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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.'"
linux and gaming
Why would I ever want to sit up from my comfy chair to poke at a screen?
And thank goodness for that. Touch interfaces are acceptable where there isn't room for anything else (though the lack of a physical keyboard is always highly unpleasant), but I'd hate to see multitouch become the 'standard' interface for desktop computing. Sure, it's fun to throw about a few snapshots or fly about Google Earth. For all of 5 minutes. Try actually DOING anything, however, and you'll quickly switch back to a 'traditional' interface in order to avoid grief.
The problem is that with laptops/desktops the screen isn't really in a good position to accurately touch.
But I like the idea of getting rid of the persistent cursor. You just leave it lying somewhere on screen when you're not using it.. there's no reason to leave it sitting there, or have to navigate awkwardly between controls, when you can just touch.
I'm reminded of the PC vs console gaming argument about how mice are better because you can snap directly to a target instead of holding the control stick and having to wait as you pan around. Well touch vs mouse it's the same argument. With the mouse you have to start pushing your mouse across the mousepad, wait for it to reach its destination, and then fire. With touch you just tap the spot
Obviously touch would never work for FPS controls but desktop controls are similar.. "aiming" at the little 5-pixel high link may be harder than it has to be
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.
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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.
of course we all know that the true touch screen desktop environment was invented in the late 23rd century,
AKA: A solution in search of a problem.
Having used touch screens for a variety of applications, I'm having a hard time envisioning it's use in a home environment. We're all used to the precision offered by a mouse, and no one wants a touch screen TV.
It would take a radically new appliance to thrust touch technology in to the lime light.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
Yeah no.
Touch is great for fairly narrow types of usage. Industrial machine interfaces for one. I'd like to see OSs integrate some touch functionailty, or at least make it possible to set the thing up to be touch friendly, just to get the improvements for those narrow uses. As it is HMI packages usually look and work like cobbled together shit and you end up having to keep a keyboard in a desk drawer somewhere even if you don't want one. Or even if you manage to put together a truly touch only HMI you still need a keyboard to deal with the inevitable OS crash, since most HMI packages are Windows only.
But yeah, for general computing, desktop touch is a novelty.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I see X as able to support all sorts of input devices... touch screen support should be standard..
We should get touch features in common apps, they should be done in a way that makes the experience superior to anything Windows can muster.
Hey, if that ever happens, it could be the year of the Linux desktop :)
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.
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.
Make something that people want to touch, virtual boobs? Virtual Boobs 7! What a money maker!
A tablet with multi touch would be the best platform for making music ever.
Its a lot less of an effort to use a mouse than it is to use a touchscreen.
I think that depends very much where the touch is. For example, the touchpad on my laptop takes very little effort to use.
On the other hand, I absolutely cannot play FPS reasonably on the thing, so maybe you're right.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
I use handheld computers on a regular basis at work. When I switch back to using a laptop after spending some time using a touchscreen device, I naturally want to touch the screen to move windows, select items from the taskbar, etc. It's silly that the functionality is missing. There's no need for this to replace the mouse. Touch-display and mouse input should complement each other.
When Java adds something as simple as anonymous functions, I'll concede your point.
And no, I'm not an MS fan. I like Ruby. But I think you're crazy if you don't at least see how a lambda closure -- especially a dirt simple lambda closure, in a tiny bit of syntax instead of a class and a half -- is not at all like Java.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Apple creates new products and new demand for them simultaneously through secrecy and good marketing. And I imagine there are many people at Apple working their asses off to try to find a way to do desktop multitouch. Not saying they will, but I wouldn't write off Apple.
The iPod was a 20-year-later elaboration of the Sony Walkman.
*facepalm*
You know, there used to be this thing called an mp3 player, and later a portable music player. They're still around, but as soon as the iPod got popular, these other things like the Rio and the Nomad were suddenly seen as "iPod clones", even when they predated the iPod.
The innovation of the iPod was making it simple enough for everyone to use, not inventing the thing itself. The innovation of the Walkman was making it portable in the first place.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Even more grubby fingerprints all over the monitor.
Bet you'd have rockin' shoulders though, from holding your arms up all day.
Question everything
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!
