Windows 7 Touch, Dead On Arrival 352
snydeq writes "Ongoing Microsoft hype around its Surface touch technology has suggested that, with Windows 7, a touch-based UI revolution is brewing. Unfortunately, the realities of touch use in the desktop environment and the lack of worthwhile development around the technology are conspiring against the notion of touch ever finding a meaningful place on the desktop, as InfoWorld's Galen Gruman finds out reviewing Windows 7's touch capabilities. 'There's a chicken-and-egg issue to resolve,' Gruman writes. 'Few apps cry out for a touch UI, so Microsoft and Apple can continue to get away with merely dabbling with touch as an occasional mouse-based substitute. It would take one or both of these OS makers to truly touchify their platforms, using common components to pull touch into a great number of apps automatically. Without a clear demand, their incentive to do so doesn't exist.'"
kinda like... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's just useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Touch and multitouch have been around for decades; the reason people aren't using them is because they simply aren't all that useful, outside maybe consumer phones and systems like ATMs. It's the same with 3D movies and interfaces; like flu epidemics, these dead ideas keep coming back every decade-and-a-half.
Not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
That should make the greasy fingerprints and nasty case of aching gorilla arm entirely worthwhile.
Re:Desktop multitouch: a tool looking for a purpos (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah thats right. It takes very little energy to use a mouse. Very small hand gestures can make big things happen on the screen. Imagine how tired your arm would get if you had to touch the screen all day to make anything happen. Even if the screen was closer to you, possibly lying flat on the desk, it would still be harder.
Re:Desktop multitouch: a tool looking for a purpos (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah no.
Touch is great for fairly narrow types of usage. Industrial machine interfaces for one. I'd like to see OSs integrate some touch functionailty, or at least make it possible to set the thing up to be touch friendly, just to get the improvements for those narrow uses. As it is HMI packages usually look and work like cobbled together shit and you end up having to keep a keyboard in a desk drawer somewhere even if you don't want one. Or even if you manage to put together a truly touch only HMI you still need a keyboard to deal with the inevitable OS crash, since most HMI packages are Windows only.
But yeah, for general computing, desktop touch is a novelty.
Microsoft Over-promises and Under-delivers (Score:5, Insightful)
We have been learning this lesson for years now. Does anyone recall the long list of features that never made it into Vista and what a useless pile Vista ended up as?
Let's just agree that it doesn't exist until Microsoft actually releases it -- until then, everything Microsoft says should be taken with a grain of vaporware salt.
Re:I actually like this idea (Score:5, Insightful)
On the computer I'm typing this on, I'm looking at a 20 inch panel, 1680x1050, at approximately arm's length from my face. If I were using a touch interface, the worst case delay between interacting with two points on the screen would be the time it takes to move my hand the full 20 inches. With the mouse, the same corner to corner motion occupies more like 4 or 5 inches(on your basic cheap OEM optical, nothing fancy). I can move my hand at roughly the same speed in either case so, while the touch sounds simpler, it is actually a fair bit slower.
For small devices, where the entire screen is at your fingertips, touch is acceptably fast; but the bigger the screen gets, the worse it becomes compared to an ordinary optical mouse, in addition to the usual disadvantages of blocking part of the screen and leaving fingerprints.
Re:Desktop multitouch: a tool looking for a purpos (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a lot less of an effort to use a mouse than it is to use a touchscreen.
Sign your name with a stylus on a touch screen. Now try to do the same thing with a mouse. You can see why some graphic artists like tablets.
Music software (Score:2, Insightful)
A tablet with multi touch would be the best platform for making music ever.
Exercise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft Afraid of Pioneering Boo (Score:3, Insightful)
When Java adds something as simple as anonymous functions, I'll concede your point.
And no, I'm not an MS fan. I like Ruby. But I think you're crazy if you don't at least see how a lambda closure -- especially a dirt simple lambda closure, in a tiny bit of syntax instead of a class and a half -- is not at all like Java.
Apple doesn't like to meet existing demand (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft Afraid of Pioneering Boo (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPod was a 20-year-later elaboration of the Sony Walkman.
*facepalm*
You know, there used to be this thing called an mp3 player, and later a portable music player. They're still around, but as soon as the iPod got popular, these other things like the Rio and the Nomad were suddenly seen as "iPod clones", even when they predated the iPod.
The innovation of the iPod was making it simple enough for everyone to use, not inventing the thing itself. The innovation of the Walkman was making it portable in the first place.
Re:kinda like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows Seven is just not ready for the touchtop ...
Re:Microsoft Afraid of Pioneering Boo (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that is wanted by the community will likely find its way in.
Unless the community gets bored and moves on to languages like Scala, Clojure, Ruby, etc, which already have what they want.
You see, the Java world runs like a Democracy. People don't like Swing and eventually there's SWT.
And this is different than anything except Delphi, how?
In the MS world, you're just plain stuck.
...until you realize there's Mono.
Also, half the things you mentioned (Swing, SWT, JSP, Struts, EJB, Hibernate...) are just frameworks. Just because .NET comes from Microsoft and ASP comes from Microsoft doesn't mean you can't write web services in .NET without ASP -- or without IIS, for that matter.
