I missed my chance to come to the PDC and hear this first hand, but blogs can fill the gap.
Microsoft has announced it will license the current Tablet OS, Windows XP 2005 Tablet PC edition, to touch screen PC makers. Fujitsu already announced one for next month. A touch-screen is by long not as sophisticated as a digital digitizer, when it comes to handwriting you're lucky to reach some level of finger-painting. But the Tablet OS has some things which can do great things for touch-screens. My bets are on gestures. The Tablet OS has a built in gesture recognizer which recognizes movements of the pen (finger) like a circle or an arrow to the right.
Everybody is used to pushing a button on a touch-screen, steering the mouse pointer by touching becomes stranger. Just imagine some of these possibilities :
- Drag and drop with your finger
- Finger stroke to the left, right, up or down. To manipulate or move something
- Circle your finger around something to select it
All without the need for any extra controls. With the Tablet OS and its SDK it's no big deal to build this into an application. In this post you can read an overview of and how to work with gestures in your code.
In Vista tablet functionality has become an integrated part of the OS. Noteworthy are flicks, which is a new system-gesture (see this post for the difference between system and application gestures) intended for browsing, a flick would be the pen (finger) equivalent of the page down key. Vista will also have touch-screen support. Touch and pen support can be in conflict, it's hard to write on a screen without your hand resting on it, and thus touching it. But what about a machine with two screens ? A small one on the outside to list new messages and operate your mediaplayer. Touch would be fine. And a big one inside to write on.
I'm going to stop before I drown in pure speculation. Just wish I was in LA.