Microsoft Enters The Tactile Touchscreen World

Microsoft this week filed a patent application covering a novel way to construct a "tactile" touchscreen – a display that uses technical tricks to convince users they are actually touching the ridges, bumps and textures of a displayed image.

Whereas previous screens produced only an illusion of texture, Microsoft proposes producing a real texture, using pixel-sized shape-memory plastic cells that can be ordered to protrude from the surface on command.

UV switch

In US patent application 2010/0295820, published yesterday, Microsoft proposes using a layer of shape-memory plastic placed above a large touchscreen to distort the surface of the screen when different wavelengths of ultraviolet light strike the pixels from beneath.

Microsoft's named inventor, Erez Kikin-Gil at the firm's Redmond campus in Washington state, says in the patent that the idea is aimed at large table-sized computing displays such as the company's Surface, rather than phones or tablets.

A projector built into the Surface displays a computer image onto the table top from below. In the patent, Microsoft proposes coating the display with a light-induced shape-memory polymer. By modulating these wavelengths, texture can be created, the patent claims.

End of keypads
Do you still questioning the effectiveness and user friendliness of the touch screen keyboards.
"Creating well-defined bumps on a touch surface is in many ways the holy grail of text entry on touch devices because it would enable touch typing at much faster speeds than on touchscreens today," he says.

Is you website touch screen friendly? Put it in to the test

We are slowly moving into Tablet PCs (iPads). So, you need to make your websites touch screen friendly. If you use Windowx XP from a Tablet PC or iPad ( Remote Desktop) you will see how hard it is to operate it from touch screen. How you can make your website ready for tablet PCs. Best place to look for some guide lines are the excising touch screen friendly operations systems: Android, Apple OS for iphone, ipad and Windows 7. Using similar effects to the web will automatically makes your website touch screen friendly.

Give enough space - If it is a mouse pointer it can click, select small buttons, links. You need more space and area for a touch. It is obviously good to have a larger buttons and have little bit more space around them ( Padding ). Even with the links you can do a similar trick but you might have already noticed that it is bit hard to click on the text links than buttons. So, give simple and nice buttons to navigate through your website.

Option to increase the Font size would be another effective way to make it touch screen friendly. However, most of the touch screen OS gives zoom in and zoom out functionality with fancy multi touch.

Touch Screen ready Web Forms - Web forms is another area that required some alternations. Again you have to use bigger web form elements (Text boxes, drop down-lists and etc ) in order to make it easy to touch and select each field. Get rid of the boring default web forms and pimp it to be filled and submit easily on touch pads.

Make sue you do not allow users to fill all the unnecessary information. Make your form short and simple. (Not only effective in touch screen). People hate typing in touch screen and yes they are too lazy and worried to fill out lot of personal information. 

Loading time and the size of the web page one of the primary issue with the mobile devices. Most of the devices come with expensive data plans and have a very limited download limit. However, this is not something new. It is been a good webmaster practice to some up with simple website that loads fast. Of course Google loves it as well and primary point when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation.

Browser Compatibility ( New Challenges ) webmasters nightmare. Each web browser has different characteristics and creating a website to work perfectly on each browser need lots of skills and patience. I think Tablet PC and iPad add more challenges. For example iPad dose not have a flash player and Android cannot run Java Vitual Machine very well. Now these limitations need to be considered before design or redesign your website.

Width and height of the page - Most of the modern tablet PCs have high resolutions screens. However it will be easy to have simple pages that dose not have to scroll sideways.

Is it necessary to built a separate tablet version? .mobi was started to have a mobile version of your website and it is not really active at the movement. No one bother to use the .mobi domain names, instead they use mydomain.com/mobile, mydomainname.com/m or m.mydomainname.com. I don’t think even with the tablet PCs .mobi will not be live. If you really have a website that is targeted big computer screen or flash base website you may require to have a new area for tablet PC users. It is not necessary as tablet PC s support most of the websites options pretty well. If you really needed and decide to go for separate version for tablet PCs I would recommend to go for application.


Test you site on Tablet PC and check how easy to navigate and how well your website respond to the touch. Something that webmaster need to consider building a website. Feel free to share your thoughts ideas and comments are welcome. 

Touch Enable Windows for your Tablet PC

Here we come to the Tablet PC age. Main advantage of the tablet PC is the mobility and give a larger screen to work. Remote desktop your computer at office or home is a key advantage of using a tablet PC. However, I have some problems working in the older windows versions ( Windows Xp ) or Windows Server version as they are not touch enabled. Here is the temporary solution I used to overcome this problem.


You can touch enable Windows 7 without any problem. However there is not direct method to touch enable Windows XP. There for you need to increase the font size, icon size to make it easy to work with the touch screen. It makes the life so much easier as you can easily select the files programs you want to work with. Increa

Go to the Windows computer that you want to access remotely from your ipad or tablet pc. Right click on the desktop and go to properties and go to Appearance tab, click on the Advanced button to change individual Items. I always make the icons bit larger and increase the space between the icons. you can even increace the menu bar and the scrollbar size so you can easily work from the touch screen.

However, there is not direct way to enable fancy multi touch options like zoom in zoom out or scroll down and up touching touching any place in the window. At this stage only option is to upgrade to Windows 7.