Windows 7 - no mouse required

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7422924.stm

(There's a video link on the right hand side, but it doesn't seem to be working, ironically)

Personally I don't want a touchscreen OS. Call me a luddite but I'd much prefer to use a mouse. I know there were a few eyebrows raised when it was announced that Vista would be 3D accelerated, but this? Its a bridge too far.

Be interesting to see how this pans out.

I've had/got a couple of touch screen laptops and while it is handy, I still like to use a mouse.
Try playing Crysis without a mouse!!

How am I supposed to draw pixel-perfect pixels with a touch-screen?

It says an alternative to keyboard / mouse not replacement.

Further more I think if Microsoft were demanding everyone have a multi-touch monitor they'd never shift units.

Personally I think it's good that this is included, it's clearly just all their surface technology rolled into the OS.

I have always wanted a touchscreen device as a way to control all the mundane stuff like moving/minimising windows, zooming and scrolling
The question is, how would they implement the equivalent to RIGHT-Clicking, Mouse-Wheel rolling, Middle button click etc ..
(The inital problem will be older applications not playing ball)

The new Eee PC 900 looks like it has great multi-touch suggestive features so that you can use 2/3 fingers to zoom and slide things around. Looking at few demos left me impressed and I can see this stuff catching on
Example -> a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qemXhTlReeA

I bought a LG Viewty phone because it was touch screen although I do find these things not as sensitve as I would like. I am too light-fingered so the touchpad matrix does not register my finger prods

I do predict "multi-touch" input will be the next big thing though

They are probably moving towards the PDA platforms and computers that use touch pads etc, TBH keyboards and Mice are definately old now and I would welcome a touch pad providing that it has the same functionality as a keyboard and mouse equvalent.

As long as the mouse remains an option, I have no problem with it.

Why? It seems the logical way to go, IMO.

I would imagine so and i agree.

I dunno if you guys have ever used a touch screen laptop or screen filter but i can tell you it is NOT comforatble for normal computing tasks.
Holding your arm up for long periods gets painful, fast!

This would only be practical on a tablet or surface syle PC. (certainly not a conventional monitor/laptop)

Think of the fingerprints as well, especially after munchies!

Yes, would be a bit silly to make 'the surface' incompatable with windows :D

By the way its not really 'their' technology, they either copied or bought the idea (surprise!) from who i believe was a researcher at NYU named Jeff something.

it says:



so mouse should still be avaible

I can safely say that the mouse/keyboard combination will be here for a very long time (having used MS Speech software to "try" and control Windows Vista. I don't think touch technology will fair any better).

With a pencil sharpener and a local anaesthetic?

touchscreens can be convenient for some type of applications, but overall the mouse,keyboardcombo is much better for general purpose computing. If nothing else, it's much more exhausting to keep holding your arms up in the air for long times instead of having them rest on your desktop.

> This would only be practical on a tablet or surface syle PC. (certainly not a conventional monitor/laptop)

Agreed. This type of tech is perfect for tablet pc's, PDA's, laptops, and mobile devices. Touchscreens have been around a while but "Multi-Touch" will really add to productivity

Touch screens are rubbish. They just end up smeared with grease and marked with scratches.

You can mitigate that by using a screen protector, but the downside of those is that the image isn't as sharp from behind an extra layer of plastic

..imagine my touch screen while surfing net and ate pizza at same time...cool..

gabriel that is a nasty image !!!

Touch screens slow down productivity!!!!

VC Express 2010 will also have a gun, if you see a bug, you can shot him on the screen and the problem is gone. Also you dont need any library. Only write "MS == good" and your application is done. So, you only need to buy 23 licenz and 18 NDAs to publish this on ONE Plattform for a (one) single user.....

bye

Who the hell wants to drag and scale his photo around? OK, fine, it looks cool as a party trick, but beside that, who manages his photos like that? Personally, all my photos are arranged in neat folders, all organized. I don't need to move them around with my fingers. What a useless feature. You'll always end up hitting reset at the end, after you've toyed with it for 30 seconds.

