
"On Monday in San Francisco we took the wraps off of the new Office's touch experience designed for Windows 8. We showed the new touch-optimized Windows 8-style app for OneNote, and we showed how we've touch-enabled Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other apps on the desktop. The new Office is designed for a great experience whether you're sitting on a couch with a tablet, or at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. It makes common tasks fast, fluid, and intuitive, while still enabling the rich capabilities required to create high-quality documents.
In this post I'll walk you through the thinking, engineering process and design framework we used to reimagine these experiences for touch."
Member since:
2009-05-19
All that reaching over the keyboard to touch the screen also looks like a recipe for backache.
It makes much less sense than you might imagine. Serious CAD users have two input devices - the Spaceball, which allows the user to simultaneously rotate and zoom on a given part, and the mouse to select and perform operations. In other words, multiple inputs requiring both hands, driving many buttons and quite a bit of experience and expertise to drive it all properly.
I *cannot* for life of me see touchscreens as a replacement.
It can perhaps augment it in some scenarios, but as a replacement it would be a serious backwards step. Would you operate it with the screen in front of you? Or would it be lying down on the table? Both are ergonomic nightmares.
It seems to me that some people perceive mobile platform technologies (particularly touchscreens) as a panacea to all prior computer interface evils. IMHO, it will probably settle in as the preferred way for browsing the net and/or other "casual user" computer uses. I just don't see it as the all encompassing future that some do.
I do like the touchscreen for drawing however, an Android tablet with the Sensubrush and SketchBookX is great fun. I'm still not sure if it's better than my Wacom tablet for accuracy though!