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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."
Another feature that will probably become vaporware. Trying to get the shareholders happy are we?
Because finger marks all over my monitor is just what I wanted!
Mmm... pie...
The CB App. What's your 20?
Actually, I believe MS was researching multitouch a la Surface either before or concurrently with the iPhone development cycle.
Also, I'll believe it when I see it.
I thought A/W was the patent-holder for 'Marking Menus' (at least it was in the 1990s).
Awesome! I can't wait to see how the malware authors use this new technology.
First donut universes, now candy bars and pies. Just go to lunch, you insenitive clods.
Invenio via vel creo
Vista, b. 2007, to William and Steven Gates-Ballmer. Laid to rest in 2008 by his parents after a long, painful illness and stunted childhood. Survived by his older brother, Windows XP. May God rest his soul.
Nevermind sticky keys on keyboards. I need to invest in some stock with companies that make monitor wipes!
Why 2 articles so close about what WON'T be in Windows 7 and now what WILL be in Windows 7... ? Maybe I'm not seeing the forest for the trees but what kind of marketing tactics are these?
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?
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Microsoft_to_Bring_MultiTouch_to_Windows_7/
As the article states itself, why is this actually a demo of Windows 7? All of those things could be implemented in XP or Vista surely.
If they think I'm buying a whole new laptop and tiring my arms out just for that, they're badly mistaken.
The vast majority of people aren't going to be using touch screens... this is just for show. There's a reason this doesn't already exist in OS X.
Stop! Dremel time!
why would they add multi touch? Does windows need this feature? My main gripe with Vista is that it is not a good platform for business. I was really hoping Windows 7 would be more of a corporate OS, but with them showcasing all these superficial eye candy features I am inclined to think that we will see something more akin to Vista on roids.
I'll take a slice of strawberry rhubarb, thanks.
Pie menus are one of those things that get a lot of attention in academic circles because they have some obvious advantages (menu choices are always the same distance away), but in the real word they always run into problems. The first and biggest problem is scaling. How many items do you have on your start menu right now? How big would the pie get to accommodate all of them? Other problems include what do do when someone clicks on the edge of the screen and how to make it so the user can browse through submenus if they have to (a common operation when you're not sure where something is and you have to hunt for it).
None of these problems are impossible to deal with, but I've yet to see a pie menu system that even attempted to. I would be surprised if Windows 7 ships with pie menus, at least for the start menu.
There are cases where pie menus make a lot of sense, but those tend to be cases where the number of options are relatively small and never change, like in drawing programs.
I read the internet for the articles.
An interesting extension of the multi-touch, although it tends to make more sense on something like Surface or the iPod Touch where keyboard input isn't possible.
I'm not sure how practical this configuration would be. Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
Maybe some kiosk applications and the tablet edition of Vista will be viable, I just don't see how this can be deployed to the desktop in a practical fashion.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
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...
In the end though, these features will be in the Ultimate Uber Windows 7, not the version I'll be getting for our desktop users due to costs. We'll end up with yet more of the same features, renamed, and shuffled around in the OS just enough to justify retraining.
So what does that leave me with Windows 7? Looking for desktop alternatives or hoping they extend the XP licensing and support for a few more years.
To quote someone who posted in the original article, "And all I wanted from an operating system was a stable platform that boots in less than five seconds, and that supports applications and other hardware well. I guess I have to go back to my desk and wait some more for an ideal OS?"
Seriously, does anyone have any hope at all for Windows 7? As far as I can tell, the development model is still the same as what produced vista. When Apple comes out with a new OS, I am reasonably sure that it will be snappier, and have some new features that at very least don't get in the way. Looking forward to the next Windows, I have doubts that Microsoft can do anything at all, except make it worse. Maybe I'm wrong, but what evidence is there to prove me wrong? (and please nobody pull out the old argument that Microsoft never keeps working at things until they get it right. It's not true for a number of reasons).
Qxe4
Wow! It's so different!
I mean, what next, their going to have a dock too? Oh wait...
: - O
Okay, this is slightly off-topic, but: Why is it that even with our modern hardware, graphics are sometimes still very laggy?
If you look at the start of the video in TFA, you'll see a demo where images are being dragged around via multi-touch. The thing that really bothers me is that the movement of the image is lagging behind the person's finger. My question is: why? Modern hardware is very fast and powerful. The demo computer probably had awesome specs, including a dedicated high-end graphics card. I have trouble believing that this kind of hardware can't update an image position at video rates.
