Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration 329
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."
great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
This feature will be announced as removed March 2009.
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How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fact is most UIs are lousy. I don't think adding multi touch really qualifies as an improvement on its own, more like an improvement to input devices, but if it happens to carry along smarter use of screen space and improved ability to size on screen objects to optimum, etc etc, I'm all for it. I'd like to see some work go into something other tha
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You've said something that I don't think can be emphasised enough - 'multi-touch' (damn buzzwords) are a means to an end. You can't just add a touch interface to a device and declare it to be something new and innovative. You have to redesign the whole interface to take advantage of this new capability.
This is why I think tablet PCs have been a relative failure. Apart from replacing the mouse with a pen, they didn't really do anything interesting or new. Apple and Microsoft seem to have realised this.
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:4, Informative)
That's right, Apple.
Ans: M.A.D. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...)
Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this modded flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Dunno how this is a ruse, per se. Doing press bits and what not in order to influence people to value a stock in a certain way isn't particularly dishonest. There's no real requirement for MS to say, "This is exactly the feature set that will be in our new product over a year from now!"
What Kind of Fund Manager (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
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Not vaporware! (Score:3, Funny)
Wonderful... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wonderful... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Wonderful... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pie menu? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pie menu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pie menu? (Score:4, Funny)
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I saw this interface probably 11 years ago in university. It was clean and quick. Logitech's implementation was slow and heavy (the ui widgets were huge), and didn't sync up with the Start menu, and I didn't miss it when I uninstalled that.
Re:Pie menu? (Score:4, Funny)
Alias/Wavefront the patent holder? (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Rotary telephone (Score:2)
seems to me that wedge shaped text windows and western linear text is just not going to be a good meet up once the wedge get small. (asian pictograms might be another story however) maybe it will work for the top level file-edit-view type menu however or a few contextual items like cut-paste.
plus usage studies how it take 47
Is Someone Hungry? (Score:5, Funny)
First donut universes, now candy bars and pies. Just go to lunch, you insenitive clods.
Here lies the body of Vista (Score:2, Funny)
Monitor wipes (Score:2)
makes no sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Sound familiar?
Next they'll be telling us Windows 7 is delayed... (count on it)
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Re:makes no sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
Useless (Score:4, Insightful)
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touch screens are used daily by tens of thousands of people around you right now(assuming your living in a city). Every Burger king, restaurant, etc are slowly switching to touch screen inputs. Go to your local chain restaurant and look around. I bet you find 3-4 touch screens for the wait staff to input your orders onto.
Also OS X has support for gesture touch input right now. it is built into every laptop. it isn't true multi poi
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It seems pretty cool. Could be fun to program in an editor that will take advantage of it. My worry is with having to buy an expensive new monitor to use it.
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Far more people use touch screen computers than keyboards. Many of the folks playing MegaTouch don't even own computers.
why? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Without multitouch, Windows is limited in where it can go, and as Apple has already shown, multitouch is not superficial but fundamental to making certain form factors work.
Pie menus again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pie menus again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Practically possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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More tech without design (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Practically possible? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was about to post something similar: I think this is another case of MS mistakintg form for content. The important thing isn't the multitouch interface which, as been pointed out, have been around in one form or another for almost twenty years. The point is to make a multitouch interface which is both usable and to package it in an environment in which is makes sense to use it. The iPhone/iPod is a perfect example: it's a small device on which real estate is at a premium, and the multitouch interface allows Apple to combine browsing, typing and a number of other features in one place. And, as has also been pointed out, since the iPhone/iPod rests in your hand, using the interface with your fingers is both easy, non-tiring and largely intuitive.
The interface doesn't make any sense on a laptop, though. My laptop already has two perfectly good interfaces, the keyboard and the trackpad. Given that these interfaces allow me to keep my hands and arms in a relatively restful position, why would I want to add another interface which makes me take my hands off the keyboard and away from the trackpad to do things I can do without using it? Put another way, unless the multitouch interface allows me to do something unique, which I can't do without out the keyboard an dtrackpad (or which are cumbersome with them) it doesn't make using my laptop any easier. It just adds some bells and whistles which I don't need.
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This is honestly really cool, even though it's from Microsoft. I think it's because they bought some company who made this technology?
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You sound just like I did, twenty years ago when I first saw an ad for a Macintosh. "Mouse?" I said. "What do I need one of those for."
