Introducing the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7

At Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference about a year ago today, Julie Larson-Green first introduced Walt Mossberg to Windows 7 and its multi-touch capabilities, which we call Windows Touch. While we’ve been working on bringing natural user interface to you in many Microsoft products, we first introduced multi-touch in Microsoft Surface. Since then, the Windows and Surface development teams have been collaborating closely on bringing multi-touch to Windows, and last year demoed a few applications they created to run on Windows 7. Today, we thought it would be fitting on this “anniversary” of first talking about Windows Touch to introduce the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7…

Microsoft Surface Globe pretty much puts the whole world in your hands (well, kind of!). It uses the Virtual Earth 3D engine to display a 3D version of the world. Using multi-touch, you can navigate to different regions, get local information, and “pin” your favorite locations. You can even “fly” around 3D models of buildings in some cities. The Microsoft Surface Globe was one of the apps Julie Larson-Green demoed at last year’s D: All Things Digital conference. To see the Microsoft Surface Globe app in action – take a look at this video.

Take your favorite digital photos and arrange and resize them using only your fingertips with Microsoft Surface Collage! Once you have your photos in an arrangement you like, it’s simple to save your collage and make it your desktop background. I’ve made a whole series of backgrounds and cycle through them with the desktop slideshow.

And many more, just visit here.