Windows 7 starts race with Apple to full multi-touch desktop OS - Page 3

Thanks, that is what I was remembering. Wiki has a purchase date of Jan 22nd, 2007.

Other than for drawing programs, object maniputation and the like, the OS X GUI can be almost used 100% without a mouse or tablet. Many times, the keyboard shortcuts are a faster way to do things. Just taking your hand off the keyboard between text entry and control and back can rob productivity, especially if it's an action in a submenu somewhere vs just hitting two keys.


Using a computer for work isn't sexy, and to market an idea, it often needs to be sexy. I'm certain that a good case for multitouch can made for use in professional circumstances. How about managing objects on a timeline? or emulating a sound board control surface? A mouse can only be used to manage one object at a time, a simulated sound board might let someone control four to ten sliders at the same time. Smoothly operating a bunch of virtual sliders and virtual buttons on a screen using a mouse just isn't as quick.

Maybe there isn't sufficient need for widespread uptake of multitouch screens, but I do see plenty of untapped potential that the detractors seem to miss.

Assuming it's done on a vertical surface. I think ergonomics is best with a slanted surface anyway, even without multitouch.

No, Han used FITR which requires rear projection and cameras behind the screen much like Surface. Only he hides it in a wall.

People said stuff that about the iPhone too, though this is the first I've read of anyone claiming touchscreens would be destroyed by touching them. Have any iPhone owners here had a problem with greasy screens?

I agree! I rather have spot on speech then touch. To be doing something else while commanding my Mac would be great!! Touch is cool as you won't have to grab your mouse, point, then click. You will be able to just reach up and click, drag, drop, whatever. It should be a more fluid motion.


Very cool! I like this quite a bit!!


Not so much. I like the idea (above) as you can close it, rather than having to stuff it into a sleeve. Granted my iPhone does not scratch, but a tablet would be far me susceptible to injury.

Perhaps he meant they'd get dirty, though that can easily be rectified with quick cleaning.

As for the idea for consumers, it looks like another failed attempt at gauging the industry by MS. Apple has already incorporated multi-touch on most of their MBA and MBPs. But not some awkward screen touching, but the more natural progression of the touchpad.

Couple this:



With this:



and you end up with something close to this:



The StarFire concept developed at Sun by Tog (of Apple fame) who has forgotten more ergonomics than you ever knew. Multitouch for the desktop has been a holy grail HCI concept for thirty years with continous refinement.

Microsoft Research and MS Center for Information Work is actually very cool. MSR has a lot of Xerox Parc alumni including Bill Buxton...a multitouch/HCI researcher of some fame.

"Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, the original work undertaken by my team was done in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, there was a significant body of prior art on which multi-touch was built."

- Bill Buxton

What's truly amazing is some work in the 50s and 60s of HCI, collaboration and computer concepts we still use today or remain to be exploited. I used to have some video clips of these amazing demos from Engelbart, Sutherland and others. It was part of an Alan Kay lecture on the history of computing I think.

Ah...found it here

Look at the 15 min mark: iChat in 1968...

I fail to see how having a virtual jumble of your digital photographs on your monitor can enhance your ability to manage your photos in an orderly, efficient manner. I always though apps like Picasa, iPhoto, Aperture etc. were developed because dumping your prints on the table to search for a particular picture was so painfully inefficient. Now we are supposed to be impressed that instead of physically rummaging through the junk on your desk, we can now do it on our monitors? So the chaos that reigned on your desk can now be transfered to your PC? This is progress?

The greatly overlooked benefit of computers is that it forced people to think about problems clearly, systematically and analytically. Before you write a program to address a problem, you need to thoroughly understand the problem so as to be able to formulate it in a way that the computer can handle. i.e. computers have forced us to work smarter.

Nowadays it seems that we want programs and computers that can solve our problems without requiring us to understand the problem first. This quest for the computer-for-the-intellectually-lazy will lead to a dead end. No matter how hard anyone tries, you cannot build a computer that can overcome the definciencies of mental sloths.

It's called progress at Microsoft.

I don't know what he means exactly, but most of the big screens today have some sort of antiglare coating, that is very easily destroyed. wether smaller screens like iPhone's need antiglare coating, I don't know? Anyways touch screens propably don't have such, just saying.

Two overrated technologies for desktop computing.

1. Speech. I can mouse around all day, but I will be exhausted after talking to the computer for 1 hour. If you have kids, you know what I mean.
2. Multi-touch. Why would I use two fingures (or even two hands) to do something I can use one fingure (with mouse) for? The best invention which made the original mouse better is the scrolling wheel. It is constant, and easy, and requires little movement.

To make multi-touch work,

1. The surface has to be solid. That excludes most laptops. However, it works for iPhone and Surface computer.
2. The computer uses completely new UI. iPhone and Surface do that. If you add this feature to an existing UI (like Windows or Mac OS), the users will only get confused. How do you know which app supports it?

I hope Microsoft spend billions of dollars and seven years on multi-touch. It will go nowhere and quite possibly be the big oppotunity for Apple.

OK, enough complains about what doesn't work. Now let's think of some workable possibilities.

Why use a surface? Use built-in iSight, detect hand gestures, and operate from that. Flip to the next page with a wave of hand. Gives a thumb-up for "OK", thumb-down for cancel. That's probably more useful than multi-touch.

My emphasis added. I disagree. I think the average males says something like 10 thousand words a day. I doubt most people type that many words in a day so I'm of the belief that speech is the most natural of all communication types. The one thing you can do with something like Dragon NaturallySpeaking is assign macros to vocal commands. So rather than click the signature button in Word you simply say something like "my signature" and voila the button's pressed for you. VBA scripting allows you do even more and DNS never misspells a word. It'll misrecognize words but everything that it spits on the page is a honest to God word.

