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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."
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.
I have no interest in touching my screen until they invent technology impervious to fingerprints.
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.
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.