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Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

Yea, it was a thought I had too. It's similar to the Front Row and Media Center experience that most people probably don't use.

But I could see this having a different fate if it doesn't feel like a drag on the system and it can be made useful (as I think external developers will make it.)

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Thinking about it a little more, it really seems odd to combine two very different modes of operation -- one touch heavy and probably best for a tablet or some sort of mobile device and the other is the standard Windows UI operated by keyboard and mouse. Having both modes on the same hardware seems like an odd situation. Usually, a device naturally maps to one or the other mode. I suppose hardware manufacturers might build tablet/laptop hybrids or convertibles (they definitely have been trying, but I don't think any are popular) and Windows 8 might be a huge win on these devices. However, aside from this narrow subset of devices, I'm still guessing how this will play out.

For instance, the device used in the demo (assuming it has no other mode of operation) seems to me that it would be a nightmare for using Excel.

edit: added the last sentence.

Yes, a lot of the freshness involved using gestures, but that's been shown not to work for vertical screens like on laptops and desktops (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/gorilla-arm-multitouc...).

This gives the video the feel of a Courier-like demo. Inspirational to look at, but not realizable in practice.

Yea, it's the same trap that Win Media Center fell into. 2-feet mode versus couch mode. Though touch is different. The largest segment of computers from what I understand are laptops. If these laptops are fitted with a MacBook Pros style touchpad that would be sensitive as iPads, it could introduce a whole new dynamic that we can't fully understand until we truly experience it.

For example, imagine a version of Excel that you could do the sum of a set of numbers by speaking "sum up these numbers" and swiping your fingers over the set that you wanted to do the sum on. Excel as it exists today may not be the best user of touch but tomorrow's Excel may provide much smarter ways of getting better milage out of it. It truly will be dependent on how well MS developers can imagine.

Media Center is pretty limited in what it can do, though. You can't browse the internet or browse the file system from it for example - two things that were shown in new-style Win8 touch UI in this video.

Oh I didn't mean that Media Center could do stuff. I just meant that it was a separate experience.

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