Exactly. It's yet another step in trying to get real-life things and activities into computers, while the computer itself already has a good interface of its own. It's like a piano player who wants his grand piano to sound like a flute. I mean, about those photos: I've them in a dir, hundreds of 'em, and I browse through them with ACDSee upon which I see each photo full screen. Why would I want all those hundreds of photos randomly cluttered around in some area? Be glad that a computer forms an alternative for real photos (which indeed may at some point be scattered around the place), let's take advantage of the computer idiom instead of trying to change it to real-life idiom.

Touch screen means you only have max 10 'screenlocation-inputs'. A keyboard has 100-some keys to be used for everything. And if done smart, functionality that works together uses tactically layed-out hotkeys (e.g. all keys which you can reach with only your left hand while not moving it).

Gadget, no more. Comparable with speech input.

LOL!

My sentiment exactly. I can see how this would be useful on a 'surface' for meetings/presentations or on a public info terminal or something, but i would not need it on a PC.
More bloat less float (as usual)

as artists go touch screen monitors (and very large at that) seem to be ousting tablets in the richer power user bracket

for desktop pcs no fin way mate
im happy with me monitor 5 foot away as i normally only brows net (at 800*600) and watch dvd's
i occasionally crank up psp just to photo resize for photobucket etc

the new one laptop per child i can see being handy in this as its a lap top (even though they nicked me idea from the bloody expensive keyboard thread ;) )

Forget it that all systems will be like this at least with multitouch on the screen.

touch screens with something like precision are quite expensive compared to a regular LED screen and that won't change by jan 2010 when windows 7 will be released.

it will be an alternative thought and MS has to integrate it as OSX 10.5 and the new MBP have multitouch capabilities as well with the new touch pads, so has the iPhone / iPod Touch branch ...

Its an enforced step but for touch pads this capability actually might become really great. same for presentations as pointed out above.

This is an extension to the user interface, just like mouse was to the keyboard. The keyboard nor mouse will not be replaced in a long time I predict, but touch screen has many uses in specific situations.

like?

List me situations in which they save time and which can't alternatively be done using keyboard/mouse!

It is not about which cannot be done using a keyboard/mouse, it is about situations where one prefers to use touchscreen. One is drawing, another is browsing pictures, another is navigating a map. Another is using the touchscreen with left hand to quickly rotate/move the viewpoint in a 3d editor and the right hand to edit, the list goes on. You need to understand that we can only know the minority of instances where a touchscreen can help, it is like predicting the use of mouse in the text screen era.

The way the touching works, its as if microsoft took the software out of the iphone!Or stole the idea.

While I haven't viewed the video, iPhone was not the first device with touch screen by far.

I'm really looking forward to some sort of a good working tablet device. It also will be interesting to see if Apple will release a MiniTablet at their show *crossing fingers*.

It's essentially the first multi-touch screen as far as I can recall that's made it out to the general retail.

Single-touch screens on the other hand have been out for ages, look at all the PDAs out there.
(or the DS <.<)

Anyways, I can't see much use being made out of this other than convenience for businesses that prefer usage of multi-touchable screens (which I can't think of any real reason over existing single-touch screens in terms of what I've seen companies use the single-touch ones for, which is primarily hitting individual buttons) over mice and don't want to resort to third-party routes. But then again, it'll also depend if the system requirements for Windows7 are better than Vista if they want this to work beyond standard PCs.

> List me situations in which they save time and which can't alternatively be done using keyboard/mouse

This video demonstrates how 'multi-touch' can greatly enhance user input. Although it only uses the standard mouse pad you can see from the clip how many every-days tasks can be performed with dual input control:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDf4HMijnSM

It's cool to include it. I love my tablet because of the interactive screen.

>like?
>
>List me situations in which they save time and which can't
>alternatively be done using keyboard/mouse!


There are many environments and work situations where keyboards and mice are not the ideal fit.

We used touch screen hardware to control industrial cutting lasers in my last job.

Asking the operator to press the Escape key to halt a 5,000 watt laser that's going awry is not good interface design. It's much easier to use his finger to press the huge honkin "STOP" button that takes up half the screen.

It's also more intuitive when tweaking power settings for the lasers to "drag" the level bar with your finger, instead of riding the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard.

