
If history is anything to go by...
Innovation Redefined (Score:2, Interesting)
MS is losing huge ground when it comes to "just works". The non computer savvy have come to accept that computers crash, behave erratically, or otherwise do flakey things on a whim due to the tremendous amount of glitchy nonsense that MS foists upon the user. OS X and even Linux are gaining some pretty significant traction while MS fuddles around in circles forcing upgrades into more garbage the user doesn't really want or need.
Though I suppose the other secret plan could be that fact that this type of feature crap continues to bloat the OS at an alarming rate requiring much faster and newer hardware just to make your computer usable. I think they are setting up to recieve kickbacks from hardware vendors on sales to make up for their other failures.
Re:Wonderful... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Correction (Score:1, Interesting)
Jim
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:4, Interesting)