If this week’s PDC is anything to go by, Microsoft is certainly winning over the dev elopers. The Surface tables that are dotted around the convention centre are attracting attendees like bees round a honeypot. So, to a lesser extent, are the demonstrations of Windows 7 running on HP Touchsmart PCs. 

I’ve just come from a session devoted to helping developers adapt their applications for multitouch, and whilst the sizeable hall wasn’t full, there must have been 300-400 people listening and tapping out notes on the demonstrations.

 Microsoft’s program manager Reed Townsend told the audience that he didn’t “think we’ve really scratched the surface yet on what a great touch UI could look like.” I think he’s right, and I worry that Microsoft’s decision to stick with the same Windows desktop for both touch and non-touch PCs proves his point.

Today’s touch PCs, such as the HP Touchsmart mentioned above, rely on a dedicated touch overlay to make the UI more finger friendly. In my opinion, boosting the size of the icons on the Taskbar and adding the Ribbon interface to native applications doesn’t go anywhere near far enough to make Windows 7 a true touch OS.

I asked Mike Nash, vice president of Windows Product Management, why the company hadn’t designed a separate touch UI for Windows 7. “It was more straightforward for us from a development point of view,” he replied. “Besides, Windows with touch and Windows without touch – it will be hard to get developers to spend a lot of time on it,” he added.

He may have a point. But in my experience touch only really works when the UI is specifically tailored to suit, which is why the iPhone makes Windows Mobile look so cack-handed. Let’s hope the hundreds of developers at today’s session have a better grasp of that than Microsoft does. 

Sadly, our test laptop isn’t touchscreen, so we’re forced to rely on the demos and a brief play with a HP Touchsmart PC to form our early opinion on the multitouch features.

Touch works well on the Windows desktop. As soon as you tap the screen with your finger, the now redundant mouse cursor disappears, and images of water droplets appear underneath your finger, providing an intuitive visual guide to the accuracy of your finger jabbing.

The new larger icons on the Taskbar are much more touch friendly that the slender bars of XP or Vista, making it effortless to switch between different open windows. As we mentioned in the interface section, the new Taskbar jumplists can be activated by swishing your finger upwards, instantly spooling out a list of recent items or commands that are available to that application. Microsoft has sensibly made the jumplist text 25% larger when it detects you’re using the touchscreen controls, making it easier – if still not easy – to select the desired entry.

Touch-friendly applications?

The novelty of the multitouch controls starts to evaporate when you start using them in regular Windows applications, however. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can swish your finger up and down the screen to scroll through documents, with the entire window visibly shaking when you reach the top or bottom of the page, providing a clever visual cue. Word documents can also be zoomed in and out using the now familiar pinch controls. (Incidentally, PC Pro’s Jon Honeyball asked Microsoft if it was confident of avoiding legal action from Apple over the use of such touch controls; the question was elegantly sidestepped).

But applications such as Word will always, always require the use of mouse and keyboard. And frankly, scrolling through documents with a flick of the mouse wheel is just as simple as daubing your fingers across the screen, and potentially smearing the display. It’s touch for touch’s sake. Ditto Internet Explorer, where you can manually drag down the address bar in IE8 with a swish of the finger, but need the digits of an eight-year-old child to accurately pick out the tiny URL required from the drop-down menu. Swishing the finger left and right to replace the back and forward buttons in the browser is reasonably satisfying, but hardly necessary.

The multitouch controls are more at home in applications such as photo editing and drawing, especially now that the new Paint application has an Office 2007-style Ribbon interface, but we can’t help feeling that Microsoft needs to put a lot more thought into touch-friendly overlays if it really wants this feature to take off.