Loading ...My apologies, this is actually older news back from May, but we hadn’t run across it until now. It seems that the media semi-blitz required to reset people’s perspectives of Microsoft (and erase the bad name they got for Vista) are starting early… way early.
Microsoft isn’t slated to release Windows 7 (Vienna?) until January 2010, but the demos of the new user interface items and enhanced HCI (human-computer interaction) work they have been doing are starting now; sort of like how the 3D User Interface demos started for Vista years in advance as well.
During the D6 conference Julie Larson-Green showed off the new Multi-Touch demo. The important part about this is that Julie Larson-Green is the oft-recognized genius behind the Office 2007 (and prior 2003 and XP) user interface redesign (aka the “Ribbon”) that was brought onto the Windows team a year ago to help spec out and design interfaces for Windows 7 as well as enhanced HCI work. Below is a video of Julie showing things off, and for the most part… it looks like a giant iPhone:
Not to knock the effort, but the one interesting bit I saw is the suggested trend the demo makes that future laptops will implicitly ship touch-screens as their primary display device; allowing you to interact with your computer using your hands instead of your touch pad or mouse.
Is this the wave of the future? Is your computing massively enhanced by being allowed to touch the screen? I’m honestly curious… I certainly see the enhancements here… and almost think that the ability to touch the screen and interact with the information on it is what our parents (and older first-time computer users) have been trying to do since day 1 when they would smear their fingers across your computer screen pointing at something: “Wait, can you click there.” or “Can you zoom in and show me that part?”
This certainly does seem to be a natural extension of that impulse we all have from time to time.
Thanks OSNews!
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July 27th, 2008 at 11:13 am
after the iphone, that seems to be the trend
but unless these things get affordable for the masses and stay compatible with old ways of doing stuff (not forcing you to just use the touch interface)… there’s potential for adoption.
these things have been available for years, but no one company has the power to make them affordable and mass appealing.
i think we’ll start seeing mass adoption on something like an eeePC with touchscreen first
July 28th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Hmm maybe… it will drive the price up of the ultra-portables but it does seem to be the perfect market (casual folks, as opposed to say Lenovo business users or something).
I agree that the iPhone did so much to open the door in the cell phone and mobile computing market… the gap between laptop and phone is slowly closing and Apple played a big part in closing that gap.
It’s not like they invented magic, they just main-streamed a phone that was so far ahead of what other folks were messing with that it pushed the bar up immediately.
I don’t know any other company that would have done that with a single release so quickly.
So I thank them for that, but don’t necessarily love the devices.