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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."
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?
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.
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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?
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
It saddens me that Microsoft is using the pie menu before open source did it. The pie menu is something I've been after for years. Perhaps we'll see it in Gnome or (preferably IMO) KDE before Windows 7 is ever released?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I would hope so about it being vaporware. I am not amazed or amused by this video. I never had a problem using a mouse to zoom in. Especially one with a wheel on it. Why not focus on making a real OS instead of working on a replacement for the magnifying glass cursor. just my opinion.
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
It's funny, before I bought an iPod Touch I made sure I went and played with one because every other touch interface I've ever used has had lag and sensitivity problems. The iPod handles pretty much everything really well. So why the lag in that demo?
Yeah, I agree. I think a mouse is faster and more accurate anyway. It has the "cool factor" but it's not really that practical. Plus my puny geek arms would get sore holding them up all day ;)