Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk... Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 -- some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers -- they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called "the smallest snippet" of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell
Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the "three years after Vista" mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we'll take what we can get at this point.
Update: Video added after the break. Enjoy! [Thanks, Dan Z.]
posted May 27th 2008 10:30PM
im pretty positive this is for tablet laptops and not for your monitors at your desk.
I own a tablet, and having multitouch would be great.
vista's handwriting recognition is the best, and with multitouch it will make my experience better since i wont have to switch out of tablet mode to do stuff.
Multi-touch is cool and all but I would rather have WinFS or another ground breaking function.
And this just proves that the consumer always benefits from competition, thank you Apple. Although I think MS still owns large portion of market share but those apple commercials sure do paint a different picture.
I think that the real reason that they brought out this video clip, is to take attention away from the failure of Vista. Their message is this, although not stated bluntly - "Vista sucks, but look how great the new and improved Windows is!"
Oooh, Multitouch. I can be just like Leonardo, and paint with all 10 fingers at once. Or, I can move, rotate and resize pictures on my screen - all without actually editing them. Wow. I can just imagine what it will do for my MP3s. It will let me touch the screen, move a conductors wand, and not hear the effect. Useful.
They just said a day ago or so, that Windows 7 will not have a shiny new microkernal, and the computer industry shook it's head in disbelief. I bet it won't have WinFS either.
I have used Vista - as a contracted IT guy, I have to know it. It is slow, clunky, bloated (Installed from a Windows DVD) and has compatibility issues. It is secure to the point where you turn off the warnings, or stop reading them and just click through warnings potentially damaging your system. It is unstable. Have you ever done one of their snappy searches? Like most Windows upgrades, they moved around the furniture, changed the drapes and replaced the carpet. Mostly everything they did was cosmetic, not structural.
I am a Mac convert. They work. They are stable. You can do some very cool things with them. The OS is secure without annoying you with prompts. I spend more time working on my Mac than fixing it - unlike my Windows boxes. If an application crashes, the whole system doesn't burn with it. I can do everything on my Mac than I can do on my PC. Except games of course where I use a game console - neither a PC nor a Mac.
Mac OS X Leopard comes in one flavour - not six or eight or whatever Vista comes in - Ultimate, Business, economy, utility and homeless shelter.
I think that Apple is going to garner a greater market share in the near future. There are stats that are showing this to be true already. Apple builds great products that work, they play nice with each other, and are easy to use. Microsoft on the other hand is killing XP within the next two months forcing you, me and everyone else to choose Vista if we wish to stay within Windows. XP might not be the prettiest, but it is the most stable of all the Windows versions. Forcing us to buy an inferior OS is not the most consumer friendly way of doing business and keeping customers.
I do wish Apple would release an Approved Hardware list, so that some of us could build powerful, Mac clones that run Leopard legally.
@Slippery Snake
"The OS is secure without annoying you with prompts."
I'm not saying the Apple OS isn't secure, but they have a HELL OF A LOT LESS viruses and security attacks to deal with than any Windows OS. Come back and talk when the OSX has as many viruses and malware built for it as Windows does.
"If an application crashes, the whole system doesn't burn with it."
What the hell are you talking about? This was a pre-Win95 problem. Stop living in the past, man.
"I can do everything on my Mac than I can do on my PC."
DUH, you can install Windows on your Mac.
"Mac OS X Leopard comes in one flavour - not six or eight or whatever Vista comes in - Ultimate, Business, economy, utility and homeless shelter."
Since when did offering different sets of features to different classes of users become a flaw? I guess Apple doesn't have that problem since they only have one class of user: the douche (like you).
I'm personally quite excited about the opportunity to write applications that take advantage of this functionality. I could care less who dreamed it up first.
Not trying to incite any riots, but I have been using Vista at home for a month or so now on an 18-month old Dell XPS 400 and I don't see what's so terrible about it, I've had minor issues with my webcam driver, but other than that it has been a pretty good experience so far. I think they did a great job with Media Center (I have used TiVo, DirecTV's DVR, and Time Warner's DVR previously and I would rate Media Center as a tie for first with TiVo in that list). I also like all the (file) explorer metadata enhancements (tag editing, rating, etc) for photos and music.
mutlitouch in windidows? for me - useless . see no sense touching my screen with fingers.
@generally.
Apparently you don't use Windows much. Applications crashing can cause the whole system to go down. It is not a pre-95 issue. You are telling me that you have never had an app crash in Windows and had to never restart your computer because its locked? You must have the most stable version of Windows ever.
Yes, not only can I install Windows on my Mac, there are similar programs available for my Mac that have the same functionality as software for Windows. Meaning, anything you can do on a Windows box, you can do on a Mac, with Mac software. Which is what I was said, but apparently was too subtle for you to pick up on.
As far as Flaws go, offering Windows is many different flavors is not a flaw, but it is a way for Microsoft to upsell to customers. They consistently do this with stuff they sell. The Xbox for example does not come with WiFi. However, the PS3 does, the Wii does, the lowly Nintendo DS does. To get added functionality, Microsoft always charges more whereas Apple doesn''t really do this.
As far as innovation goes, Microsoft does not have much of it. Apple does. Microsoft always plays catch up after a technology becomes popular. Apple releases an IPod, and M$ comes out with a Zune, Sony and Nintendo, release game machines, then out comes Microsoft., Apple released the first commercially available computer with a graphical user interface (First the Lisa, then the Mac), so did Commodore and Atari then Microsoft followed a few YEARS later. How about Netscape Navigator, then M$ includes IE with their version of Windows, driving Netscape out of the browser business. Even MS DOS was not an innovation of theirs. IBM gave them the source code to upgrade IBM DOS to a newer version, which they did, but then in turn used it as a basis for MS DOS which they sold to computer manufacturers and the general public. Aero and Flip, was Sun Microsystems invention which they wanted, so they settled nicely on the Sun Java Lawsuit to get their hands on it. I cannot think of one thing that Microsoft has developed that is an original idea of theirs, and not ripped off or bought from someone else. Microsoft is anything but innovative, imitative but not innovative. I suppose, that they did invent the Start button.
As a side note, someone mentioned in this thread, that Windows was the first with Pre-emptive multitasking. Wrong! The first computer available to the public that did that was the Commodore Amiga 1000 which was released in 1985. It could do it well on a measly 256 K of RAM, and the multitasking was built into the hardware, not the OS. An Amiga could emulate a PC years before a PC could emulate an Amiga - it was that advanced.
Why the fuck do they keep on showing us people moving photos around and resizing them, we already know we can do that and its not even something anyone wants to do anyway!