Don't worry about training and skillsets, everyone knows how to use touchscreens already from ATM machines. And this is actually *l
Nothing interesting here... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end though, these features will be in the Ultimate Uber Windows 7, not the version I'll be getting for our desktop users due to costs. We'll end up with yet more of the same features, renamed, and shuffled around in the OS just enough to justify retraining.
So what does that leave me with Windows 7? Looking for desktop alternatives or hoping they extend the XP licensing and support for a few more years.
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Multi-touch isn't going to help me do my job any easier and I really don't want users pinching and dragging their dirty mits around the new LCD monitors...
Well certainly not anything in their multi-touch demo. A touch-screen piano on a laptop screen-- I doubt anyone who knows how to play a piano will find this is be a worthwhile solution.
The thing is, I'm sure multi-touch is a good practical solution for many things. And for many other things, it's a gimmick. What I wonder about this presentation is,
what they should be doing (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, does anyone have any hope at all for Windows 7? As far as I can tell, the development model is still the same as what produced vista. When Apple comes out with a new OS, I am reasonably sure that it will be snap
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I can't find my way around Vista yet and have pretty much given up, I want stable predictable and fast. Add all the eye candy you can as long as you don't move the stuff around we have gotten so used to.
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"And all I wanted from an operating system was a stable platform that boots in less than five seconds, and that supports applications and other hardware well.
I guess I have to go back to my desk and wait some more for an ideal OS?"
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Sheesh, that's some pretty subtle astroturfing there, Steve... masquerading as a good-ole-fashioned Slashdot MS detractor, but subverting the message to include how perfect Vista is... I'm impressed. And frankly, I didn't think you had it in you.
Offtopic: Why do graphics still suck? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you look at the start of the video in TFA, you'll see a demo where images are being dragged around via multi-touch. The thing that really bothers me is that the movement of the image is lagging behind the person's finger. My question is: why? Modern hardware is very fast and powerful. The demo computer probably had awesome specs, including a dedicated high-end graphics card. I have trouble believing that this kind of hardware can't update an image position at video rates.
The obvious answer is that the code isn't good. Perhaps it just hasn't been optimized (maybe it's just a tech demo). But frequently even in final implementations I see this kind of behavior.
One of the main ideas with multi-touch displays (and dragging to scroll, zoom, etc.) is to generate an "intuitive" interface that responds in a very "natural" way. But in my opinion, you totally ruin the desired natural immersion if the display cannot keep up with your actions. After all, the idea is to somewhat simulate physical interaction (e.g. shuffling papers)... but in physical reality, we don't experience any kind of "lag" waiting for physics to catch-up.
So, I think more effort should be put into cleaning up those kinds of things. It may seem like a trivial point, but those kinds of details can subtly but crucially affect the user experience (and can mean the difference between an interface that seems to respond to your thoughts, vs. one that is frustrating). I should note that this is an area where Apple has frequently done the right thing. They seem to put a lot of effort into making display transitions very fast and smooth.
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Re:Offtopic: Why do graphics still suck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Got it, first guess.
-jcr
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.
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One of the main ideas with multi-touch displays (and dragging to scroll, zoom, etc.) is to generate an "intuitive" interface that responds in a very "natural" way. But in my opinion, you totally ruin the desired natural immersion if the display cannot keep up with your actions. After all, the idea is to somewhat simulate physical interaction (e.g. shuffling papers)... but in physical reality, we don't experience any kind of "lag" waiting for physics to catch-up.
This relates to a problem with the Compiz desktop cube (and, I presume, other similar effects). When you turn into another desktop, the contents are notably blurred. Of course, you cannot do slight rotations of straight lines etc. and expect them to stay optimally sharp. There are further, subtle effects from the way text is optimized (e.g. subpixel rendering) that are lost when you turn a desktop into a 3D surface texture. This, IMHO, ruins the physical metaphor, and makes the effect unusable in practic
OLPC pie menu? (Score:4, Informative)
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Windows 7 = Sugar [laptop.org] + XP. No wonder Microsoft wanted to get involved in the OLPC project.
stupid! (Score:2)
enough! (Score:2)
But where's the Brain-Computer interface? [mg.co.za] Heck, I would even go for real-time voice recognition!
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How many times can you make a spiral go around?
And glass cleaner sales go through the roof... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It seems to be hard as nails as well. Is it actual glass?
The only thing I'm dreading is the day a grain of sand gets into my cleaning cloth--I do wipe pretty hard.
