Windows 7 will bring the 'touch' interface to the masses. Be prepared | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 will bring the 'touch' interface to the masses. Be prepared

windowsteamblog.com

17 pointsurlwolf23 comments

I doubt there are more pc's running windows that have a touchscreen than there are iPhones.

Not that it isn't a nice development, but "bringing it to the masses" sounds like typical MS marketing BS to me.

Spare me with this fanboy criticism.

How hard is it for you to consider that if new laptops are going to have have touch screen then Windows will make touch mainstream.

It's not quite criticism. It's pointing out that touch screens are mainstream. My immediate family alone has three. That's mainstream. Touch was a huge deal in 2006.

Obviously you have a different idea of what is considered mainstream.

Impossible to know since you haven't explained yours. All we know from your comments is that anyone with a different idea is a "fanboy".

Touch screen is a very broad concept. It has been applied in numerous devices.

In the meaning of being available in a mobile, yes iPhone may lead currently, but I wouldn't consider a phone that has a price tag 900 euro to be considered mainstream, just because 17 million people (as zimbabwe sais above) have bought it.

My point of view is that in mobile phones, Nokia will be the one to take it mainstream as their strategy has always been various phones models and cheap ones.

However, since Windows will be supporting touch screen and Windows is 90% of the market, obviously Microsoft will put touch screen in a lot more hands than Apple.

Since no one can predict what will happen, this remains just speculation. But my point is you can't consider mainstream something that only few can access, at least currently.

You probably should consider the definition of mainstream, since a price-point really has nothing to do with its meaning. http://www.answers.com/mainstream

The iPhone is known by every person who uses tech devices. Everybody who knows about it knows it's touch-based. I'd bet that most people who know about it have had a chance to fiddle around with it, since they've sold 17 million phones and I-don't-know-how-many iPod touches. It's inspired a slew of touch-based competitors from every major phone provider.

I would bet more people use multitouch every day than use Windows Vista's app switcher that tiles and cycles windows, which Microsoft featured prominently in every Vista ad as an example of advanced technology. I'll further bet that this touch technology takes longer to catch on in the laptop market than you think. Remember that touch screens already do exist in laptops, and they're not that popular because they're bad. I'll add one last bet, which is that, if the reviews of the Surface are accurate, Microsoft is incapable of making a touch screen interface that's enjoyable to use and so people will stick to using mice and touch pads.

Touch is a cute trick but for the most part I don't think it will make that big of a difference interface wise. In the end I suspect most users will use it every now and then on photos but it won't significantly change the user experience like it does on say an iPhone.

I made a post on my own blog not too long ago on why, after experimenting with touch interfaces, I found them to be lacking in a PC enviornment. You can find it here if you're interested: http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/A-Quick-Indictment-Of-The-F...

(I link only because there's one small graphic in the post that I think makes a big point and I couldn't embed the graphic here)

What may be a 'cute trick' to you, is a massive leap in usability for others. Mainly kids who at a young age could interact with a touch screen but find it very hard to use a mouse/touchpad (I witness this first-hand with my 3 year old daughter)

This is bigger than most geeks recognize for the 'casual' PC market and also for breaking the PC out of the office.

It's actually a massive leap backwards in usability. In the post linked to above I point out that the same action that takes one click with the mouse takes 2 clicks and 3 gestures with a multi-touch screen (worst case scenario obbviously). Moreover the increased range of motion in the shoulders and upper arms can cause muscle pain (I've actually done usability tests on this using a regular touch screen).

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't have limited use. Just that it won't revolutionize the UI of PCs (like it actually did for phones imho)

This sounds eerily reminiscent of the objections, including muscle pain, I heard to PCs going mouse+GUI in the 1990s (also yesterday here on HN :) ). Multi touch (which has been absent from this HN discussion but is present in Win7) allows many possibilities which are unavailable with a mouse and is what delivers the win.

Yes, interfaces will have to change and evolve - snapping will be more important than ever, a mouse is still more accurate for fine work (but so is a stylus) and it's going to take time to figure out how to communicate interface information when we can't necessarily rely on having a cursor. But we'll get there. Early WIMP systems were pretty lame too compared to what we enjoy now.

It's actually touch mixed with stylus handwriting that I think will become useful. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476184 I expect it will first be put to good use by a company like Evernote. That's my interest anyway.

Just curious, what advantage to you see touch having in relation to writing recognition? I'm not saying that in a confrontational way, I'm honestly missing your point.

I'm most interested in writing, but I believe touch will allow developers more creativity. For instance, it's easy to tuck a pen into your fingers then use your fingers. Now you can use your fingers to drag the page up and down or zoom in using the iPhone trick of pinching the screen; I find that quick and clever. If you are using the pen to draw diagrams or write out math equations, lets say in something like matlab, it would be more taxing to set the tip on a scroll bar than it would to drop you finger onto the screen to push the page up.

I could be the one missing the point, but I believe having both options will allow enough flexibility for developers to make pen and touch a semi-standard input device.

Just realized I need to make it clear that I see tablet and hybrid laptops as the real use. I don't expect it to take over as a primary input device, just to be a commonly used secondary to keyboard and mouse.

Hehe, that same graphic is the reason why I find the touch phones annoying. Small keyboards, hard to press for people with long nails like me (I'm a girl, in case you're wondering :P). I prefer stylus.

That doesn't mean there aren't instances where precision isn't an issue and we can happily use a touch interface without problems. I would say it's more than a cute trick.

"Touch is a cute trick" is a similar statement to "No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame.".

Touch will be the future of computing. The potential in touch and multitouch is staggering, and Windows 7 actually brings it to people. The hardware people will catch up next, then the software people will follow.

Microsoft are rich because they get where the trend is going.

You should write press releases. You'd be goood at it. But I'd be interested in some substance. Why exactly do you think it's "the future of computing"

Because a large part of the interaction with a computer does not consist of typing, it consists of pointing and clicking and moving stuff around. A lot of these stuff being moved around can be done efficiently by hand motions - your mouse exists because you like to push things around.

Desktop touch is flawed in one way only, but it's a big one: that no one wants to hold their hands up to the screen for hours on end. It works much better as a table (MS Surface), and perhaps we'll see future computers at 45-degree inclines (you'll notice that Jeff Han demoed multitouch on that kind of system).

"Touch is the future" is a half-truth; the future of computing will probably include a blend of mouse, keyboard, touch, voice, and (hopefully) direct brain interfaces, depending on the task and the use case.

What will happen is that the keyboard will be replaced with a tactile feedback multitouch surface. It's like your second screen, but a bit more task specific.

I agree, though it will take some time before the price/hardware specs balance becomes reasonable. I'm not sure that will happen before "Windows 8".

Not only are fingers very low-resolution input devices, but they're opaque and attached to a big meaty human hand, obscuring your view of whatever you're manipulating. The visibility problem worsens with multiple touch, since you may have both hands between your eyes and the screen.

When manipulating something small or fine on the screen with a coarse fingertip, it can be difficult to know if you actually have a 'grip' on it, or precisely which face/edge of it you're pushing/pulling. (In the physical world, we receive tactile feedback through our fingertips that helps us grasp things.) Frustrating, since much of the promise of multi-touch systems is in modeling physical-world manipulation.

Also, PC touch screens can quickly get greasy, worsening visibility even when your hands aren't on it. I developed for a PC-based multitouch environment last fall; by the end of a debugging session on the test system, its screen would be difficult to read. If I ever do that again I will buy silk gloves and learn to type in them (and hope that they are fine enough not to block input on a capacitive touchscreen).

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