Roberto Mateu

The most exciting thing about the demo of Multi-Touch in Windows 7 at the D: conference is that it clearly shows that this is the next step of the desktop metaphor. Many will argue that this was evident even before the iPhone introduction. But for a while I felt there were some doubts about how useful Touch interfaces would be for current OS’s in the short-term.

The issue for me is that unlike mobile or “flat” devices the usefulness of a touch interface over keyboard and mouse is debatable. Yes, it’s very cool to pinch a picture to change its size. But is it quicker or easier than holding the corner of the window with the mouse?

For me the OLPC version 2 concept was a real eye opener. I now see a touch-screen based keyboard as part of the evolution of the PC hardware. As soon as a good enough way to provide feedback on the screen is introduced, a screen based keyboard will appear. Hard clicks keyboard purist will be up in arms, but even current Apple keyboards provide minimal feedback in a very thing package.

We still need to see what is Apple’s approach to the technology on the PC. Unlike Microsoft they understand that current desktop interfaces aren’t optimized for anything else than mouse and keyboard (I’m looking at you Tablet PC). In any case, with Windows 7 coming in 2010, it sure looks like the next few years are going to be exciting once again in the UI department.