When Vista launched, a major difficulty for users was the lack of availability of drivers. (Actually, in fact, there are lots of devices that still don’t have drivers and may never will, but that’s another story.) Microsoft appears to be making a concerted effort with Windows 7 this time to avoid this stituation. For instance, the company is trying to keep the driver model the same as Vista’s in order to avoid stirring up the driver update problem again.
However, the fundamental challenge of keeping the hardware and the hardware/software ecosystem up to date with the changes that Windows 7 does support is non trivial. Steven Sinofsky describes some of the challenges involved in his blog post here as he outlines how Microsoft switches from Windows 7 beta to working on the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
“…we’re now seeing how releasing Windows is not something that Microsoft does “solo”, but rather is something that we do as one part of the overall PC ecosystem. Obviously we have a big responsibility to do our part, one we take very seriously of course. The last stages of a Windows release are a partnership across the entire ecosystem working to make sure that the incredible variety of choices you have for PCs, software, and peripherals work together to bring you a complete and satisfying Windows 7 experience.”
No truer is this than with the new multi-touch features in Windows 7.
As of today there’s only a handful of hardware that supports multi-touch and getting good Windows 7-compatible drivers for them is illustrating how difficult it can be to support new features.
As of today, the most widely available devices I’m aware of that potentially support multi-touch are the:
HP TouchSmart all-in-one display: Uses NextWindow two-point optical touch
HP TX2, uses N-Trig duosense capacitive touch and pen capable digitizer
Dell Latitude Tablet PC, also uses N-Trig duosense digitizer which is multi-touch capable and also supports pen
On the notebook/Tablet PC side it appears that the N-Trig digitizer is the only game in town for now for most of us since the HP Tx2 and the Dell Latitude Tablet PC both use it. However, N-Trig has been very slow to make a driver available for Windows 7. The good news is that N-Trig has available a multi-touch beta driver on its site. The bad news is that the driver still shows issues with multi-touch on at least the Dell Latitude I’m testing it with and worse yet the driver does not support the Tablet PC pen.
Yes, Windows 7 is still in beta, but as Steven Sinofsky points out, Microsoft’s engineering team is ready to lock down their code with RC1, and so for developers and users like myself without a good multi-touch driver available it means that essentially Microsoft is getting very little feedback on multi-touch before locking down and shipping Windows 7.
Think about this.
Multi-touch is a new showcase feature for Windows 7 and there isn’t much driver support for it in the ecosystem for Tablet PCs–where you’d think multi-touch would be a terrific feature. I’m really getting concerned. Yes, there’s time for this to all get worked out, but Microsoft really, really needs to be sure that Windows 7 ships with the drivers for multi-touch. If it doesn’t and it requires users to jump through hoops to enable the feature, it’s going to look lacking. Please don’t do this.
Now as I’ve blogged before, I’ve been concerned for a long time about this and in all that time I haven’t seen much movement. Well, Microsoft and others did pump N-Trig with an additional investment of $24M. I bet that’s getting the wheels turning a little. So maybe more is coming soon. It better. The Windows 7 train looks to be leaving the station. Will it leave without solid multi-touch support?
You know, this beggs the question: What is Microsoft’s engineering team developing Windows 7’s multi-touch feature with? I imagine whatever it is it’s going to be biasing the experience and possibly the implementation. I can imagine that it’s easy enough to develop the API to an abstract notion of multi-touch with a target spec. However, as Apple has proved over and over the last few years, it’s the total experience that is key. And without a good hardware experience I wonder what’s going on here.
Now yes, the two-point touch supported by the HP TouchSmart display is great. But it’s only two-point touch. Obviously this limitation would bias software to one or two touch points if that’s what developers are using. Imagine what developers might not create if only two point touch is available. Something similar goes for the N-Trig digitizer. If that’s what developers are using and since it doesn’t currently support the pen, then it wouldn’t take much to presume that pen support and multi-touch support might not be designed to work side by side since the current driver hasn’t supported it. Is this a bad thing? Might be.
My guess is that with the sparsity of multi-touch support at this time in Tablet PCs that we might see more single point touch perfection in Windows 7 than anything else. That’s just my guess. It would an incremental step.