But again -- anonymous fucking functions. Javascript has it. Lisp has it. Ruby has it. Perl has it. C# has it. Smalltalk has it. Hell, even C has it -- this is not exactly a new idea.
Java can sort of kludge it together with anonymous classes. And it looks absolutely nothing like it does in C# -- even Javascript manages to make it look better than Java.
Seriously, show me the Java equivalent to:
Or maybe:
Contrived examples? Sure. But I'm sorry, your "language that looks 99% the same as Java" actually looks nothing like Java, unless you claim JavaScript "looks 99% the same as Java", in which case:
touch is all over the Mac OS (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a Windows user, so I can't comment on Gruman's take on Windows 7, but he seems to be missing a lot about the Mac. Ever since the iPhone and the advent of CocoaTouch, Apple has been migrating touch elements into the desktop Cocoa framework and the laptop trackpad hardware. Today's MacBooks have trackpads that are, essentially, as sensitive as the iPhone. Two-finger scrolling has been joined by other gestures, most recently four-finger strokes to invoke Expose and the like. Application in Cocoa can (and many do) take advantage of two finger "spread" and "squeeze" gestures to zoom in and out, or "twist" gestures to rotate.
Gruman identifies the chicken and egg problem correctly enough, but misses the fact that Apple has a great advantage in the way Cocoa is architected. Many of these features can be implemented by Apple in such a way that Cocoa apps inherit these behaviors "for free." At this point the Mac OS is quite "touchy" and this drives some of the tablet rumors we hear. There is very little to prevent Apple from making the Mac screen itself an input device with gestures that many (if not most) Mac apps would have no trouble interpreting.
The other advantage for Apple in all this is CocoaTouch itself. Apple has a touch interface already widely deployed and is on its third generation of the framework that drives it. The iPhone/iPodTouch has many more users than MS Surface and Apple is learning from every one of them. Just because a casual user of the Mac OS does not get confronted by a host of touch options does not mean the potential is not present, after all, this is the company that ships a five button mouse configured to act like a one button mouse!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wacom and Nintendo had the right idea (Score:3, Insightful)
So this whole hullabaloo is about selling twice as many screens, then. Thanks...now I get it.
Re:kinda like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually....
Most touchscreens are fairly resilient. Part of my day-job involves putting touchscreen monitors in front of public safety dispatchers in place of physical buttons for them to mash their filthy hands onto 24 hours a day.
The finger grease isn't really very noticable at all on these things after years of use - I suspect the glass has been treated to some extent to reduce the problem. And it's tempered, and quite strong -- I read a spec on my own touchscreen of being able to drop something like a 1-kilogram weight from several feet onto the surface of the screen without visible damage. So far, none of the dozen or so that I've placed into 24-hour use has developed any scratches.
Go look at a friend's iPod Touch or iPhone for an example, if you can't fathom the notion of a durable touchscreen display. I haven't seen a scratched one of those, either.
Re:kinda like... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I can see it for like Kiosks
As a general rule, I'd suggest they're useful when you're not planning on inputting major amounts of data. Situations where you're better off without mouse and keyboard, tasks where you have only a few selections to make.
My kitchen table terminal (used mostly as a jukebox) could probably use it.
But for general desktop work it'd be mostly a step back. The display is often further from the keyboard than the mouse, you occlude the objects you touch, touch lacks the precision of a mouse, and even if you could enhance it by temporary zooms or such things, that's a solution looking for a problem. Etc. Added input tablets with display backgrounds might have some use in some professions, but it's not like tablets are a common part of the average desktop setup.
So I agree; there's a reason we haven't seen these kinds of sweeping changes to the desktop setup, and mainly it's because there hasn't been anything that'd actually work better in the common usage situation.
Re:Desktop multitouch: a tool looking for a purpos (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a nice idea, but the problem is that, as the summary says, enabling ubiquitous touch would require some radical changes to our current UIs - anything interactive must become much bigger, toolbars are favored over menus, you lose a mouse button, etc. Most of these would make the mouse-based experience worse in order to enable the touch-based experience. *That's* why no one is doing this. You can't just add it in cheaply, and there's little evidence it's worth a large cost.
Re:kinda like... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoa there, stop your wheel re-inventing for a few minutes.
This is an old, old question which has been voted on and solved for far in excess of a century.
Look at any drawing, photograph or film of a drawing office (drafting office in some spellings?) before the middle or late 1970s. Lots of drawing boards being used in an analogue "Touch"-like interface all day every day by expensivly skilled professionals.
The working surfaces are neither horizontal nor vertical, but generally between approximately 30 degrees to 60 degrees to the horizontal ; and they're individually adjustable. So you can set your drawing board up at an angle for you to draw things, then lay it flatter for several people to gather round and discuss aspects of your design. Oh, sorry, BuzzWord Bingo - that's "Collaborate".
Don't re-invent the wheel. And please Bog, hang the person who tries to patent the new interface paradigm ; hang them from the nearest lamp standard and pull them up slowly so they die slowly. Leave the body up on the wire "pour encourager les autres".