The obvious answer is that the code isn't good. Perhaps it just hasn't been optimized (maybe it's just a tech demo). But frequently even in final implementations I see this kind of behavior.
One of the main ideas with multi-touch displays (and dragging to scroll, zoom, etc.) is to generate an "intuitive" interface that responds in a very "natural" way. But in my opinion, you totally ruin the desired natural immersion if the display cannot keep up with your actions. After all, the idea is to somewhat simulate physical interaction (e.g. shuffling papers)... but in physical reality, we don't experience any kind of "lag" waiting for physics to catch-up.
So, I think more effort should be put into cleaning up those kinds of things. It may seem like a trivial point, but those kinds of details can subtly but crucially affect the user experience (and can mean the difference between an interface that seems to respond to your thoughts, vs. one that is frustrating). I should note that this is an area where Apple has frequently done the right thing. They seem to put a lot of effort into making display transitions very fast and smooth.
Can someone explain the attraction of this? Sure, it might look cool, but if you want to find an album/photo, surely showing the pictures as a grid is quicker?
Apple has been patenting a lot of aspects of multi-touch. I assume this is possible because they purchased the right to do so from the original "inventors".
IN any case when asked how Windows7 will support the "pinch" feature they demoed without violating apple's patent, the spokesman said that like Longhorn, windows 7 won't arrive till those patents are well expired.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The XO has exactly the same type of pie menu to switch from one application to another. Nothing new.
Oh boy, they're giving the world really greasy, dirty screens and cute, useless time wasters! Good thing they're working on that instead of security, useability, or generally making it not suck. I think they're gonna pull an ME and just really quickly throw together a bunch of crap on top of Vista and call it a new OS when they should be redesigning the entire thing. I for one am about 10x faster with a mouse than my fingers and a bunch of tilted, 3D objects lying around in my programs is gonna drive me crazy. I like neatness, not fun looking chaos. I think they're actually determined to turn windows into an idiot's OS for new computer users and 10 year olds and all the serious people will use Linux.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
"I was using multi touch on my MAC 4-5 years ago. "
Not like this, you weren't. The closest you might have come is if you've used an iPhone. Even then, what Microsoft showed was fancier. Watch the video.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
rubbing your computer in an erotic manner with both hands does not constitute multi-touch in the technical sense.
-S
TFA's last picture is a shot of hand-drawing with MS Paint.
Can anyone with psychoanalysis knowledge explain the impulse hidden in that piece of drawing?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
But where's the Brain-Computer interface? Heck, I would even go for real-time voice recognition!
I have no interest in touching my screen until they invent technology impervious to fingerprints.
Give me WinFS -- that's the best technology idea that Windows has had in a long time, and it got shelved for Vista... no excuse now why it shouldn't come out with Windows 7.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
John Titor! I just *knew* I'd run into you on Slashdot. Eventually.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Is touch really the wave of the future? You can be pixel precise with a mouse, but they want to introduce the concept of "fat fingering" to my desktop? Fat fingering.... lol.
Could it be? A version of Windows that people might actually get excited about? Here's hoping that Microsoft will create a successor product that the market might actually enjoy and accept willingly, instead of coercing consumers into adopting a product that's arguably inferior to the one it was intended to replace.
As an aside, I can see how this would be useful for travelers and business folk on the go, but multitouch is rather pointless for your average worker doing data entry 8 hours a day.
Multitouch? This is the big thing that will sell the next windows? This is not a OS feature. This is a driver for a specific class of hardware. People with Wacom Cintiq tablets have been doing the exact same thing for years now.
Not to mention that there is no support for this. After all, how many people/corporations buying commodity windows hardware are going to pay the premium to get all their screens with high quality touch?
Also, pie menu is interesting, but problematic. Does it float over the other windows or sit under? Can it be moved around? Will we have to alt-tab to get to the Start menu? How nice will it play with multiple screen setups and other non standard desktop layouts?
There is no cake!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I notice that this machine redraws on zooms quickly, and creates a travel route quickly. That means the box has some real horsepower.
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?
