'Microsoft Research slides' show touch-enabled Office - report Leaked screenshots have been posted online purportedly showing the UI for Office Touch for Windows 8. The slides are part of a presentation posted by Microsoft Research that is now no longer available. Versions of slides were still on mirror sites at time of writing. The presentation was caught by Winsupersite’s Paul Thurrott …
"since the hardware is flaky and noticeably less accurate than pen and paper" Obviously coming from someone who has never used a wacom stylus and I've never got paper to zoom in for extra resolution, it seems to be stuck at one resolution.
I can't believe that MS think they have come up with something new or innovative. I guess we'll not be able to use the noun Ink any longer as it will be corporate property like most usefull english words seem to be.
I use Excel on my WinP quite successfully
I create spreadsheets on the PC, save them to OneDrive and then in meeting display them on the screen through PhotoBeamer. Instant corrections and changes
All works rather well.
Its all about using the appropriate tool at the appropriate time.
But I find that when one tries to work with touchy things, you end having your hands blocking your view all the time.
I think MS will invest millions and millions of dollars of research into developing something that very few people will end using.
Unless they force it like the ribbon.
There is a really really simple solution to the "fingers getting in the way" problem. I'm not being sarcastic there. It's one thing I hate with touch, but a mouse pointer does not obscure the screen overly so.
I'll not mention the solution, as it's trivially easy. I'm just gob-smacked no one has implemented it yet. Perhaps they fear a submarine patent?
Ah, I do love a mouse and keyboard. But it's not a solution for mobiles (even I can't use them on my chest while walking... though I'm tempted to try). :D
As said, the solution to fingers getting in the way of typing/pointing on a touch screen is very easy to solve. I think I have seen it implemented in one instance, using existing tech. That is, they could roll out an update to all mobile OSs tomorrow with no hardware changes and it would work... Why they don't is beyond me.
They instead add air gestures or similarly problematic, not quite touching but detecting, touch hardware. :(
..you know, an interface that takes your hands away from they keyboard, in a clearly keyboard driven application, is the same festering tagnut who deigned it suitable to remove the search functionality from the latest update to Remote Desktop Client for Mac, and not provide any suitable 'sort' or arrangement functionality beyond clicking and dragging, so the dozens of RDP connections I have are now just a random list, with no ability to find a single fucking thing.
Seriously, I'm not even exaggerating for effect - the only way that I can find to use RDP for Mac now is to find one RDP out of potentially dozens, and click and drag it to the top - or somewhere. And it dumps any new connections you make at the very bottom.
I swear sometimes (or often) Microsoft really do just come up with shit like this to fuck with our heads for their own amusement, the shit-eating thunder-twunts that they are.
(sorry for the excessive swearyness, mods, but I can't tell you the number of times over the last few days this has had me putting my head in my hands as I try to find one RDP connection out of 50-odd to get access to a server, doubting myself as to whether I'd created one, etc...)
Steven "fuck this shit" Raith.
I'm convinced it's a matter of arrogance ... pure, unrestrained arrogance, if not thinly veiled contempt for the user. I first experienced this years ago with programmers who could not be bothered to a) step back and fix bugs, rather than charge ahead with yet-another "cool feature" and b) pressing ahead with change for the sake of change, because of a general "if it works, it's boring!" attitude. That, coupled with an impatient disregard for documenting their product, made the user experience more frustrating than productive.
Corporate interests are better served by all of the above (bug hunting is costly, documentation is an expensive, shifting target, and change for change sake keeps sales churning. Besides all that, mega-corp is a monopoly and the customer is locked in ... so who should give a flying freck about user concerns?
I agree. However, although I'm more a sort of open source guy than corporate by choice (though I have to be the opposite professionally) I feel compelled to point out that change-for-changes-sake is not purely corporate, otherwise we wouldn't have had the Gnome / Unity fiasco.
That's one hell of a niche usage case you have there. Also, voice input/recog is a different scenario to touch and often diametrically oppposed to it as there are only a few cases for using it.
if you're using voice input and recognition to control office, you're probably doing so because you don't have hands or eyes that are capable of dealing with a keyboard or a touchscreen, depending on their disability (which means a touchscreen would be worse in most cases). I know people who have this problem; they don't use tablets or touchscreens for a reason, and it's not personal taste - they are physically incapable of it for various reasons.
Or you might be using it as a novelty, in which case it'll wear off quick when you realise keyboard and mouse is faster, and saves you moving your hands away from the core input methods. As a touchscreen does.
Or you're just Doing It Wrong. There might be other reasons, but I can't see 'em.
If that's the best you can come up with against my post, then you have absolutely nothing.
Steven R
@Steven Raith: Office has supported Ink and touch input for years, but this is about making it work better. If you actually watch the presentation it is very explicitly NOT about replacing the keyboard and mouse, but augmenting them in scenarios where it is suitable to do so.
Ah, the slideshow on the mirror loaded for me this time (I thought it had been taken down after getting no loading when I tried it initially - might just have been my internet being spotty), and you're not wrong - that looks like a good improvement on the current Windows touch language.
It's still highly dependant on usage cases though - I can think of nothing more annoying than trying to sketch on a laptop/desktop screen, and so far Windows tablets have minimal traction in the marketplace because, quite frankly, they aren't up to snuff at this stage; from my experience of them they are still overpriced, overhot, overweight, with poor UX on the touch side once you fall out of Metroland (which works pretty well in a touch scenario, doubters be damned) - the thing is that you don't want to use them as a tablet if you see what I mean. They are closer to ultrabooks without keyboards.
So I'll grant you, the main thrust of my ANGRY ANGRY was misdirected.
I still enjoyed having a rant though. ;-)
Upvote for steering me back to retrying, and edifying me, good sir. Which was far, far more constructive and instructive than ACs rahter attempt at point scoring (and my ranting)
Steven R
"the division works on long-term ideas that take a while to feed into products"
good to see that El Reg knows quite something about MS Research 8^)
Wonder if anyone has a number how much of the MS Research ideas ever made it into a product.
Should be a small number.
Research labs are not about driving product innovation - they're here to file patents.
/Zane
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