Also, what's with those cloths that Apple puts into the notebook/iPhones? Those things are absolutely perfect. I've never seen a better "Wiping Cloth". Use it all the time for my glasses, screens and phone. I
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Using a mouse takes almost no effort... do I really want to be waving my arms around all day?
(even though it would probably be good for me if I did)
Drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Drivers (Score:5, Informative)
I'm losing my chance to moderate so I can reply to this. Yes, it is an OS feature. Simple gesture support for devices is easy to do in a driver, but is nowhere near what you really want out of multitouch. An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet.
To handle such things, the application must be able to simultaneously get multiple touch events at different locations that indicate that a finger has gone down at a particular spot and now is moving in a particular manner. These finger events must then remain individually trackable. To handle this correctly requires significant extensions to the event system of the host OS, probably on an opt-in basis to avoid confusing applications that only support simple events like click/drag or lightweight touch events like zoom in/zoom out. Therefore, it pretty much has to be an OS feature.
The only way I can think of to do this without OS changes would be to allow an application to capture the device and take exclusive control and communicate with it directly outside of normal OS channels (e.g. a user client). Those sorts of designs are okay for specialized devices like tablets that only one or two apps will ever care about, but they are hardly ideal for input devices that are intended to be general purpose.
Pie / Cake (Score:2)
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And 101 people taking the piss out of me on slashdot begins... now.
Slow (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Slow (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow
My guess is that this is deliberate and to do with the input method (touching).
When you use a mouse or trackball its obvious what you want, separate buttons for clicking and a ball for moving.
When you have a touch pad (laptop) or touch screen you have one input (your finger). A press and hold by your finger starts some input and if you move it then the mouse cursor moves. A quick tap and you get a click. Same
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Multitouch? (Score:2)
Multi crash (Score:3, Funny)
Whoa! (Score:2)
This will be so cool. I can't wait for this feature to get dropped from Windows 7.
Windows 7 (Score:2)
If the big news on it is that add something that a device driver for specific hardware could do (they didnt introduced a totally new OS for the new mouse wheel back in its own time), and nothing related with architecture, security or bloat, then will keep the same old problems gaining something that is already for the other platforms (OS X have multitouch, and probably MPX will be available in most linux distributions by then).
At le
Flamebait? (Score:4, Insightful)
um... what happened there? (Score:2)
Is this practical? (Score:3, Interesting)
It looks neat but I wonder how practical is a multi-touch screen unless you can fully replace either a keyboard or mouse with it. We've all seen the applications of touch interfaces in movies. But in those cases, they could have used a mouse and keyboard. It wasn't vital that it had to be touch technology.
In applications were touch is essential, they are most often very specialized. If you look at the touch-screen applications today, they are for areas where a keyboard and mouse are not practical and often the interfaces are simplified to allow fewer choices. For example in restaurants, waiter use them as registers. Everything is usually driven by a limited number of screen buttons that they can push. For the iPhone, the screen is customized around specific functions like making calls, etc. You could use them to write term papers, but it wouldn't be very practical.
It would seem that adding multi-touch to a screen was be extraneous. Sure you could do a few things , but it would be another input device that you have to manage. These days, people have to break work flow when they switch between a keyboard and a mouse by going sideways. If you'd replace the mouse with the screen, you'd have to move forward and possibly shift your body. I just don't see that as practical.
The Apple Fallacy (Score:2)
Apple is about as innovative as Microsoft. Neither serves the purpose of producing basic tech or interface innovations. Multi-touch has been around in university HCI and computer science labs for many many years. Apple and Microsoft are both companies which specialize in marketing, ie understanding the needs of their target customers and tailoring their solutions towards them, and execution, following through by producing coherent sets
Not enough hands (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:multi touch (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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John Titor! I just *knew* I'd run into you on Slashdot. Eventually.
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For finding a specific album it's not so great.
For browsing your collection it can be useful. The album art can grab your attention in ways the plain name never can. And you'll find yourself picking things out based on the 'mood' of the artwork. Which was part of the whole experience way back when.
The grid view can't really show you the same size artwork and let you quickly skim through things. Coverflow does.
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That's just it. It looks cool. That's all that most people care about these days.
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My desktops tend to be extremely messy and most of my folders are in thumbnail mode.
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I predict failure. It sure is pretty, though.
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I watched the video, but I wasn't paying close enough attention to notice if that were there or not.
Re:really (Score:4, Funny)
You make it sound so dirty :(