Windows 7 multi-touch SDK being readied for PDC in October

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

May 28, 2008, 4:38 PM

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As we saw last year with the first demonstrations of Surface development, a gadget that can be used in a Surface application can essentially be the same gadget used in everyday Windows, just wrapped within a new and more versatile container. That container can then be assigned to the Surface container, which is an alternate space that doesn't have to abide by all the rules of the Windows desktop. There, most importantly, a gadget can be sensitive to more than one thing happening at a time; it can register something that takes place on multiple sets of screen coordinates (generally two) as a single event -- something which MFC could never do.

In the Surface world, as Microsoft's first demos showed, a gadget can be stretched and shrunk using two-handed or two-fingered gestures. It can be tossed around and spun, and depending on the level of physics in play at the time, gadgets can pretend to adhere to laws of gravity. This way a Surface display hanging on a wall, for instance, can contain gadgets which, when pinned, descend toward the floor rather than float as if in space.

These are the types of extensions made possible by WPF, and many of these same types of extensions were seen in the videos released yesterday by Microsoft, including windows that spin around -- something typical applications windows in Windows have never done before.

But as the Surface demo showed, the world inside Surface works essentially by registering itself within the underlying Windows kernel as a world within a world. It is an application, as far as Windows knows; and like a Tablet PC app that enables semantic gestures where the rest of Windows won't, a Surface demo is a world of enhanced physics, the likes of which have never been attempted on a Windows desktop.

So the question becomes this: What type of world is Windows 7? Will it adapt a Tablet PC-like model, where the real gist of the enhancements are available only to applications that are "multi-touch-aware?" Or can it open existing Windows applications to the realm of touch sensitivity? Put another way: Could today's Office 2007, running in Windows 7, allow its main application window to be stretched by two hands? Or will the types of functions we saw yesterday only be feasible to developers using the new Windows 7 multi-touch SDK, the existence of which was first confirmed this morning?

We may not know the answer to this next month, when Microsoft throws its TechEd conference in Orlando. But we know that we will know the answer by October; and we can infer from that news the fact that Windows 7 system developers' kits at a very low level will be distributable to developers this fall.