Windows 7 Touch

Having gotten the Dell Studio touch past the birthing pains of Windows 7, it really is a sweet platform. The hardware supports multitouch input, but the Vista operating system that it was shipped with barely supported it.

However, W7 supports multitouch WM_TOUCH messages natively.

The Windows 7 Touch Pack is supposed to be installed by OEM only, and only on hardware that is approved by Microsoft. (This makes sense, since if they installed the Touch Pack on hardware that was single touch, it would come across quite lame). I acquired a grey-market version of Windows 7 Touch that was floating around on the 'Net, and it works fantastically. The 3D Multitouch Virtual Earth supports single hand rotate, pan, zoom, etc. It's quite cool. Mind you, I do remember using a similar interface in 1995 on a SGI :)

There's also a surprisingly satisfying photo collage making tool via Microsoft Surface, and an interactive fish pond. The very thing, indeed.

I'm looking forward to making a really first class user interface with this stuff.