Microsoft: A Multi-Touching Moment!

Microsoft today demoed the new multi-touch portion of their next gen operating system Windows 7 yesterday at the All Things Digital conference. For those not familiar with multi-touch, it was brought into the main stream by Apple’s iPhone in June of last year and lets users concurrently use multiple touches on their device’s screen to perform commands or actions. An example is using a pinching motion with your fingers to zoom in when viewing a picture. The video below is a great demonstration of Windows 7 multi-touch capabilities.

The interesting comment from Microsoft is that Multi-Touch will be built throughout the operating system. This change can be a dramatic one for programmers who will need to learn new APIs and coding tools to take advantage of the technology. As the technology is expected to be integrated into the next versions of Linux and Mac OS, we certainly hope that there is commonality when it is integrated into browser technology. The next version of the One Laptop Per Child XO2 model will have multi-touch capabilities and will run both Windows 7 and Linux which confirms that development is underway on the Linux operating system. As the iPhone runs a full version of Mac OS X Leopard and contains multi-touch capabilities, Apple already has the technology to integrate it into their desktop OS version.

Integrating multi-touch into the browsers will be a bit more tricky. If Microsoft incorporates it into their IE browser using ActiveX functions, they will be limiting use of Microsoft-based code (.Net) to work only with IE browsers on PCs running Windows 7.

Regardless, while companies like Apple are more secretive on their development pipeline and may be incorporating this technology into their next gen operating system, this is a major announcement from Microsoft. It will completely change the way we interact with our desktop and laptop computers. Timing of this announcement may also have been made to trump Apple who may be making a similar announcement at their World Wide Developers Conference set to begin June 9th.

The Multi-Touch OS race is on!

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7