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"  This week at the annual All Things Digital conference\u2014a geekfest of high-roller proportions\u2014Microsoft brass followed up the whole Yahoo hullabaloo by showing off the capabilities of Windows 7, the operating system that will succeed Windows Vista by the end of next year. Much of the early buzz comes from the OS&amp;#039;s multitouch interface, with the early demo reminding us of the hands-on functionality we&amp;#039;ve been following from the Microsoft labs to Jeff Han&amp;#039;s Breakthrough Award-winning wall to the much-hyped (and much-delayed) Surface\u2014and the iPhone, of course.   So Microsoft is borrowing some of its Surface software and bringing multitouch to the home computer. We&amp;#039;ve already seen the once niche application transform from a super-expensive military and research application to a hand-built plaything. But as the world&amp;#039;s largest software company makes it a standard feature, are we all about to start typing on touchscreens?   Not quite. To get some perspective, we spoke with Addie Wagenknecht and Stefan Hechenberger, the gurus behind Cubit, a new multitouch table made from cheap parts and open-source software. &amp;quot;For computers that are mostly used for checking emails or manipulating images, it&amp;#039;s definitely going to be mainstream,&amp;quot; says Wagenknecht , though both designers agreed that for many applications a mouse would continue to be more suitable.   Wagenknecht and Hechenberger, who run the studio NOR_/D out of New York tech haven Eyebeam, insist that multitouch is at its best in three arenas. In programs for users who are truly unfamiliar with computers, multitouch offers an extremely low &amp;quot;hurdle of engagement,&amp;quot; Hechenberger says. The second place you&amp;#039;ll see a lot of multitouch, he predicts, is in applications &amp;quot;where you don&amp;#039;t spend a lot of time working, where you want to use the computer really quickly without wanting to sit down and grab the keyboard and the mouse.&amp;quot; That could mean hands-on recipe finders in the kitchen (as long as your fingers are clean). The third common use of the interface, as we&amp;#039;ve already seen, will come with collaborative software. After all, why use 10 fingers on a screen when you can use 20? So before you dismiss multitouch screens offhand as impractical, remember that nobody&amp;#039;s suggesting that you&amp;#039;ll use it to do your taxes. Yet.   Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Co. haven&amp;#039;t been the only hot-shot executives with important announcements at D6. Rubert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Jerry Yang and Michael Dell were all on stage near San Diego. And Sony CEO Howard Stringer broke news when he introduced a 0.3-mm-thick version of the OLED TVs he first introduced at CES. The new TV is thinner than a credit card. To compete with the new Netflix Roku player, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said his company would launch a streaming video service (paid content, no advertisements) sometime in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, ActiVision CEO Robert Kotick demoed Guitar Hero IV, an update that makes the now-inferior franchise seem more like its chief competitor, Rock Band (maybe our expert tester will agree). \u2014S.E. Kramer   RELATED STORIES \u2022 PLUS: Cheap Multitouch Table Tops Backyard Gadgets  \u2022 GLENN DERENE: What Took Microsoft Surface So Long?    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2831/4266092/>