

Is Microsoft Right About Touchscreen Computers? - Snapps
http://mashable.com/2012/10/31/microsoft-is-right-about-touch/

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adriand
On the rare occasions when my five-year-old son gets his hands on my Macbook,
he frequently tries to interact with it by tapping and swiping the screen.
Growing up with tablets around, this is natural to him. I know that's just one
anecdote, but it's enough to make me think that the OP is right that regular,
non-tablet computers will commonly have touch screens.

~~~
pm90
I think a lot of the people saying that Windows 8 is the most terrible mistake
are forgetting precisely this. Dell has just released a series of
laptop/tablet hybrids running win8, and also has _Desktops_ with touchscreen.
I think Microsoft has done a great job by facilitating this transition(to "all
computers with touchscreen") with win8. Now that a major Software has a touch-
based paradigm, hardware vendors will have the courage to switch over as well.
Oh, I can't wait to see how the future will shape out!

~~~
eupharis
Wow. This is mindblowing. I just went through the thought/body experiment:

On your desktop/laptop, assume you already have a touchscreen and everything
works perfectly. Assume every swipe interaction you have ever used works
perfectly.

Interact with the computer. Navigate around the computer. Drag and drop files.
Surf around the internet. Click tabs and hyperlinks and whatever with the
mouse, with touch, even with tab+space, whatever feels natural.

Do it. Seriously, literally do it. Go through the motions.

~~~
pm90
I see what you're getting at, and I agree that it feels quite clunky....now.
But I wouldn't be so dismissive quite yet. What if in the future you could
detach your screen and keep it on the table? Now, you have an actual "surface"
(just like a tablet). You can play games with others on this surface . Maybe,
divide the screens and then have everyone use part of their screen for their
own work. (I'm just listing what I could think of doing with a really large
tablet)

My point is simply that once we have touchscreens on every desktop, it might
enable ways to interact with your computer that we might not even have thought
of yet.

edit: added "similarity to tablet" part

~~~
Radix_
'Mindblowing' is nearly always a positive thing. I think your comment really
made an impression. I did as he said, lounging here with my laptop, and it
really was a nice feeling to have the option to reach up and scroll the page
with my thumb. I'd like to put three fingers down and tap my left most finger
to shuffle tabs but that's impossible now. I'm looking forward to future
hardware.

~~~
pm90
Oh, I wasn't sure whether eupharis was being sarcastic. Thanks for clarifying
that!

~~~
eupharis
Yep, no sarcasm meant. :) Now I just can't wait to actually have a touchscreen
and have all my software work flawlessly with it!

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edanm
The BEST thing about a MacBook laptop, in my opinion, is the trackpad. The
ability, even if it's only partial, to scroll with gestures, move things
around by "dragging them" with 3 fingers, and so on, is simply so much nicer
than any use of a mouse.

I don't really know why, I just know that it makes me really happy to use the
trackpad. It feels natural.

This, to me, is a sign that we are definitely heading towards _something_ that
involves Touch to a much larger degree.

I can't imagine touch being on every computer monitor, because my arm would
get tired. I mean, I'm now leaning back on my chair with my keyboard on my
lap, with my monitor pretty far away - I wouldn't be able to do that if I had
to touch the monitor. Still, the world of computer interaction is going to be
a very interesting one over the next few years, that's guaranteed.

These are really great times we're living in.

~~~
jonah
This.

the touchpad on your laptop is around the size as the screen on your
smartphone. They use hand/wrist-sized motions. This is fast and efficient.

Scaling a touchscreen up to laptop or desktop size is a completely different
set of motions. Your whole arm gets involved and your fingers have to travel
much further to achieve the same motion.

I think the mapped indirect manipulation of a trackpad makes a lot more sense
from a human factors perspective.

[edit clarity]

~~~
DaveMebs
Why do you consider these to be mutually exclusive forms of input? Just
because you can touch a screen doesn't mean that all other forms of input are
no longer applicable.

~~~
jonah
I don't.

I do think the ergonometrics of using touch on a large(ish) vertical display -
"Gorilla Arm"[1] - is a deal breaker for extended interaction.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726394>

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chrismorgan
The article's title is "Microsoft Is Right About Touchscreen Computers", not
the interrogative form as this post's title currently is. It should be
corrected.