Finally, something is being done about the taskbar. It's a neat enough interface if you have only a few windows open, but quickly becomes a useless waste of screen space once you open more windows. I'm happy that Microsoft is finally rethinking the idea. There are various alternatives that would be better, so the chance for improvement is certainly there. And here's to hoping GNOME and KDE will follow suit and improve theirs...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Back when there rotary telephones companies used to offer these cardboard circular menus you could tuck behind the dial to act as a menu for accessing features on their phone-sites.
seems to me that wedge shaped text windows and western linear text is just not going to be a good meet up once the wedge get small. (asian pictograms might be another story however) maybe it will work for the top level file-edit-view type menu however or a few contextual items like cut-paste.
plus usage studies how it take 47 muscles to make a rotary motion and only 4 to give the finger.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Great, but will it support my SoundBlaster?
Is that what Windows 7 is supposed to be? Vista + New Input Human Device Driver + Funky Taskbar?
If so, they'd better start pulling an Apple and consider it an "incremental" upgrade, with modest prices. Who'd pay full OS price for that?
> "the Windows team have switched their focus"
The Windows team HAS switched their focus.
It seems like during the last few years, the word TEAM, and the names of companies have turned into plurals. Folks post with "Microsoft ARE releasing a patch," and "Apple ARE filing a patent." It's wrong, folks! I heard the narrator on Mythbusters say, "The team ARE," and "The trio ARE" repeatedly. What's up with this?
Great, we won't have a new rewritten, more powerful, more efficient Windows kernel (see http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/05/28/0315244.shtml ), but we'll have eye-candy features that should be userland side. Just in line with Vista. Thank you MS. I really think the "MinWin" project would have been better for users.
Why is this modded flamebait?
If we take the history of Longhorn/Vista into account, it's very much possible that it will never be realized on a real production level. Disclosing it now, is clearly a move to stay in the news, which is mainly relevant the stock market.
Come on, what were the last great news from Redmond? They clearly need some publicity, so yes it might be vaporware.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
You were using multi-touch on your network card?
Just how many computers have a touch screen built in? I'm excluding POS systems and ATMs. I don't think one out of every one hundred thousand consumer PCs have a touch screen, let alone one out of a million!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Multi-touch will be accompanied by multi-crash, where Windows tries to compete with multiple apps for kernel priority at the same time from you trying to touch multiple things, and then they will all independently crash! yay.
stuff |
If MinWin is removed out of Win7, then the "new" product could leverage a lot of the existing work already done with Vista and the work for MinWin can be saved for release in the next operating system. MinWin seems better for a distributed operating system which is closer to the "no major OS model" of future networked hardware. So in some ways, spending more time to make MinWin more compatible to that future (and thus removing it from Win7) makes financial sense.
So, will Microsoft succumb and make Win7 into a "Vista Release 2"?
Excluding the productivity part, since in my opinion this is clearly anti-productive, if anyone comes near my screen and starts touching it, I'll go bananas.
Wonders of miniaturization! HOW did MS manage to cram an ENTIRE big-ass coffee table into a tiny little tablet PC? AMAZING.
This will be so cool. I can't wait for this feature to get dropped from Windows 7.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...a multi-touch mousepad that we can use instead of mice, with support for customisable gestures. One that we can use TODAY with existing hardware.
But then that's just my opinion.
Same old fatty untasty and unhealthy cake (well, pie?) with a cherry on top.
If the big news on it is that add something that a device driver for specific hardware could do (they didnt introduced a totally new OS for the new mouse wheel back in its own time), and nothing related with architecture, security or bloat, then will keep the same old problems gaining something that is already for the other platforms (OS X have multitouch, and probably MPX will be available in most linux distributions by then).
At least this will help to push in the market touch interfaces.
Or at least beating Apple to the punch? When the iPhone first came out, I had the follwing advert in my mind, for Apple's next big thing: an iPhone appears on the screen, with the normal "twang" iPhone song in the background. and then a hand (you know the one) comes on screen, and pinches (or antipinches?) the image of the iPhone apart, enlarging it into a full fledged laptop (tablet?). I'm wondering, was Microsoft also imagining that Apple would take this route? Are they leaking their images to "beat" Apple, in case Apple announces this new laptop product at their developer's conference (which is less then two weeks away)? The timing seems conspicuous.
Umm, guys? Can we be a bit more professional in the article and not include flame-inducing comments like "It seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS."? The whole MS sucks, or Apple sucks, or MS is copying apple, etc thing is really annoying for us non-fanboys, and the least you can do is let some annoying commenter make those references, it's really annoying to see it IN the article... -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Most serious users use keyboards and have atrophy in their arms, only capable of moving their hands from the wrist down. If you force them to actually pick their arms up and move all the way to the screen, I'm afraid that it just wont be possible. Only things that will be part of the future are such things that work along the same theme as the toilet-chair, coffee IV's and Second-Life/WoW.
