Early Windows 7 Multi-touch Demo

We now have a demo video below of some of the early features of multi-touch coming to Windows 7. There is little that is new in terms of multi-touch itself, although the on-screen piano keyboard is cute.
Of more significance will be the new hardware that is needed. Even today’s tablet PCs aren’t useful since they [...]

CodeCampOz 2008 Report

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a [...]

Real-world Online Application Experiments

Wow, is Microsoft actually doing something cool? Is this another influence of Ray Ozzie? Mary Jo Foley tells us about the new Microsoft ExP system for conducting scientific online design experiments.
We have an unprecedented opportunity to run A/B tests with online
users and innovate more quickly based on actual user response. Microsoft
needs to shift the [...]

Impressionism on Tap

Well Flashie B has excelled himself this time. Take any photo and have it gradually emerge as an impressionist painting. Looks great. Now I can’t wait for the online web version. Upload your photo and download the Flash movie or better still the final impressionist image. How about it?

Modern Art Images on Tap

I am sure soon to be wed MB will like this one. A very quick and easy modern art generator by Microsoft designer Jeff Weir. Generate your masterpiece at his Viscosity site or watch the animated image show. I liked it immediately. My first effort is below. given a couple of hours I would imagine [...]

Multi-touch Comes From Behind

Using multiple fingers on a small multi-touch screen soon becomes counterproductive as the fingers obscure the screen. Solution? Touch the back of the screen, a simple and effective idea. See Lucid Screen from MS Research.

Universal login: name tab pass tab space tab enter

When an application or web site prompts you for a login the accepted standard has become:

The cursor should be blinking in the login name field
Type your login name
Press tab to move to the password field
Type your password
Press tab to move the Remember Me field as a checkbox [...]

Newly Delicious

As a long term and frequent user of del.icio.us I am excited by the complete revamp that is coming to my 850-hyperlink collection soon. The really popular, and much memorable, change is the URL which will be delicious.com at last. You can see the new layout at this new URL but conversion to the new [...]

Day 2 of Tech-Ed 2007 Sessions Valuable

My early session at 8:15 was given by Joseph Cooney, a stalwart Aussie presenter, who gave us an in-depth tour of WPF and XAML. Getting more details on the XAML primitives was useful as was seeing the new XAML renderer in Visual Studio 2008 beta.
For the next session I attended Charles Sterling’s (resident DPE on the [...]

Impressive First Day at Tech-Ed 2007

I returned home on a high after day 1 of Tech-Ed. There were so many unexpected new and exciting technologies/tools/development kits for my own area of Web 2.0. I feel I had my money’s worth in this first day alone.
The day kicked off with the impressive keynote from Michael Twigg of Animal Logic, the [...]