In my current job, our software interfaces to huge multi-ton hoppers for dispensing the ingredients for concrete. Using a keyboard is just as inconvenient in this environment. The big "STOP" button is just as important, as much as when the batch guy has to watch the batching process through a dusty window, while keeping his fingers on the screen to fine tune water flow rates. Highlighting the right control then using the arrow keys just doesn't work.

We're quite happy with the possibilities that OS standardized multi-touch can bring to our work.

Did I mention all the dust? Keyboards and mice don't like that, either...

That's all industrial, I assume interface concepts are completely different from consumer/home utilities. Can you name me something in the consumer/home genre?

(btw, I'd be able to hit ESC in a splitsecond, it'd be worse when I'm to press ctrl-shift-u or something to stop a piercing laserbeam.. :P)

Jim Brown: that youtube vid shows me that ppl are doing exactly 1 thing: "nothing". It's like a 2d map editor in which you are just scrolling around the map without actually editing the map itself, what fun is that? So far I've seen people scrolling through their explorer window (scrolling for what? for fun?), zooming in/out + scrolling in Excel (what fun!), rotating images in ACDsee (I think I've never even done that, so, point being?), switching windows (how amusing), etc.

You can impress me by showing a video of some touch user who creates an image in Photoshop, who creates a Visio design of some sorts, who edits audio, who selects certain files (randomly scattered around) in explorer to move to another dir, etc.

If touchscreen is the worst thing they add to Windows 7, then I will be happy with it!

What about touch-screen consoles at shops, stations etc it would make them easier to implement using Windows 7 I guess.

If you don't like it don't use it!

CS_TBL,
The point of all this though, is more choice for control.
It's like somebody raving on about the mouse wheel and another saying that it has no real benefit

For me, since I use apps like Excel whilst travelling on the plane, I find the laptop mousepad pretty horrible to use. Scrolling for example, means swiping my finger several times to get the mouse pointer over a small scrollbar. Then, holding down the left button whilst sliding another finger over the pad
It will be more more faster for me to simply swipe two fingers to perform the scrolling regardless of where the pointer is

Actually, thinking about it, if you are a regular Opera browser user and use mouse guestures, you soon realise how nice it is to close a tab via a quick RightClick + L-shape pointer move rather than chasing after the [X] close button

you should use laptop on plane during flight on the first place :)

>That's all industrial, I assume interface concepts are completely
>different from consumer/home utilities. Can you name me something
>in the consumer/home genre?

You didn't pose that condition in your original request. You asked for situations in which they save time, and I provided some.

If I can play a home version of the touch screen bar/restaurant casual arcade games that eat my kids' quarters, that's enough for me.

Heck, my mother in law with severe arthritis should be able to play solitaire finally... she's tortured by mice and keyboards.

IF there is no Mouse then How they going to play FPS game hmmm

Football manager would be cool because then you will be able point the player and move the positions that you want him to play at.

wicked!

The case where there is no mouse won't happen for a very long time.

And MS did not steal anything from Apple. They actually showed multitouch technology before apple did and invested in this research area for the past 10 years.
It was actually apple that took the idea and pushed it faster than MS into the retail. MS did not seem to realize or like the idea of a micro gadget with multi touch but saw its potential on the larger scale retail sector where the technology is still by far too expensive to reach enduser. A "end user" touch screen display (not even multitouch) costs about twice as much as a regular one even today ... and they are very rare and hard to get at least here.
So I would say that they are pretty good at their timeline handling, by the time Windows 7 will be released there is at least a potential chance that the technology is affordable enough to start spreading the home user market.

A touchscreen would make things so sleek..

Take a look at this:

Multi-touch

This touch screen stuff is outdated. Haven't you guys heard that telepathy is the in thing at the moment :)

have you a link dawlane ?

Latest from Microsoft Surface

Think of the games that can be created using that?

Yeah, Microsoft Surface is awesome...but I don't think it would be great for games. Something like RuneScape would be no different, but try something that usually uses a joystick or the keyboard. They would probably put a virtual keyboard onscreen, but most touchscreens have a relatively slow response time.

And nothing will ever convince me that Windows 7 will not at least have support for a mouse. If it didn't, Microsoft will have spent a lot of money for nothing, because no one will buy their product.