~~~
damian2000
The submitter probably disagreed with the article's conclusion.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines>

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jonah
I'm still not convinced that "touchscreen computers" will help with general
purpose content creation.

I have yet to see how touching the screen will help me write software (or a
word document for that matter) better or that my finger is precise enough to
design with.

Content consumption, web browsing, social sharing, all that stuff sure. I have
modern smartphone and a couple tablets - they're pretty awesome. But bringing
extending the touchscreen paradigm to the machine I use to do "work" - I'm
just not seeing it yet.

~~~
dagw
_that my finger is precise enough to design with_

So use a pen when you need precision. The designers I know that have Wacom
cintiq screens love them to death.

~~~
jonah
The ones I know do too. That's a different interface paradigm though.

Pen is not suitable a general purpose pointing device to use in conjunction
with any type of (onscreen or physical) keyboard.

* Tap on the screen to set carat * Put down pen * Type * Pick up pen * Click something else

Just no good.

For design / illustration pen is fantastic. You don't even need to have a
Cintiq, a standard tablet works almost as well. I'll bet you money though,
when most designers are doing other things, managing files, browsing the web,
writing, etc. they put down the pen and pick up their mouse.

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potatolicious
I think Microsoft is, at least in concept, on to something.

Whether or not they're _right_ is a matter of execution - not only on their
part, but on the part of the OEMs who have a nasty habit of doing the most
short-sighted things possible.

A general purpose tablet computer, with the right feature set, with the right
price point, and most importantly, with the right user experience, can be
_huge_. But of all the Win8 devices I've seen, none of them are close enough.

~~~
Mythbusters
Right is subjective. Care to explain? Maybe there is no single device that
gets everything right? But are there separate devices that each got one aspect
right? Care to give examples?

My pint is that Windows ecosystem is all about diversity. If there exist
separate devices, some manufacturer will bring the together.

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mgkimsal
I played with 3 Win8 touchscreen computers at a store the other day. The big
'all in one' one - from HP I think - was just not good. You might get used to
it, but I didn't like it. The dragging - which you end up having to do a lot
of - was pretty slow, and no amount of poking around in the system settings
showed a way to change the responsiveness. Secondly, it doesn't seem that
there's any sort of speed sensitivity - flicking an ipad screen fast or slow
changes the speed of the scrolling; that didn't seem to be the case on the
systems I used (nor on my win8 system here, but it's not touch).

The two touch-enabled laptops I tested were more responsive and a better
experience, although the speed of scrolling issue was still there. I suspect
hardcore geeks may not adapt to these for some time - they're very 'eye candy'
focused, and reduce your ability to do things with keystrokes. For the crowd
that still meticulously watches their hand move to the mouse, then moves the
eyes back to the screen to watch the mouse move, slowly, up to a menu, then
click, then wait, then select an option, when just hitting 'ctrl-s' would do
the trick, I suspect they'll like touchscreens for more of their daily work.
Me? For now it'll be a niche thing.

~~~
canistr
I've used Windows 8 on an Lenovo X220 Tablet and would have to say that in
terms of touch-response, it's incredibly accurate and fast. It's most
noticeable in the Maps app where I can zoom in and out really quickly.