The mouse and keyboard work, they require little body movement (its bad enough having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse). If you have a choice of waving your hands around in the air to zoom in and out and move images around or using a mouse which are you going to pick? I can just imagine spending 10 hours at work waving my arms around, one day of this and I'll have to take the rest of the month of to recover.
Bitter and twisted, DON'T ever FORGET the TWISTED
I thought Longhorn was supposed to be a "transition" OS... a kind of stepping stone between the windows 5 kernel and the "next generation" kernel. Did uh.. Did M$FT forget they were supposed to do something? All I have seen of Windows 7 (not to be confused with kernel 7) is Vista SP2 with Plus!
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
would take this stuff seriously? The problem is most will.
./ can be laughed at for calling some dev groups blood, sweat and tears, and management's gravy train broken.
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!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The software they're demoing is the same software they've been showing on the Surface, which is hardly a copy of the iPhone...
If Apple has implemented a technology, they must have invented it.
Apple is about as innovative as Microsoft. Neither serves the purpose of producing basic tech or interface innovations. Multi-touch has been around in university HCI and computer science labs for many many years. Apple and Microsoft are both companies which specialize in marketing, ie understanding the needs of their target customers and tailoring their solutions towards them, and execution, following through by producing coherent sets of products and services. It's true that Apple frequently looks like it's ahead of Microsoft on the user interface curve, but that's just as it should be.
Apple's positioning as an edgy, flashy brand allows it to experiment more with its user interface, while Microsoft's positioning as lowest common denominator means that introducing new interfaces that are not market-tested will alienate its target base (which still expects to be able to run programs from the DOS era on brand-new systems). Interface innovations are usually produced in university labs or some of the few private labs that produce(d) a lot of basic research, like PARC, and typically a few companies spun out from the innovations will try to market products on and off for a few years, until a big and edgy company like Apple recognizes a market need, and makes the innovation a part of a major product and thus bring it into public view. Then slow-moving "stability" oriented companies like Microsoft can slowly bring the innovation into their products as well.
That's all well and fine, but there are certain kinds of photo browsing sessions where I really do need to keep at least one hand free ...
The real problem here is that Microsoft is just regurgitating what we saw from Jeff Han two years ago.
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...
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS
And so it begins again... I'm sure Apple will do nothing to quell this.
Both OS X and Win95 were beat to the punch by OS/2. Win95/98/ME/NT/XP/03/Vista looks a LOT more like OS/2 Warp than it does OS X (actually claiming they had any inspiration from OS X is kind of silly - XP looks like shiny Win95, which beat OS X by years and doesn't look like OS 9. If anything Apple noticed the widget placement in Win95 and decided to go with that.) In fact that widget layout is very reminiscent of even Amiga Workbench.
And when the iPhone came out I thought "hey, it's like MS Surface but actually available!" Looking at dates it seems Surface only beat it (in demonstration) by a month, but were there leaked videos? It seems like it was a lot longer than that...
Is it going to be Microsoft TV Tray?
This is getting pretty pathetic. I am even willing to give XP some credit for being a decent OS, even more so now compared to Vista. (Maybe that is the secret plan, release Vista, demo Windows 7, and then triple the cost of XP since it is "out of support"). But seriously, Vista Aero (Sounds alot like Aqua), then we have the Sideboard vs Dashboard, now multitouch. MS is clearly clueless to what is really happening. They apparently think it is the eye candy wizbang stuff from Apple that makes it attractive. So (true to their origins) they copy Apple innovations and find a stunning way to make them completely useless or unusable.
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.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The idea behind touch screen seems to be an uncomfortable place.
If I had to sit at a desk and work on a computer for over 8 hours with touch screen technology, I think my arms would fall off. My monitor is at least 20cm away...Either I would be kissing my monitor or I'd be bent over touching my screen....Very uncomfortable...
Rather then place this technology on a monitor, companies should place this on the keyboard. Or replace the keyboard entirely...That would seem more feasible for long periods of computer usage.
I know Apple currently has this on Laptops, but that's not my point....
It should be placed down...Not up...
