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How many of those Win7 apps are optimized for touch screens?

I didn't like the White plastic phase that Apple went through, but I liked all the aluminium that's come out lately, especially on my iPod Classic. The new MacBooks look pretty nice too.

Phantasee wrote:How many of those Win7 apps are optimized for touch screens?

Not a lot of them are, I think - the touchscreens on tablet PCs all serve as pretty much the equivalent of a mouse pointer. Drivers provided by their manufacturers should help you with optimizing these programs (such as zooming into the screen with multitouch)...but at best, those are hacks. Windows 7 is a generic operating system, whereas iPhone OS is specialized for touch screens, so trying to compare both of them is just like trying to compare an apple and a banana.

Phantasee wrote:How many of those Win7 apps are optimized for touch screens?

I didn't like the White plastic phase that Apple went through, but I liked all the aluminium that's come out lately, especially on my iPod Classic. The new MacBooks look pretty nice too.

My biggest hangup with Apple's old plastic notebooks is that they looked too much like toys. Their unibody Macbooks don't have quite as much of a problem and I can actually take them seriously, especially given how solid their construction is. The bigass Apple logo in the middle of the lid is still a bit of an eyesore, but not enough to make me not want anything to do with them.

There's gonna be a tablet with the Droid OS, which might bridge the gap between functionality (it'll have multitasking and flash and so forth) and usability. My only question is still "can it run photoshop, maya and motionbuilder?"

As well as "how well."

Covenant wrote:There's gonna be a tablet with the Droid OS, which might bridge the gap between functionality (it'll have multitasking and flash and so forth) and usability. My only question is still "can it run photoshop, maya and motionbuilder?"

As well as "how well."

Android tablets cannot run Windows software.

Phantasee wrote:How many of those Win7 apps are optimized for touch screens?

Windows 7 works pretty well on touch screens. If you don't believe me, just go down to the nearest Best Buy an play around with one of the HP Touchsmart computers.

Works pretty well != is optimised for. Anything mouse driven will 'work pretty well' with touchscreen, but it won't necessarily take full advantage of it.

Apple doesn't want AU users looking at iPad apps, but the games seem to be a serious improvement. It's a bit ridiculous to buy a $1000 32gb device to replace a PSP, but in a more realistic world it might be pretty useful. It's interesting the number of decent quality driving games and 'board games' played with the ipad flat on a table.

Stark wrote:Works pretty well != is optimized for. Anything mouse driven will 'work pretty well' with touchscreen, but it won't necessarily take full advantage of it.

The Windows 7 supports pinching, swiping, flicking, and most other things I've seen the iPhone do. So in what other ways is the iPhone/iPad "optimized" for touchscreen?

Uh, how about none of the UI designed for a finger? Going by the touchpad functions you see these days, working with text will be iPhone OS v1 levels of horrible, which is a bit of a problem.

Dominus Atheos wrote:

Stark wrote:Works pretty well != is optimized for. Anything mouse driven will 'work pretty well' with touchscreen, but it won't necessarily take full advantage of it.

The Windows 7 supports pinching, swiping, flicking, and most other things I've seen the iPhone do. So in what other ways is the iPhone/iPad "optimized" for touchscreen?

Just because the OS supports multitouch constructs does not mean it's really optimized for it. W7 is still primarily designed (and rightfully so) for WIMP-model interactions. Notice the size of selectable elements on dedicated touch-centric OSes (e.g. iPhone/iPad, Android, WebOS, WP7, etc), for example.

atg wrote:

Stark wrote:Heaps of apps already have ads; its not like 100% of apps are suddenly going to use this. I imagine it's just a framework to more efficiently or uniformly deliver ads (and make Apple money). Does anyone seriously think Apple will make everyone look at an ad every three minutes regardless of what they're doing?

A lot more iPads would be blended if that were true.

From what I've seen the current ads in apps are the equivilent of a banner ad on a webpage - they don't actually stop or interupt the app from running. This new way of doing it seems to be a lot more intrusive.

Whats the bet developers use the "every 3 minutes" quote from Jobs as 'justification' for actually doing that?

I think people are misunderstanding the iAd concept.

Current ads are banners, which, when clicked, close the app you're in and send you to the web browser. It's incredibly obnoxious when you accidentally touch the ad in free apps.

The stuff Steve demo'd lets the developer put in a banner ad that, when touched, brings up a pop up in front of the current app, without closing anything.

Putting APIs to allow developers to put ads in the app like that will, hopefully, result in more free apps or at least less obnoxious ads.


While I don't officially have to support the iPad or Macs, a lot of the executives at my work come to me with Mac questions, so I'm probably going to pick up a 3G iPad when it comes out just for the sake of being able to give executives help when they ask me stuff. However...have any of you guys actually used one? Having used the Best Buy ones, I'm actually really impressed with the experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing applications making use of a 10" multitouch screen.

All you really have to do to understand the difference between Win7 been pretty good with a touch screen, and the iPad OS being optimized for it, is to try to do the same task on both. The HP touchscreen computers in particular can be a real pain in the ass if you try to use the touch features instead of defaulting to a keyboard and mouse like a regular computer.