Microsoft touches on some new Windows 7 touch methods

In an update published yesterday on the Windows 7 design team's efforts at standardizing its touch and gesture recognition methods, Microsoft revealed that it has made some of those ergonomic design choices that were up in the air when Win7 was first unveiled last October.

For example, what's the difference between a "drag" and a "scroll?" Think about it; with a mouse, the distinction is clear. There's an on-screen device for scrolling windows, but with a drag, the pointer target is the item being dragged. With touch, the expectation is that the target is the same: To drag a document or to scroll a document, you start by touching the document. So how does the system distinguish the differences?

Yesterday's update reveals Microsoft's decision: Scrolling a page is most likely a motion that begins off-surface, and that continues on-surface like a plane coming in to land and taking off again. The direction is clearly up or down. Meanwhile, a drag starts with a landing of the finger on the surface itself, and a dead stop. Then the drag continues in the direction the hand goes; and if that happens to be up or down, the system will already have distinguished the gesture as a drag because it began with a dead stop.

While that's the conclusion easily drawn from the text of yesterday's update, however, the narration of an accompanying video appears to contradict it at one point. For selecting text in a document: How should a window interpret a left-to-right "plane landing" motion? One train of thought says it might be a left-to-right scroll; but the video shows that gesture as meant to select text, as in a word processor. Meanwhile, the narration describes that same gesture as meaning either of two things: "to select text, or drag and drop." And that contradicts the description of a drag, which the text states begins with a touch.

If Microsoft thinks it's made a clear decision, it might want to go over it again before revealing it to a broader audience.