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
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
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
Looks like resizing pictures is a primary feature of the new OS. Whoop-de-do! I didn't really want features like completely separate environments (disk included, not just memory) for each application, something more innovative that a simple tree structure for a filesystem, search that actually works anyway. But I don't think the whole resizing thing will catch because you have to use two hands to do it. And that'll never work since at least one hand will be covered in cheezy poof cheese and I don't want to get that all over my screen, now do I.
Here they are, massive kick ass gimungous multinational software company, and the best they can do to demo graphics is FUCKING PAINT????
Damn. I bet they'll demo how good it is with games using PONG or something. MS is so hopelessly messed up. I don't care about the touchy feely stuff. I wanted WinFS. I wanted a real system level database so I could do Interesting Things. Instead, it was ripped out, and I was given VISTA. Now, I'm being shown how I can use my screen as a napkin for my greasy cheezypoof fingers as I scrawl kindergarten like drawings in PAINT.
don't they THINK about this crap before they foist it off on the world and call it "innovation"?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't really see what the iPhone has to do with this [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS]when we already know what the future will look like[/url]. It doesn't surprise me at all that "multi-touch" will be the wave of the future. Now we just have to wait for the flat-colored palette and rounded corners to come in vogue. ;)
In typical fashion, Microsoft is late to the party. By the time this becomes a reality in the Windows world, Apple will have already moved on to the next "thing". Why should I get excited about this tech, when it's already available in Apple variants? Why even get excited about the tech as it applies to a DESKTOP operating system? Touch is great on the iPhone, good on the Mac laptops (because it has a logical touch surface called the track pad) and seems pretty useless for a desktop monitor.
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.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
The following features will be included in the next version of Windows.
All the multitouch is already out, it's called
Apple iPhone.
Come on Microsoft come up with something other than copying everything Apple already did.
You failed to copy Apple OS X with Vista, you have failed to copy Apple iPod with Zune, and windows mobile will soon fade away when Apple's iPhone takes over the cell market. Time to count your money Microsoft and give up.
Windows has become completely unusable, in part because of all the layers upon layers of crap that have been piled on. We see tons of inconsistencies at the surface, but the problem is much worse underneath, in the actual application code. House of cards, except made of crap.
Unless this gets canned like the promised interesting bits of Longhorn, I can see it now: A new radial menu opens a shiny Vista menu which opens a goofy XP task menu which opens a 2000 "personalized" menu which, once expanded to show the useful stuff, opens a 9X menu, upon which right-clicking opens a radial menu from which the whole exercise can begin again.
minimizing kernel bloat should be a focus of every operating system/software, exception none. Windows is the only one that has been "planning" to optimize their software, so to speak.
Minwin sounds like "we're getting rid of the crap that made no sense in the first place, but we'll be sure to leave in TPM and DRM".
I wonder how many wasted clock cycles can be eliminated via getting rid of DRM/TPM?
Most people here already use one hand for typing and one for...well...other things. That leaves NO hands to use the touch interface!
Umm... Microsoft Touch or whatever that table thingie is called was released long before the iPhone. And that was "vaporware" already.
Why are people assuming that Microsoft is ripping off the iPhone? It's more like Apple and Microsoft are both ripping off the same concept.
Is that not a good thing? Make a good concept doable? Make a good concept better? Add more features, take away some?
How am i supposed to operate this without a touch screen?
I mean, I saw "multitouch" with compiz a while back at some demo or another. I dont think it does a lot for usability. I think that what theyve shown so far is that the best they can offer are BADLY DONE copies of what REAL innovators (Linux, Apple) do.
Fuck microsoft and the horse they rode on.
NO SIG
KDE and GNOME already have a solution, multiple desktops.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't think that "Multi-Touch" is a huge leap over "Touch" screens. Sure some apps in certain usage scenarios would benefit from Touch screens (which are too expensive right now, I am sure multi-touch monitors will be very expensive). But as MS demos, the only person that will really benefit from Multi-Touch is your 4 year old "Finger Painting" in MS Paint ! WTF! I also see the GUI lags like it does on my Tablet PC. See image here: http://synapsedirect.com/forums/storage/25/5978/windows.7.multitouch.missed.a.spot.jpg
Apple and Microsoft must have attained Mutually Assured IP Destruction by now - if they open the silo doors on their patent portfolios and press the red buttons then it won't be over until its Microsoft's patent on the universal Turing machine vs. Apple's patent on "representing information via a system of symbols"** and there's nothing left but the cockroaches. (What's that? the cockroaches have been nibbling on GM grain and are now owned by Monsanto? Darn!)
(** I seriously hope that I am making this shit up, but the way things are going...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Pinch Pinch pinch pinch. Your head keeps getting smaller.
Now do you get it? I'm crushing your head.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wait a sec. Did she say you can't use the KEYboard as a method of mimicking piano KEYs ?
Why can't they fork this? Develop one operating system that boots in 5 seconds and supports all of the drivers needed effortlessly and supports useful things like copying a Gigabyte worth of files on a network without crippling the system in CPU/bandwidth (or give an error message like Linux does that it cannot do it). And then develop this second eye candy crapola operating system that has these features for all of the 10 people that want it.
Cool. But how much will that touch screen lap top cost me, and how dirty will the display become after a half a can of Pringles?
So MS finally saw the light and is using trees instead of arrays (pie vs. menu). Did someone there finally take CompSci 101 and realize the marked difference in search times?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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/
I have used http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zGDNFpOMcA kind wall about year or two ago, it was placed on Helsinki, Finland to public place where you could get information of Helsinki. You could send photos and videos to it from mobilephone or send stuff to youtube and flickr! with specific tag and people could browse those on that window. It was about 1.3x2m size.
I use to stop there couple time a week to look what people has sended or writed a memos.
Using that "wall" was fancier than that Microsoft's own Windows 7 demo or It's surface concept.
Sure it looks cool, but only on a "Surface", pardon the pun.
The interface is totally unusable in any application beyond producing cheesy demos.
To begin with, can't reach my 21" screen, yes, I sit that far away. Good for your eyes, you know.
Even when I work with notebook, I don't wont my hands stretched forward all the time. I'll have cramps after an hour.
But it does look good on the demo, I admit, so shit-brain managers will be impressed!!!!!
"I was using multi touch on my MAC 4-5 years ago. "
Not like this, you weren't. The closest you might have come is if you've used an iPhone. Even then, what Microsoft showed was fancier. Watch the video.
I think the problem is that the GP misspelled MultifinderI worked primarily on speech recognition during my development days, but I'm not ignorant of touch interfaces. Certainly, human testing and consumer expectation is not that different between the two.
My thought is that the touch interfaces...to date...do not offer a compelling experience for the average user. (Compelling defined as "yes, I will spend money on this!")
Yes, the iPhone is way cool, but it's NOT a desktop, everyday computing device like Windows 7 is aimed at.
Vertical applications using Surface are niche markets. Profitable most likely, but not the kind of numbers a Halo 4 or Office 2010 would produce.
I don't see consumers dumping XP or whatever version of Vista they're on to adopt Windows 7 for multi-touch alone. The final product will have to "win" in a lot of areas to get folks lined up at Best Buy, not just because you can touch the screen and things happen.
I'm certainly biased, but for me, the ideal interface "killer combo" would be intrinsic, system-wide voice AND touch capability. That, I would buy...which is the litmus test; will anyone or ENOUGH anyones desire this sufficiently to make it profitable?
I am my own gestalt.
Touchscreen displays are only good for portables and sales displays. There is no value in touchscreen displays for desktops.
What will be the next big thing, imo, is Minority Report-like controls. Hell if someone can replicate this with a Wiimote then it can't be that hard to get something going for desktops.
This is not vaporware. Microsoft has been multitouching my wallet since the early 1990s.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
.. Google demonstrated the first HTC device running Android with multitouch support.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/28/google-demos-the-htc-dream-at-i-o-conference
This is real news, a working device that we can buy. Not a slow demo running on a laptop (want to guess the laptop specifications?)
No... THIS is fancier.
I only have one hand, you insensitive clods!
Remember Alt-Ctrl-Delete?
Have gnu, will travel.
One thing I noticed that I found interesting was that the windows have a new position variable - theta if you will - that allows the edges of a window to be non-parallel to the boundaries of the screen (rotated). This I have not seen before, but it makes me wonder how badly it would break backwards compatibility?
TPM chips are actually useful however. They form the basis for hardware-locked full-disc encryption, useful for any sort of really sensitive data. Gets rid of that "plug it into another machine" method of "recovering" data from a disc whose machine wont boot off removable media.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I don't know hard disk encryption that great but I do have a basic understanding of encryption itself.
Are you saying that TPM is a successful method of encrypting a hard drive in some sort of manner that couldn't be done as well or better using other methods? Please explain if so.
Also, how is this to prevent any of the vulnerabilities that other forms of crypto have as well?
I mean will alone will not make these will's happen, will it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm lost here. How is the next version Windows 7?
I was of the understanding that after the professional and consumer versions of Windows merged (with the release of XP), that the NT version count was left intact. So the numbering should be:
NT 4 -- Windows 4
2000 -- Windows 5
XP -- Windows 6
Vista -- Windows 7
??? -- Windows 8
Or if that's not the case, just look at the consumer versions of Windows. I'm even including Windows ME with 98/98SE and the numbers still don't add up.
3/3.1 -- Windows 3
95 -- Windows 4
98/ME -- Windows 5
XP -- Windows 6
Vista -- Windows 7
??? -- Windows 8
So can someone please tell me how the next version of Windows is Windows 7?
yeah, great, just what i want to do, constantly wipe fingerprints off of my glossy screen. also, i dont want to replace my 30" lcd with a 30" touchscreen. and if i did, i dont think i would want to lay it down flat. however, my arms would probably get tired with the screen mounted in front of me. geesh. i like apple's approach with the wide multitouch, touchpad. much easier to keep clean.
Well, that is a fancy error message....
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I am almost certain that somewhere along the road to Windows 7, this will get dropped. I might be wrong and Windows 7 might be Vista on steroids (it really needs the extra muscle), but this really just looks like a very desperate attempt by Microsoft to garner some positive media atention after the fuck ups of late.
Vista is so complex that normal users and even sysadmins are suffering. While I'm that navigating through the labyrinth that is Vista's various control panels and settings gets easier with time, it mainly shows an almost total lack of communication between the various development teams at Microsoft.
I also imagine that Microsoft's lack of direction is making them panic. Kicking out various managers, like Allchin, but keeping king size buffoons like Ballmer only make the situation worse. Not knowing how they can improve on the disaster that is Vista, they variously try to copy:
a) Google,
b)Apple,
and when the going gets really rough, even
c) Linux.
The touch screen thingamabob they demoed today must have Apple employees laughing so hard they must be crying. If you think that Vista has enormous hardware requirements, and it really does, can you imagine what that touch screen thingy will require, which is in reality, just Microsoft trying to do a vapourware job on Apple.
The problem is that the media have grown up (partly at least). No one is going to fall for MS vapourware until Microsoft produces concrete implementations on commodity hardware. Apple's iPhone can do all that on an embedded CPU...
I agree. I was a TA in an HCI course a couple of years ago, and one thing that I found interesting was that in several of the hypothetical UI-design projects we gave them, most students jumped on the opportunity to claim that they were implementing a touchscreen interface so it'd be easier to use, without offering much reasoning or research to back up what they were trying to claim. There are certainly some useful applications for touch screens, but I get the feeling that more than a few people just jump on the band-wagon of assuming they're somehow better simply because they're there. They're probably slightly easier to teach and demonstrate more than they're easier to use.
Touch screens certainly have their place in some applications, but there are definitely things they won't help with. eg. If you have a vertical touch screen (which is reasonably common), someone will have to stand in front of it and hold their arms in the air, which gets more and more tiresome if you want them to perform a task that'll take longer than about 60 seconds or so. I'm sure they'll improve, but so far I've yet to see a useful desktop scale touch screen interface that's more than an info kiosk. ("Desktop scale" meaning something like for a desktop or laptop sized computing device, I guess.)
If they have a horizontal screen in front of them, you're still asking them to use big fat pointing devices (fingers) that aren't always accurate to the scale which today's typical applications like to give a pointing device. Add to this that a typical touch screen of any sort is still a hard, flat surface which still requires a user to look through directly through where they've just put their fingers or hand, or (occasionally) listen carefully. It doesn't give any tactile feedback whereas hands and fingers are well evolved with the ability to pick things up and manipulate them in complex ways.
Mouses are similar in some ways, in that you're reducing the complete flexibility of a user's hands and fingers to the manipulation of a single pointing device that can only be in one place at a time and has a couple of buttons. They seem to have become popular because they simplify things compared with a keyboard input, but it's often deceptive. People often tell themselves that a mouse is simple to use, but you can then watch them take an incredibly long time to do something because they're constantly moving the mouse and clicking (often missing things) to get even simple things done.
I also think that Windows in particular has historically been built around a very irritating philosophy of encouraging application developers to make everything possible with the mouse more directly than the keyboard, if the keyboard's even available. The ability to make things possible with a keyboard is usually there, but anything involving keyboards in nearly all the Windows application development frameworks seems to be an afterthought. If anything I think a multi-touch display might replace a mouse, but I also think it'll be almost as annoying as and not vastly more efficient than a mouse in most applications, unless there's a radical re-design of applications which seems unlikely.
Keyboards are ancient in technology terms, but they let someone with a little training interact very quickly, and they have the reliability of everything always being in the same predictable place without having to visually search for it, even if some software maps keys inconsistently. I wouldn't want to detract people from researching touch screens and multitouch interfaces, but personally I think it'd be great to see more research put into some more intuitive keyboard-
Dear Microsoft
Thank you for yor Windows 7 demo.
If you have success we'll sell millions of new computers to allow multitouch.
Regards
HW vendors
-------------------
Dear Microsoft
Thank you for yor Windows 7 demo.
Actually there are very few computers which can run Multitouch. If you don't have success we'll sell millions of copys of our software.
Regards
Linux SW vendors
I cannot believe how friskin stupid Gates and Balmer must be. Touch this! You dumb mother flickers!
Look, I am not ranting just to see how many different ways I can spell frooking. Are there no visionarys at MS at all? OK, boys here goes: 1) An audit trail for every process. 2) Installation monitoring so that uninstalls are 100% 3) Total user approval for any and all startup processes before they are implemented. 4) Trusted computing that trusts the owner, and no one else. Finally, the one feature that could actually hold Google at bay, 5) The division of Windows into a hardware platform level and a user and application installation level. That way one could have one's installation with all one's applications, settings, and files on a storage device module that unplugs from the hardware device module, plugs into ones laptop device module, and any other hardware device module. Whereever you go, your Windows installation and files go with you, no internets needed!
Yeah right, like any of that will ever happen...
MS is loosing money on every copy of Vista that they license. Don't belive me? Check prices at Dell. A computer with Linux, that costs Dell nothing, is more expensive than one with Vista. A computer with XP is more expensive than one with Vista. They are paying Dell to install Vista. Otherwise nobody, and I mean nobody, would have bought it at all. Would you?
Social Credit would solve everything...
As I understand it, the MinWin project was never about "rewriting the kernel from scratch to be more powerful"; that was exaggeration (and perhaps a little Microsoft fanboyism?) by the tech media. It was about modularising the NT kernel: consolidating the dependencies so that the core kernel can compile and run by itself independent of all the OS servers, subsystems etc. This is certianly no incredible new Windows 7 innovation; no matter what some Win7 fanboys may say -- look at how the Server 2008 kernel ("Server Core") compares to the Vista one: same basic kernel, only better compartmentalised. This is a good thing, and as a trend, it's something that's almost certianly going to continue in Windows 7. My guess is that's all MS were ever saying.
You do have to be careful with the tech media (inc Slashdot); you do get quite a lot of exaggeration and overdramatisation. This whole thing can prob be summarised as (forgive the l33tsp34k):
Microsoft: Dudes, MinWin; we're compartmentalising the k3rn3l, man!
Tech media: OMG Windows kernel rewritten from scratch kewl!
Microsoft: Woah -- hold your horses, dude; it's still an evolution of the V1st4 & Server08 kernel!
Tech media: OMG MinWin's been canc3lled!!1111one1!
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Has anyone tried writing words on a steamy window for more than 10 minutes? Your shoulders start to hurt. Why will lifting your entire arm, from a sitting position, to fiddle on a screen with the tips of your fingers be any different? Apart from that, isn't the idea of good UI design to help you move less, not more, to achieve things? Ok, so it might be fun for a while using a photo-book program like in the demo, or playing a game like solitaire, but the novelty will wear off pretty quick.
In terms of simple practicality, this tech is suited only to hand-held devices, table-top screens and perhaps large presentation screens (but not too large of course unless you're doing an Al Gore). But for day-to-day work on a PC screen? Not to mention laptops which tend to wobble and fold when you push on them. Sounds crazy to me.
Seriously, how long until you say, "man this is too hard, where's my mouse?" An hour?
Even in a futuristic, holographic "Minority Report" environment, I can see compo claims for shoulder-related RSI. On a PC, it will be fiddly and will hurt you.