4 ms·

There aren't a lot of Windows 7 touch devices, and the ones that do exist have proprietary drivers since Win7 doesn't support touch. It doesn't make sense for M

There aren't a lot of Windows 7 touch devices, and the ones that do exist have proprietary drivers since Win7 doesn't support touch. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to spend a lot of time back-porting the whole touch system to Win7 and then pleading with OEMs to provide touch drivers there as well. Even assuming they were able to do both of those successfully, you'd be stuck using touch with Win7 desktop apps unless they back-ported Metro to Win7 as well. Doesn't make a lot of sense once you write it all out.

ygra 14y ago
Windows 7 does support touch. Vista didn't and thus needed proprietary drivers.
- contextfree 14y ago
  Windows 8 has a new set of touch APIs (including on desktop). The Windows 7 touch APIs are still there for compatibility. They'd have to either port the web touch stuff to the old native APIs or port the new native touch APIs to Windows 7, and I guess there's not enough Windows 7 touch interest to bother.
  - ygra 14y ago
    That was what I was guessing in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4783393 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4783393 as well. Still, the point I was complaining about was clearly wrong in the post :-)
masklinn 14y ago
> There aren't a lot of Windows 7 touch devices, and the ones that do exist have proprietary drivers since Win7 doesn't support touch. The problem with this explanation is that the purported advantage of the Pointer API over apple's touch API is it being "pointer-agnostic", it's supposed to unify mouse, fingers, stylus, etc... events into a single coherent one. So implementing it on non-touch devices (which isn't the case of Win7 anyway) would very much support its integration.