Desktop Touchscreens
Desktop Touchscreens
One of the most striking effects of Apple's (AAPL) success with the iPhone is that it has made us think of touch as a natural and efficient way to interact with our electronic tools.
Nowadays, touch-sensitive screens from big vendors are moving way beyond devices such as Apple's iPhone.
Touch-sensitive screens have been around for some years, but until the development of a technology called capacitive touch—the sort used on the iPhone—the displays were intended for use with a pen or stylus. Capacitive touch gives reasonably precise results even when poked with a fat finger. And, more important, the new screens can sense multiple touches at once, enabling sophisticated ways of interacting, such as using your fingers to stretch or shrink images on the screen.
Mermaid Ventura Desktop Touchsceen
A New Latitude
Touch will come to PCs in a big way after the release of Microsoft's Windows 7. The latest version of Windows includes extensive support for multi-touch screens. Big vendors have just come out with a variety of touch-computers that can be used without a keyboard.
At the simplest level, your finger is a mouse. That idea may be familiar if you have used an iPhone or seen it demonstrated on TV, but somehow it's more revolutionary on a larger device running work-related programs. Touching an onscreen object selects it, tapping an icon or link acts as a mouse click. If you hold your finger on the title bar of a window, you can drag the window around the screen. The same gesture on the edge or bottom of the window lets you increase the size or shrink it.
Intuitive Touch Tricks
That's helpful, but not all that surprising. I was more taken with the ability, in some programs, to scroll through content in the window by sliding my finger up and down or side to side. Pinching or stretching out two fingers on the screen lets you shrink or expand the contents of a window, so you can zoom in or out on a Web page, map, or picture.
There are some other two-finger tricks. If you touch something on the screen with one finger down and tap with a second, you bring up a menu of content-specific actions, the equivalent of a right click. In Windows Photo Gallery, you can rotate a picture with a circular gesture using two fingers. And tapping an icon at the edge of the screen brings up a big onscreen keyboard designed for use with fingers rather than a stylus.
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