I couldn't call it overrated because I saw people who were paralyzed from the chest down compute. I saw legally blind people read and send emails and surf the internet. Speech technology in conjunction with other Assistive Tech like screen readers is anything but overrated..it's a lifesaver for people who can articulate naturally.

Multi Touch certainly has an acceptable role in portable devices but the Holy Grail should be doing "less" with your hands to combat RSI...not more.

I bet you don't have a kid.

People don't talk too much think they can talk all day, but when you have to constantly talk, you will find that your throat gets dry in 30 minutes, and in 1 hour, you want some quiet time.

Speech recognition and commands were available 15 years ago in System 7. It is hardly new technology. It had so much advances since then. Yet, who uses it? Other than some special cases (people who don't have the ability to use mouse or keyboard), hardly anyone.

After Windows Vista, I have lost all faith in Microsoft's ability to develop software that isn't bloatware. OS X Leopard still runs well on my 1.25GHz G4. I shudder to think about the system requirements and responsiveness of Windows 7.

Why do you assume that Apple would build a computer for touch without addressing this in the design? Steve isn't known for missing major details like this.


I highly doubt Apple misses this detail either. There are hundreds of thousands of developers programming for cocoa touch. Do you think that will only ever run on a 3 1/2 inch screen?

My office mate uses dragon. It's much better than 20 years ago but it's technology that has been perpetually 5 years in the future. Still though, it's hardly overrated. Just a combination of misused and not quite ready yet.


Because direct manipulation has consistently proven to be better once it is refined enough to work reliably. For many tasks, multitouch and stylus on the desk surface (that is also a display) is superior to indirect manipulation via mouse and keyboard.


Somewhat solid. You can do finger tracking for some gesture interfaces. For laptops, any multitouch UI will depend on the ability to be a convertible tablet to provide a horizontal surface to interact with.


This is a given. UIs must be designed differently for multitouch. MS is not incapable of doing this.


Multitouch is simply one way of adding additional gestures to the computing environment. The biggest improvement comes when you take something indirectly manipulated and make it more directly manipulated and intuitutive.

Why? Because people directly manipulate physical objects all the time. We're used to it and have quite a bit of capability to do it well.

This isn't to say we're going to lose the mouse and keyboard but multitouch can provide another, more intuitive, interaction pattern for computing.

Of course, folks like you won't even bother to click the links to something like Starfire that shows how well something like multitouch can work in a desktop environment.

Yes but we're "skating to the puck here" I'm not concerned about who's using it today I'm looking at future potential for input modalities and voice recognition is more probable as a game changer than multi touch. DNS is expensive at $800 but when this technology can be added for say $0-100 or included with your smartphone you have the ability to reach critical mass for this technology quickly. VR accuracy on a phone will be no worse than non English like

"hey dood IDK what ur # is plz snd it"

Both can

Dude, Speech recognition was FREE in System 7. It is an optional install for Windows right now.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...ptember23.mspx

The cost of the technology is ZERO. It does not cost $800. It does not cost $100. It costed $0.

You have to know a little bit history (or at least the present) here. I was a Mac developer since 1992.

I'm aware of this but the speech recognition you mention is not equivalent to today's Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional which "is" $800 and currently the best Speech to Text you can purchase.

Microsoft has native speech to text in Vista that does NOT work well but give it a few generations and they may have something. Apple doesn't even seem to be on the playground in this area (not just VR but speech to text)

Hmm I have an iPhone and I do have keep cleaning the screen if I want to see pictures clearly. My iMac at work doesn't like people touching the screen either, smudges all the time, quite a nuisance actually. (Never understood why people have to touch a screen to SHOW me something)
Whereas the multi-touch mouse-pad on the Mac Laptops is pretty cool to work with.

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This is incorrect. To quote Tog:

"

• Test subjects report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers belief that the keyboard is faster.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist."

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

Caveats:

• Shortcuts that are committed to muscle memory are faster since the cognitive load is lower. This is stuff like ctrl-x, c, v for cut, copy and paste and any application specific shortcut you use so often it's "second nature".
  
• This may no longer be true if you're using a dual monitor setup and the menu is on the wrong one.

So it's not "many times" but in reality "a few times". Also, the reason that Apple went with a one button mouse is the assumption that the other hand is still on the keyboard and able to provide the required context information (cmd, ctrl, short) for what the button click means.

In practice the keys are IMHO too far from the home position to be useful in two-handed input UI design a la Engelbart and users, even seasoned Mac users, don't appear to make those keys the new "home" position when mousing.

That statement is not backed up by empirical data...hence the IMHO. Just casual observation.

Anything not measured in an experimental environment is hugely subject to human perception errors.

So maybe using the mouse makes me so bored out of my skull that using the high level cognitive engagement is what prevents me from going postal.


I'm satisfied with that, that's pretty much what I meant. I wonder if the size / resolution of the screen would also have an impact, it sounds like they might have been doing their testing with the original Mac. Not only that, computer applications are a lot more complex these days. Maybe those two would cancel each other out, I don't know. Cmd-i seems to have the biggest edge vs. "get info", for some reason, I get confused trying to find it in the menu, it's not in a consistent place even if many different kinds of app use it.

The problem is that high level cognitive engagement interrupts the high level thinking you are applying to the presumably higher level task you are using the computer for in the first place.

I would think that saying I'm getting bored using the computer would imply that I'm not doing such a high level task.

But I think the quote by vinea showed that someone that uses a particular command a lot is going to benefit from hot keys. Occasional use, occasional enough that you don't remember the combination without thinking, is going to cause problems.