As I've said before, if you can touchify an OS, it's great. I use a very specific version of Windows XP on the lighting console I use. The dual touch screens take the place of the mouse (there's a trackball built in but only used really when a touch screen has issues) and of course tons of hard buttons and knobs etc. By combining the 2, touchscreens and keyboards (hard buttons) you can get everything done so fast you wouldn't believe. I don't think you can have only one or the other and go as fast as having both. That being said, it's built so the touch screens are at the right angle (and height, but that's up to you) and distance from the hard buttons, to make everything easier - you don't end up moving your hands too much. Even hours of using touch screens don't make you too fatigued.
Parent deserves mod points. The keyboard came first, after all. It took me some time to get used to the idea of a mouse, but today, they coexist on the very same computer. Imagine that, huh?
So, go ahead, put the touch stuff up there. There are times when a stylus or a finger can do something that I will NEVER accomplish with that stupid mouse. Just don't kill my mouse off. I hate the little bastid, but I can't get along without him!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
As a graphic artist who uses a tablet, I can say with confidence that a mouse is far, far, far, far, far easier to use than a touch screen monitor.
Point one: a mouse (like a tablet) lies flat on my desk, requiring zero upper arm/shoulder exertion. I can spend eight hours using a tablet no problem--imagine holding your arm straight out for eight hours. Or imagine having to hunch over a monitor mounted flat on your desk--you'd destroy your neck and back within a week.
Point 2: I can move my cursor from one side of the screen to the other by moving my mouse about 1.5 inches. Tablets, while larger than mouse pads, are almost always much smaller than monitors. Most graphic artists use 8x5 or smaller tablets. My monitor is 16x22. That's a lot more space.
Point 3: a mouse cursor (or tablet stylus) is much more precise than a finger on a touch screen. With my mouse, I can hit a single pixel, no problem. With my stylus, I can get within 2-3 pixels, no problem. With my finger? I would guess 10 pixel accuracy would be hard...and 20-30 would be more realistic.
Sign your name with a stylus on a touch screen.
I do that all the time after using a credit card at Walmart and everytime I'm sure they are thinking that another drunkard must have entered their store just based on what my signature looks like.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I assume that what the author's comment about Apple "merely dabbling" in touch interfaces was in reference to desktops only? Apple runs circles around Microsoft when it comes to successful touch interfaces built onto their OS's back end; look at the iPhone. Microsoft's own Windows Mobile platform makes almost no effort whatsoever by comparison.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Everyone knows that no new technology can succeed without the endorsement of the pr0n industry.
And this requires a whole different approach to 'touch' technology ;)
- James
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!
I just love the author's statements about the"new" touch gestures:
it adds a unique two-finger gesture for opening a contextual menu (hold one finger on the object and tap a second finger near it)
This one sounds exactly like what I used to do on an old rear-projection SMART Board system, and as such is certainly not unique to Windows 7.
Windows 7's new two-finger swipe gesture for horizontal scrolling
And this two-finger scrolling gesture also functioned on that old system (which worked on Windows 98). It was a vertical scrolling gesture, not horizontal, but that's a very minor difference.
- James
> You have one upright screen and one screen laid flat.
So this whole hullabaloo is about selling twice as many screens, then. Thanks...now I get it.
Clicking GUI buttons is a far cry from trying to draw accurately. The demands of a graphic artist are nothing, at all, like the demands of the general computer-using masses.
Of course, a stylus and tablet are also nothing, at all, like a touchscreen.
The millions of office workers out there really do not want to sit for eight hours a day holding their arms in front of them like mummies. I'd say it's likely to be physically impossible for a human to do that for more than a few minutes without the muscles fatiguing to the point where they are nonfunctional.
This touchscreen garbage keeps coming up every so often, usually with a tone of regret, lamenting the fact that the technology hasn't made any real inroads. There's a reason it's made no inroads, and that's a lack of demand. The reason the lack of demand is there is because touchscreens pretty much suck.
You iPhone-loving kids deal with touchscreens in a very specific, limited, handheld system for reasons I can't quite fathom but I will acknowledge that the technology seems to work for that very specific, limited, handheld system. Anything more complex and touchscreens seriously start to bite, and all attempts at integrating them into a normal computing experience have been met with failure because they bite.
