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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
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
"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.
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.