Windows 7 is the first version of Windows to fully support multi-touch features. The interface is much more finger-friendly and so are the included touch screen applications, such as Paint. If you own a multitouch LCD monitor, you probably already have Windows 7 running on your computer. But to fully experience the magic of touch, you will want to install some additional touch screen software.

1. Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7

Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 is a collection of touch screen games and other touch screen software.

The Touch Pack includes:

• Microsoft Blackboard, a physics puzzle game.
• Microsoft Garden Pond, a tranquil game that takes place in serene Japanese water gardens.
• Microsoft Rebound, use your fingertips to control spheres with an electrical field between them to catapult a metal game ball into your opponent’s goal.
• Microsoft Surface Globe, application allowing you to explore the earth as a flat 2-D map or as a 3-D globe.
• Microsoft Surface Collage, explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background.
• Microsoft Surface Lagoon, a screen saver and interactive water simulation, complete with playful, shy fish.

The best FREE touch screen software you can find.

2. Corel Digital Studio 2010

Corel Digital Studio 2010 is a multimedia content organizer. Organize, view and edit photos, videos and music in one place using your fingers. In addition to burning them to DVDs or CDs Corel Digital Studio supprots uploading and sharing to Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Check out the video tour of Digital Studio 2010:

3. Corel Paint it! touch

MS Paint may give you the feel of fingerpainting. But for the true fingerpainting experience there is Corel Paint it! touch. Perfect for parents, kids and anyone who likes doodling and sketching. Corel Paint it! touch has a wide range of gesture support – move, zoom, flick, rotate, tap, drag and scroll—right on screen, using nothing but your fingertips. It also includes plenty of fun features such as realistic mixer pallete – a movable mixer palette, you can use to mix colors. I also supports different types of artistic media (such as oil, acrylic and spray paint) and various paper textures.

4. WinDVD Pro 2010

WinDVD Pro 2010 is the leading DVD player software for high-quality video playback. With fully enabled Windows 7 touch screen support, you can control playback, scene selections and browse media library

WinDVD Pro 2010

And the winner?

Sadly, selection of good touch screen software is still quite poor. BumpTop is no longer available for download and Asus is making their software only bundled with their computers (read the Touch Gate software review). With the exception of a few giants, like Microsoft and Corel, no major companies seem to be interested in developing touch enabled software for the PC…

Technorati Tags: touch screen applications, Touch Screen Software, touchscreen applications, touchscreen software, windows 7

Using infrared (IR) light pens and the Wii Remote, it is possible to create very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboards and multi-point tablet displays. Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. The software can be downloaded at johnnylee.net.

Technorati Tags: Multitouch, touch screen, Whiteboard, Wiimote

While it’s nice to see the fast development in touch screen hardware, software vendors will need to create more finger-friendly touch screen software, for finger and pen computing to catch up. One promising example is ASUS’s Touch Gate software.

Touch Gate software is a replacement for the default Windows desktop.

The main interface is designed as a 3-sided cube. The main sections are:

• standard windows explorer desktop,
• touch enabled applications and
• web widgets.

You can move between screens by flipping with your finger over a window.

The main section includes a large row of icons, that lead you to five applications.

Pressing the button in the bottom shows you all applications.

Configuring the toolbar is easy and fun. Available applications are displayed on a carousel, which you spin around, then move the desired application to desired location.

ASUS tries to make web browsing more finger friendly by providing a virtual keyboard and zooming support for Internet Explorer.

PhotoFun lets you view photos in different ways. Arranged in rows or scattered around the desktop. You can use your fingers to move them around, re-size or rotate them. It even allows you to create instant photo albums.
When browsing trough your book-like album, you may flip the pages with your finger, with realistic eye-candy animation.

Sticky notes allow you to hand-write reminders and stick them to your desktop. You can even share them across Eee PCs.
In addition to Journal, Sticky Notes are the only application that supports palm rejection.

You can position Yahoo widgets (like weather widget or battery life indicator) on the background and drag them around.

Most of the icons are big and work great with fingers. Pressure sensitivity is supported in most applications (but must be manually activated). Palm rejection, on the other hand, could be supported in more applications.

While new interfaces usually have a big learning curve, Touch Gate software works naturally in intuitively.

Touch screen software still has a long way to go, but examples like Touch Gate show us, it’s time for touch screen computing.

Get it at Amazon: Asus Eee PC T91MT-PU17.

Check some other best selling touch screens, too:

Technorati Tags: asus computers, asus t91, touch gate, Touch Screen Computers, Touch Screen Laptop, touch screen pc, Touch Screen Software