Windows 8 Cheat Sheet for Keyboard and Touch

Touch is MUCH faster than using a mouse where precision is not required (as with apps designed for a touch interface). I am surprised I don't see this in print more often because it's very clear, very quickly, in use. A well-designed touch interface, in my experience, restores the "computing at the speed of thought" we enjoyed in the days of WordPerfect, 1-2-3, WordStar and to a lesser extent, CLIs like the DOS prompt and AutoCAD. During the transition to GUIs, mice were CORRECTLY criticised for being fussy to use, and preventing, or at least discouraging, use of "fingertip macros" we all learned for the functions we did over and over. Touch allows use of a GUI without having to coordinate movements of a hand on a mouse or a finger on a touchpad with a tiny arrow on a screen to click a button. Instead, you just touch the button. Touch does work better on a notebook where the display is closer. I'd likely not use it on a desktop either. But I use touch close to 100% of the time in a MUI app because it's faster, easier, and more accurate. (No "gorilla arm", either. Whatever that is.) Regarding loss of multiple windows, that's a bit harder to defend. My bet is that we'll never see a Start menu on the Desktop again, but we will see changes to windowing in the future. But the did not arise from the small screens of phones and tablets. It arose from MS's telemetry, which told them that users ran programs maximized most of the time, regardless of display size. My telemetry and perhaps yours would be exceptions to the rule. I seldom run anything maximized; an occasional spreadsheet, or graphics or CAD software is about it. But all my years as a computer consultant, I've been astonished at how near-universal it is amongst my users to run programs maximized. Perhaps you know this, but you actually can have 2 windows open simultaneously in Win 8 MUI. But I won't propose this feature as an equivalent for the multiple overlapping, resizable windows we've had since Windows 2.x