RSSMicrosoft touches on some new Windows 7 touch methods
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published March 26, 2009, 12:43 PM
In an update published yesterday on the Windows 7 design team's efforts at standardizing its touch and gesture recognition methods, Microsoft revealed that it has made some of those ergonomic design choices that were up in the air when Win7 was first unveiled last October.
For example, what's the difference between a "drag" and a "scroll?" Think about it; with a mouse, the distinction is clear. There's an on-screen device for scrolling windows, but with a drag, the pointer target is the item being dragged. With touch, the expectation is that the target is the same: To drag a document or to scroll a document, you start by touching the document. So how does the system distinguish the differences?
Yesterday's update reveals Microsoft's decision: Scrolling a page is most likely a motion that begins off-surface, and that continues on-surface like a plane coming in to land and taking off again. The direction is clearly up or down. Meanwhile, a drag starts with a landing of the finger on the surface itself, and a dead stop. Then the drag continues in the direction the hand goes; and if that happens to be up or down, the system will already have distinguished the gesture as a drag because it began with a dead stop.
While that's the conclusion easily drawn from the text of yesterday's update, however, the narration of an accompanying video appears to contradict it at one point. For selecting text in a document: How should a window interpret a left-to-right "plane landing" motion? One train of thought says it might be a left-to-right scroll; but the video shows that gesture as meant to select text, as in a word processor. Meanwhile, the narration describes that same gesture as meaning either of two things: "to select text, or drag and drop." And that contradicts the description of a drag, which the text states begins with a touch.
If Microsoft thinks it's made a clear decision, it might want to go over it again before revealing it to a broader audience.
So far Win 7 seems to be way more stable than Vista. Win7 is faster, loads quickly, identifies a good deal of hardware, and renders images in a crisper manner. I am not a techie, but as a user Win 7 clearly is a better build, even in its beta config.
Score: 1
|nobody should try explaining touch... better off just showing a video demo on their website =P and whats with the cynics down below, have you used windows 7 touch features yet?
and i don't care what anyone says, Windows 7 is not Vista, despite the various features/enhancements added, we have this to look forward to
resource usage steady at 260MB RAM
http://static.zooomr.com.../7055104_718eca91b3.jpg
hdd requirements 7.5GB or less
http://static.zooomr.com.../7058557_7e3b30852e.jpg
with todays system specs (and even those years back), the above is great to see
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|it is still my belief and disappointment that there isn't enough in windows 7 to make it into a sellable product.
at best win7 should be renamed /reclassified to vista sp2 or 3 because the amount of enhancement/improvements/modifications don't come close to being at least 50% of the vista o.s.
Score: -2
|What is a "sellable" product?
Was Windows ME was a "sellable" product? Did it sell? Did Microsoft convince people to buy it? Sure. Obviously it was not a good product, but it was purchased by individuals, and it was installed by OEMs. So if by "sellable" you mean it was able to be sold, it qualified.
Certainly Windows 7 will be infinitely better than Windows ME. It will also be better than Windows Vista, and in all likelihood even better than Windows XP. Therefore, it will be sold, and therefore "sellable".
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|not sure about the statistics of windows me.
however to my recollection there were little or no viable alternatives at the time and it made microsoft profits look sweet.
win 7 would need to be at least 50% better than vista to be considered viable to sell as a new o.s. and different from its predecessor vista.
but for now what little improvements win7 can provide, can be added to vista as a sp.
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|and the last version of tiger to the first version of leopard was what? taking your view that was a service pack too, a broken service pack at that. same goes for snow leopard
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|Just as the improvements of XP could have been added to 2000 as a service pack..
Just as the improvements of 98 (and SE) could have been added to 95 as a service pack...
....your point? That it can't be sold?
*laughing*
Where the hell have *you* been the past two decades? This has always been how Microsoft releases 'iterations' of a platform.
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|@DatabaseBen: Have you tried using Windows 7 yet? I'm using it right now, it beats Vista in any way you look at it, and I would rather not go back to Vista. Come to think of it, if I tried to go back to XP, I would end up missing some of the features in Windows 7 like mousing over a preview on the taskbar to get a full-screen preview.
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|It'll be interesting to see how piss-poor this turns out to inevitably be.
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|Such cynicism! Why don't you wait and see before expecting the worst?
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|I'm running a beta of win7 and its a far beta o/s than vista, lets just see what the full version brings before we slate old Bill :-)
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