And because so many of my devices are touchscreens now, it's really natural to
want to touch the screen and do something when I don't want to use my mouse,
trackpad, or trackpoint. It's so commonplace that I'm finding that I'm trying
to touch the screen on my Macbook Air too.

~~~
fpgeek
I know exactly what you're talking about. After I started using my ASUS
Transformer last year, I had to consciously train myself to not touch my
laptop and desktop screens. That was painful enough that I'm firmly convinced
that adding touchscreens is an important part of the future of traditional
PCs.

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knieveltech
So touchscreen's coming back into vogue? Great in a tablet format. For
standard computer monitors this is a major ergonomics no-no:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22>

Of course if this leads to light-table style hardware that could be pretty
awesome.

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TimGebhardt
Well don't forget that they were doing tablets all the way back in 2002. They
just didn't have the foresight or guts to revamp the ecosystem around it. So
the tablets didn't work because they needed to take advantage of the existing
mouse-based Windows ecosystem of software, most of which was just too
cumbersome to use on a tablet with a stylus.

It took the internet about 10 years to really take off too and there were a
lot of visionaries in the early 90s that just couldn't survive until the
hockey stick growth really started to take off and validate their assessments.

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jefflinwood
I went to the Microsoft Store to see if the Surface RT was worth picking up -
I ended up being more impressed by the touchscreen Intel notebooks they had
out running Windows 8.

I do think Microsoft is on to something with Touch and their new UI.
Unfortunately, I felt that the touch interface was pretty useless on the old
Windows 7 UI and MS Office.

I wonder how much confusion there will be with the move to Touch, and
non-"Windows Modern UI"/Metro apps. It feels like Apple is moving OS X towards
iOS and touch friendly, but they are doing it very gradually.

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WalterBright
Having a laptop with a touchscreen is a surprisingly big deal. Big enough that
I bought one for just that feature, and the Apple laptops without it seemed
suddenly old fashioned.

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splicer
I think the reason Apple reversed the default trackpad two finger scroll
direction is because they plan on releasing Macs with touchscreens in the near
future.

~~~
CrankyPants
I always figured it was to match iOS.

~~~
vvhn
I agree. Most people's first Apple device these days is an iDevice and if they
go on to get a Mac as well, they get greeted by familiar things like
launchpad, scrolling etc. .

~~~
CrankyPants
Yeah, the Gateway Drug factor here is huge.

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allertonm
There might be something to this. Despite Jobs' statements about the
usefulness (or otherwise) of upright touch screens, accessory manufacturers
have been catering to people who want to use their iPad upright literally
since day one. Apple itself is doing this with the Smart Cover. So if that's
OK, does adding a physical keyboard laid flat to the equation somehow turn it
wrong? Seems like a stretch.

~~~
corporalagumbo
I completely agree with you. I just want to get this one point off my chest
though: why do people put so much stock on Jobs' public pronouncements? He was
wrong on so many occasions, either on purpose (to conceal Apple's intentions)
or just plain mistaken, enough times that his statements really are pretty
much worthless for any sort of evaluation of current tech or prognostication
about future. Average people maybe can keep holding him up as a faultless
visionary but HN should see him as he as: less a visionary and more just
someone who liked to always present a front of total certainty, regardless of
whether there was something or nothing to back that certainty up. I.e. Jobs
was a salesman primarily interested in selling Apple products in the short-
term - not a deep-thinking omniscient prophet.

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mmanfrin
What's with the editorializing of the articles title here?

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nextstep
This whole article got me excited! Maybe Windows 8/RT and Surface aren't a
miserable failure. I'm hopefully because at the very least, this will force
Apple to innovate harder.

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ivarchan
having a touch screen when writing touch enabled HTML5 games has come in handy

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drivebyacct2
I think people are really missing the point of Surface if they think that the
focus is on touch+classic. It's about supporting classic. And supporting
touch. And it does, Metro-with-mouse takes getting used to, but it can be
done.

The Surface RT can play the iPad role.

The Surface Pro can play the iPad role _and_ the laptop role.

That's why what Microsoft is doing is risky but has the potential for user
value: For some reason, people really want to use Android apps on their
computer. Think about the number of apps and games that would be available?
That's what Microsoft is getting out of this. Developers get to target both
casual users and pro users. And pro users who are casual users after 5PM.

I don't plan to buy a Surface, but I see a lot more potential than I think
others are really willing to see if they're honest with themselves.

