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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?
Mmm... pie...
The CB App. What's your 20?
First donut universes, now candy bars and pies. Just go to lunch, you insenitive clods.
Invenio via vel creo
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?
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
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.
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 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)
A/W may have gotten a patent on a particular form of pie menu, but Don Hopkins invented it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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?
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
Got it, first guess.
-jcr The trouble is, when you put together an unoptimized, unscalable, hastily coded demo to prove the feasibility of something or to make a stopgap before the real version is available the code *lasts forever*. The real version doesn't come and hack is laid on top of hack to make the demo the real thing and you own it.
Hence the quickie stopgap I put together in shell scripts and python in three months is now production code critical to a multi billion dollar business and it regularly demands attention from me and only me. The team of programmers didn't arrive.
I expect this will be no different.
Evil people are out to get you.
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.
Ever play Megatouch?
They're in all the bars. Small one piece computers loaded with games, no keyboards. Older ones have CRTs, newer ones have flat screens. A very few have joysticks, most don't. The only input devices are a coin slot, a dollar bill slot, and a touch screen. Despite the fact that dozens of people a day have their hands all over the screen (since that's the only way to play them), they in fact don't have fingerprints on them.
BTW, they run Linux as their OS, as I saw one day when a bartender accidentally unplugged one.
I wonder if "megatouch" is where they git the "multitouch" name. It's the same thing, only Windows instead of Linux.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
You make it sound so dirty :(
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 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?
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.