I am having a good time running Windows 7 on a number of devices, but one of the things I miss from previous versions of Windows is how to optimize the interface for the small screen. I have been struggling in Windows 7, on touch-enabled devices in particular, due to the inability to make the scroll bars and other windows controls bigger. The min/max/close boxes on windows are just too tiny to tap with my finger on touch devices, and the scroll bars need to be wider to be useful. While surfing around the web this past weekend I stumbled across a free method to make these controls work much better with touch.
Seamonkey420, a frequent visitor to our site, points out that the Origami Experience 2.0 (OE) from Microsoft can change certain aspects of the Windows interface to have larger controls to make them easier to use by touch. The OE was the failed attempt to turn touch-enabled UMPCs into devices that could be run entirely by touch. This was accomplished by replacing the tiny interface controls in Windows with nice, big finger-friendly ones. OE never took off for a number of reasons, but chief among them was the fact that it was produced to only run on Vista.
UMPC devices as a rule haven’t run Vista well in the past, and most of them currently ship with XP. OE will not run on XP so it was largely ignored by UMPC users. Seamonkey discovered that while OE was developed to run on Vista, it can also run on Windows 7. He produced a nice tutorial for getting it running on Win 7 systems, and since OE is a free download it was a no-brainer for me to give it a go on the ThinkPad x200 touch tablet I am testing.
The first step was to download and install OE. The program warned me that it was only intended to run with Vista but I ignored those messages. It installed without a hitch and then rebooted the system. When the system rebooted it gave a couple of error messages as programs OE installed in the Startup folder tried to launch, but couldn’t run under Windows 7. This was not a problem as I didn’t want to run OE proper, just get at the Touch Settings utility in the Start Menu under OE.
The Touch Settings utility gives a nice interface for “optimizing” different interface controls, such as Start Menu, Scroll Bars and Internet Explorer. You can tick only the features you want optimized, which largely means OE will make them bigger. I opted to only make the scroll bars and title bar bigger, as those were the parts of the interface giving me the most trouble in Win 7 with touch.
Once the settings were changed, it prompted for a log off and log on to enact them. Upon log in the title bar controls and scroll bars were bigger and easier to use, natively in the OS. This is important, because everywhere a scroll bar appears it is now nice and wide. All windows have an easier-to-use title bar, everywhere in Windows 7. This is a tremendous boon to use by touch, and has made a big difference in usability.
I did have to go to the Start Menu and delete two programs that OE installed there, those were the ones giving me the error upon boot. I find the x200 to be much better to use by touch, and I am going right now to install this on the Viliv S5 UMPC. That 5-inch screen is just screaming for bigger controls.
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