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RSS FeedsMicrosoft Touch Pack Brings Surface Style Apps To Windows 7
Category: SoftwarePosted: May 28, 2009 12:42PM
Author: jammin
We have known from pretty early on in the development of Windows 7 that the new OS would feature much improved support for applications which make use of touch as an input source. At the moment, there isn't a lot of hardware out there that can utilise touch, but Microsoft is continuing to give the technology more exposure with the announcement of the Touch Pack for Windows 7. The pack is a collection of six multi-touch enabled applications, which were developed in close collaboration with the Surface team and are designed to showcase the kind of touch features Windows 7 brings to the table.
So what exactly does the pack include, and is there anything in there that could be called a 'useful' application? Well, included are three surface applications: Surface Globe, Surface Collage and Surface Lagoon along with three casual games: Blackboard, Rebound and Garden Pond. The Surface apps are very much the kind of thing you would expect to see popping up on Micosoft's table computer of the same name, with Surface Globe using data from Virtual Earth 3D to give you navigation of the world with your fingertips. Collage should look very familiar, giving you a place to arrange and explore your favourite photos as if you were laying them out on a coffee table. Surface Lagoon is an interactive screensaver of the fishy variety. Looking at the games we have Microsoft Blackboard, a physics puzzle where you manipulate gears, fans and other objects in an attempt to move balloons and balls towards light bulbs. Rebound appears to be a variation on the classic game of Pong and Garden Pond has yuo moving origami boats around a pond to complete various goals.
According to the Windows 7 Team blog, Microsoft will be making the Touch Pack available to PC builders, who will have the choice of pre-installing as many (or as little) of the apps as they see fit. That means you can expect to see the apps popping up on touch enabled hardware when Windows 7 is released. While the applications will no doubt make up a nice exhibition of how touch can be used on a computer, I'm not so sure it will do much to change how people feel about touch on PCs as a whole. It seems likely that touch will become part of interactions with PCs more and more, but I think it is reasonably safe to say the release of Windows 7 won't see a sudden explosion of its use.