Other than the iPhone, which I still don't even like, I've only seen one useful, real-world application where touchscreens were a good idea, and that's POS systems, particularly in restaurants. As a waiter I could wander over to one, tap the screen a few times, and place or modify an order. But those were also severely limited systems, with a user interface designed with a small number of very specific functions arranged into large, easy-to-tap buttons. It didn't need to do anything else, it didn't do anything else, and so the touchscreen worked well for one-handed operation (and no risk of spilling crap all over a keyboard).
Given the totally limited places touchscreens have ever been useful, I have to say WHO CARES if it never really goes anywhere?
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Seems like Wacom is planning something just like that for the Desktop. ;)
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/15/wacom-bamboo-multitouch-pen-tablet-spotted-by-mr-blurrycam/
I would totally buy one.
I often find myself trying to execute pinch gestures on my mouse pad after working with my MacBook
Try holding your arms up for an extended period of time. It is extremely tiring. Well, that's what you'd be doing with a touch display on a desktop. Very bad ergonomics. To be able to comfortably work at computer for longer periods, you want to have your arms at rest on the desk. Now you could in theory move the monitor down to the desk. Ok but now we have a bad neck/back position. You are going to have to lean over to get a good view of it. You'll have to lean in even farther if you use a standard, cheap, Twisted Nematic LCD panel (which most panels are) as they have poor off axis viewing.
Ergonomics are important, not just a talking point. Depending on your body, poor ergonomics in a repetitive task can lead to RSI of one sort or another. Even if not, it is tiring and thus decreases productivity.
Currently, touch screens have no benefit at all I can see for a desktop environment. They are only really useful when space is limited. Something like an iTouch makes sense because you want more screen space, but you don't want to make the device bigger. Ok, you make the screen touch sensitive. It does not make sense when there's plenty of desk space.
While there are some tasks that call for finer control than a mouse gives, like some art tasks, that is what a tablet is for. A pen interface provides much finer control than a touch interface, and also doesn't suffer from the smudge problems.
"Touch me, I'm 7!"
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
The obvious solution would be to put the touch-screen flat on the desk (and split the keyboard out to either side). Add eye-tracking to switch context/windows, multi-touch on-screen interaction, and built-in windex for a potentially workable solution..?
Jeez. The obvious solution would be to use computers the way they are, until some serious shift in the nature of human-computer interaction is required. It works fine the way it is.
Right now I can kick back in my chair, sit upright, slouch around, glance at the screen while talking to people, and so forth. It works fine for basically every computer user with two functional arms, and many with only one. In fact, right now my feet are on my desk as I type this on a laptop, and I can move one hand to control the workstation sitting on the desk if I need to.
Your solution would require us to all sit hunched over our desks, staring straight down so we could see the screen, train ourselves to limit our eye movement, spread our hands on both sides of the desk like we're having trouble holding up our body weight (which, after sitting hunched over like that, we might)...
I fail to see what is wrong with the current desktops and laptops as they stand today.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
***********these are MY own personal opinions and not the opinions of my employer, they are mine and mine alone, just like the ones on my blog, http://rongeorge.com/ *****************
I work at MSFT and just happen to work on the Advanced Design Team that designs Natural User Interfaces for several products around the Org. I myself specialize in touch and multi-touch devices and gestural languages. The thing you have to remember, is that Touch, Multi-Touch, and Pen are all already supported in the core of the Windows 7 operating system. This isn't a small feat. No other OS has that today. The bigger fact is that we have had that for over a year now. The API recognizing the difference, and the ability to track so many targets is monumental in the input field. Ask any interaction designer and if they know the history, it will all go back to input devices and drivers "tricking" the OS into thinking it was something different rather than for what it truly is. Silverlight 3 also has this functionality already built in. These are core functions that allow any software developer around the globe to start building multi-touch applications right NOW. Not next year, but right now. The code is there.. build it.
We are by far not "merely dabbling" I think that's ludicrous. Do you have a multi-touch device and is it working right now? Yes. That is not dabbling. There is a lot of great stuff that Microsoft has put out with this release and so many more great things to come. The one thing to remember though, is that as a platform, we have to do things thinking of other developers in mind. I came from the Surface Team before going to ADT and want to clarify something. Surface does respond to touch, but remember that it is a vision based system and WAY ahead of the competition. It has hover, item recognition, and so many other capabilites that other companies can also build on. Once again, it is a platform. Don't confuse them, they are separate devices but both with very rich interactions and uses.
