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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?
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.
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
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.
"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)
I have no interest in touching my screen until they invent technology impervious to fingerprints.
There is none. It's just marketing.
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?
I Agree with your assessment, the touch display will be the third major input device. Touch still has a way to go (mostly price wise) before it reaches the end consumer as a household product. As you stated touch already has a big presence in the commercial world (and i expect that the touch screen will continue to make large advances in that area). This particular demo by microsoft seemed to lean towards the consumer when in reality this is a feature they will more heavily market toward (and be most useful to) commercial organizations.
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
I see one problem with all this: Where's the beef? It is nice to see that we're moving forward with the GUI - but does it do anything good? I've used a wide variety of OSes and I can say without a doubt this does little to advance the GUI as I see it. I think that touch interfaces are great on non-desktop oriented environments, but beyond that...I'm not so sure touch SCREENS really make sense. I'm not going to be touching a 24 inch monitor - plain and simple. It's big, expensive, and I would hate for it to look all finger-printed and messy. I want to see a touchscreen "panel" or "keyboard" or "control pad" - not this.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Given that apple probably spent 2 years working on their own touch system for the iPhone before it was even announced you might want to check your dates.
What dates? No dates were mentioned in the original comment, just an observation that Microsoft was working on their own technology before Apple introduced the iPhone and therefore, probably didn't steal the idea from Apple. But FWIW, Microsoft was working on multi-touch at least as far back as 2003.
There seems to be an assumption that if Apple introduces a technology first then any other company introducing similar technology is just stealing the ideas from them. While Microsoft has certainly been guilty of this, they don't always do so.
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?
I can handling wiping off finger marks, but the lag on that demo is totally unacceptable. Unless it was running on a 5-year-old celeron-based laptop with 128MB of RAM, or unless the whole demo was running in emulation, that interface is simply DOA. Would any of us put up with 1/2-second lag in a mouse-driven GUI? No way.
A-Bomb
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.
It's the same old question, are you moving the window or the frame?
You've said something that I don't think can be emphasised enough - 'multi-touch' (damn buzzwords) are a means to an end. You can't just add a touch interface to a device and declare it to be something new and innovative. You have to redesign the whole interface to take advantage of this new capability.
This is why I think tablet PCs have been a relative failure. Apart from replacing the mouse with a pen, they didn't really do anything interesting or new. Apple and Microsoft seem to have realised this.