Windows 7
Why Windows 7?
One of the biggest changes in Microsoft's Windows 7 will be integrated support for touchscreen devices. The operating system has been tweaked to make it easier to interact with a computer using your fingers or a stylus, whether your system also has a keyboard and mouse or not. These multi-touch controls, familiar to Apple iPhone users, will now also be available to Windows 7 users.
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How about another BBC video showing the power of Touchscreen?
Windows Touch will be a "first class way to interact with your PC alongside mouse and keyboard," said the firm. They say that multi-touch PCs will become popular in retail, public spaces, on laptops and "kitchen PCs".
As we have already stated, a small number of multi-touch PCs are already on the market, including the HP TouchSmart and the Dell Latitude XT, and Microsoft now hopes that Windows 7 will create a new ecosystem of devices that take advantage of touch.
Microsoft has launched a Windows Touch Logo program, which will help consumers understand if a machine has been optimised for the new control system.
The new Windows taskbar is designed with larger buttons allowing you to click or drag for thumbnail previews of running programs, which works great on touchscreen devices. The Aero Snap feature makes it easy to resize windows by dragging and dropping them, and the Aero Peek button in the taskbar will be a bit wider and easier to hit with your finger on computers with Touch features.
Also, Microsoft has improved the on-screen keyboard so that keys now glow when you press them, giving a better sense of feedback.
Programs like Internet Explorer 8 have also been designed with touch in mind, with panning and zooming built into the UI.
Windows Touch will features controls such as tap and double tap, drag, scroll, zoom, flick and rotate. There will also be a number of new touch gestures that can be used throughout the operating system.
For instance, you can tap or double click on programs or drag them around just as if you were using a mouse, but now you can also press and hold the screen to simulate a right click. Scrolling in programs can be achieved by dragging your finger up or down in the app itself, not just on the scrollbar and pinching your fingers together or pulling them apart zooms in and out of photos or documents. You can rotate images by touching the screen at two points and twisting your fingers.
In a posting on the Windows 7 engineering blog, the team leading Touch developments said: "Quite a few folks have been a little sceptical of touch, often commenting about having fingerprints on their monitor or something along those lines. "We think touch will become broadly available as the hardware evolves."
Microsoft says Windows Touch will be much more than just a "touch shell" for Windows. "We made sure you are getting the full Windows 7 experience," the blog post said. While some applications will be optimised for touch, such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Centre, programs which are "touch unaware" will also have some level of touch control. "For example, if someone tries touch scrolling over a window that is touch unaware, we can detect the presence of various types of scrollbars and scroll them," the engineers said.
To help optimise the different ways of touching and gesturing Microsoft said it analysed data from "thousands of samples from hundreds of people".
Windows 7 is expected to be released at the start of 2010. A "release candidate" for users to try out is already available at the microsoft web site.
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