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Windows 7 Touch, Dead On Arrival
snydeq writes "Ongoing Microsoft hype around its Surface touch technology has suggested that, with Windows 7, a touch-based UI revolution is brewing. Unfortunately, the realities of touch use in the desktop environment and the lack of worthwhile development around the technology are conspiring against the notion of touch ever finding a meaningful place on the desktop, as InfoWorld's Galen Gruman finds out reviewing Windows 7's touch capabilities. 'There's a chicken-and-egg issue to resolve,' Gruman writes. 'Few apps cry out for a touch UI, so Microsoft and Apple can continue to get away with merely dabbling with touch as an occasional mouse-based substitute. It would take one or both of these OS makers to truly touchify their platforms, using common components to pull touch into a great number of apps automatically. Without a clear demand, their incentive to do so doesn't exist.'"
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Touch and multitouch have been around for decades; the reason people aren't using them is because they simply aren't all that useful, outside maybe consumer phones and systems like ATMs. It's the same with 3D movies and interfaces; like flu epidemics, these dead ideas keep coming back every decade-and-a-half.
We can just depend on the OEMs, whose craptastic bundleware powers are exceeded only by those of scanner and camera manufacturers, to produce horribly nonstandard custom UI elements and "helper" programs to iron out the trouble. Extra credit will, of course, be granted for clumsy partial shell replacements that(while they run at all times and somehow manage to slow everything down) will just dump you back into straight Windows for anything more complex than taking publicity shots.
That should make the greasy fingerprints and nasty case of aching gorilla arm entirely worthwhile.
Yeah thats right. It takes very little energy to use a mouse. Very small hand gestures can make big things happen on the screen. Imagine how tired your arm would get if you had to touch the screen all day to make anything happen. Even if the screen was closer to you, possibly lying flat on the desk, it would still be harder.
We have been learning this lesson for years now. Does anyone recall the long list of features that never made it into Vista and what a useless pile Vista ended up as?
Let's just agree that it doesn't exist until Microsoft actually releases it -- until then, everything Microsoft says should be taken with a grain of vaporware salt.
I don't think that just tapping the spot is actually more efficient than using the mouse, at least for standard desktop and laptop scenarios.
On the computer I'm typing this on, I'm looking at a 20 inch panel, 1680x1050, at approximately arm's length from my face. If I were using a touch interface, the worst case delay between interacting with two points on the screen would be the time it takes to move my hand the full 20 inches. With the mouse, the same corner to corner motion occupies more like 4 or 5 inches(on your basic cheap OEM optical, nothing fancy). I can move my hand at roughly the same speed in either case so, while the touch sounds simpler, it is actually a fair bit slower.
For small devices, where the entire screen is at your fingertips, touch is acceptably fast; but the bigger the screen gets, the worse it becomes compared to an ordinary optical mouse, in addition to the usual disadvantages of blocking part of the screen and leaving fingerprints.
Its a lot less of an effort to use a mouse than it is to use a touchscreen.
Sign your name with a stylus on a touch screen. Now try to do the same thing with a mouse. You can see why some graphic artists like tablets.
I like my mouse. I can get from one side of the screen to the other in any direction without moving my mouse more than an inch. With touchscreen I'd actually have to move my whole arm around.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Anything that is wanted by the community will likely find its way in.
Unless the community gets bored and moves on to languages like Scala, Clojure, Ruby, etc, which already have what they want.
You see, the Java world runs like a Democracy. People don't like Swing and eventually there's SWT.
And this is different than anything except Delphi, how?
In the MS world, you're just plain stuck.
...until you realize there's Mono.
Also, half the things you mentioned (Swing, SWT, JSP, Struts, EJB, Hibernate...) are just frameworks. Just because .NET comes from Microsoft and ASP comes from Microsoft doesn't mean you can't write web services in .NET without ASP -- or without IIS, for that matter.
But again -- anonymous fucking functions. Javascript has it. Lisp has it. Ruby has it. Perl has it. C# has it. Smalltalk has it. Hell, even C has it -- this is not exactly a new idea.
Java can sort of kludge it together with anonymous classes. And it looks absolutely nothing like it does in C# -- even Javascript manages to make it look better than Java.
Seriously, show me the Java equivalent to:
Or maybe:
Contrived examples? Sure. But I'm sorry, your "language that looks 99% the same as Java" actually looks nothing like Java, unless you claim JavaScript "looks 99% the same as Java", in which case:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I am not a Windows user, so I can't comment on Gruman's take on Windows 7, but he seems to be missing a lot about the Mac. Ever since the iPhone and the advent of CocoaTouch, Apple has been migrating touch elements into the desktop Cocoa framework and the laptop trackpad hardware. Today's MacBooks have trackpads that are, essentially, as sensitive as the iPhone. Two-finger scrolling has been joined by other gestures, most recently four-finger strokes to invoke Expose and the like. Application in Cocoa can (and many do) take advantage of two finger "spread" and "squeeze" gestures to zoom in and out, or "twist" gestures to rotate.
Gruman identifies the chicken and egg problem correctly enough, but misses the fact that Apple has a great advantage in the way Cocoa is architected. Many of these features can be implemented by Apple in such a way that Cocoa apps inherit these behaviors "for free." At this point the Mac OS is quite "touchy" and this drives some of the tablet rumors we hear. There is very little to prevent Apple from making the Mac screen itself an input device with gestures that many (if not most) Mac apps would have no trouble interpreting.
The other advantage for Apple in all this is CocoaTouch itself. Apple has a touch interface already widely deployed and is on its third generation of the framework that drives it. The iPhone/iPodTouch has many more users than MS Surface and Apple is learning from every one of them. Just because a casual user of the Mac OS does not get confronted by a host of touch options does not mean the potential is not present, after all, this is the company that ships a five button mouse configured to act like a one button mouse!