I also see all this about Apple and the iPhone. If you want to give credit where credit is due.... you should all say Wayne Westerman and not Apple. He is the genius that Apple bought and brought over to save their failing tablet and turn it into a phone. His company, Fingerworks, made an incredible product that still has very loyal fans.
I stopped using a mouse 2 years ago, and have never looked back.
PS: If any of you are in Seattle and would like a demonstration of Surface's capabilities along with a Win7 touch demonstration, please drop me a line, contact info is at my blog. I would be happy to show you around campus as long as you write about it here. Thanks for reading.
Well, it would probably make sense to make touch-enabled interfaces more table-like and less wall-like. That is to say, to make them horizontal.
Someone is definitely looking forward to having a sore neck.
You see, your idea is great, except that for the past couple of million years since Lucy, we've slowly evolved and somewhat adapted to an upright position.
Granted, our level of adaptation isn't optimal yet, given all the typical human disease associated with upright position.
Never the less, they way we are organised, we're better at looking at thing in front of us. Not at looking down.
As an exemple, just ask any university student currently having an exam session :
They stay the whole day in the library and spent this time reading - i.e.: looking *down* on book *laid* on the table.
Neck and back pain result from this. Much more than what's seen in people doing a day job with computers (where they watch a screen in front of them).
Touch screen and other "minority-report"-like hand controlled stuff is really cool in theory. But there is a fundamental problem with all these :
Therefore, biomechanically, we're just not well organised to have the input and output localised at the same level.
(Which one more point telling us that if we were indeed intelligently designed, the design wasn't intelligent in the first place. And probably drunk)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's a nice idea, but the problem is that, as the summary says, enabling ubiquitous touch would require some radical changes to our current UIs - anything interactive must become much bigger, toolbars are favored over menus, you lose a mouse button, etc. Most of these would make the mouse-based experience worse in order to enable the touch-based experience. *That's* why no one is doing this. You can't just add it in cheaply, and there's little evidence it's worth a large cost.
The big advantage of a touchscreen is that you don't have to find the cursor/pointer to start manipulating. With a mouse or a trackpad every action you perform has to start where the last action left off. This means a lot of repetitive moving of the cursor/pointer to get from point a to b to c back to a back to b, etc. WIth a touch screen you avoid all of this repetitive input.
For point and click users a touch screen could actually reduce the amount of input activity they have to do by 50% or potentially even more as touch gestures tend to be much more effective than having to click multiple buttons or keys to achieve the same results.
The reality is that very few people are *constantly* interacting with the GUI. More typical is for people to manipulate a window (scroll) then read for 2 minutes, then repeat. On my laptop I could do that while resting my hand on the lower surface, touch the bottom scroll arrow with a finger or my thumb and not think twice about it. It would be no different than resting my finger above a down arrow key. Move a window, resize or minimize... these are very brief actions that occur every hour or so and a lot of people already avoid them with multi-touch input or key combinations.
The question to ask is "What do we do repetitively and frequently with a mouse that would be a burden with a touch screen?"
I honestly can't think of much. There are some accuracy issues with specific GUIs which would not work well with a touch screen if fingers were the only input option (a stylus would solve that) - but otherwise I just can't think of any job related or leisure time activity on a computer that is so repetitive and frequent that it would cause muscle fatigue if a touchscreen were used instead.
If you are referring to typing - well everyone knows that a keyboard is the best interface for that activity, why would a touchscreen device not have a keyboard? We're not talking exclusively about Tablet PCs here... that's just one form factor.
I think all laptops should be touchscreen and all monitors should also be touchscreen. They should both still have keyboards of course and potentially a trackpad or mouse for when you need very accurate input. However I think people would adopt the touch interface for 99% of their activities without breaking a sweat and in fact will work less hard and be less mentally fatigued at the end of the day as they will be able to relax that part of their mind which currently controls the mouse... something not everyone is good at.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Bet you'd have rockin' shoulders though, from holding your arms up all day.
Yeah, then that one shoulder would match that one forearm you use so much
Nah, it would be the other shoulder. It would look really weird, all those guys with the shoulder on one side all muscled up and the forearm on the other, with the rest of the body small and spindly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Having said that, the demo touch computer that I walk by on the MS campus in Redmond generally seems to be either blue-screened or at a "operating system not found" prompt. Two of the three times that it was up and I tried it the interface seemed locked. Admittedly it's probably a very old beta release.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin