Notes from Microsoft PDC 2008

[brad jones]

I posted some of my notes on the PDC conference on Codeguru. I should have linked to this last week. I sat through the VB futures session by Paul Vick too, so I'll need to dig out some of my notes and post those as well.

See my quick notes from early in the week at: Notes from Microsoft PDC 2008


I should comment that Visual Basic was not well represented by developers at the conference. There seemed to be more people in the session on what is coming in C++ than there were people in the what's coming in VB. Of course the what's coming in C# was more than double the VB and C++ sessions combined.... Very interesting.

Brad!

[Shaggy Hiker]

What is this thread doing in Forum Feedback???

The article is nice, but I was struck by one point: Multi-touch. At first I got thinking of the uses for two mice, so that people could do two-fisted computing. There aren't really all that many situations where this would be ideal, but there are a few (I can only think of graphics based items), and multi-touch would open that up.

The other thing that got me thinking about was a multi-touch based touch screen keypad. After thinking it over a bit, I don't really like the idea, but multi-touch does open up new possibilities.

[techgnome]

OH I don' t know.... being able to design GUI forms by dragging things on to the form and resiszing them using two fingers (to grab opposite corners).... that would be coo-- never mind.... imagine the fingerprints all over the screen.... blech... actually I've used it on the iPhone playing with pictures... but it's really limited in use for most people I think.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

We just need better screen cleaners. It would give a whole new meaning to Screen Wipers.

I wasn't thinking of touching the screen (at least not much, though the screen based keyboard would be so) so much as using two mice on one computer. This would be two point rather than multi point, but the advantages for some kinds of graphical interfaces would still apply.

[brad jones]

Since you are jumping on multi-touch, expand your mind. While the zooming feature is what a lot of people show, think about working inside two side-by-side windows at the same time. Or, think about finger painting.... (Okay, finger painting is goofy). Multi-touch is one of those technologies that I think will be used for things that suprise us in a few years....

<< I need to write part two of my notes and talk about managed compilers and such.... now that is something to talk about.... >>

Brad!

[brad jones]

<moved as requested>

[brad jones]

One other topic similar to touch is vision. Microsoft had a large number of Surface machines at the PDC. The difference between Surface computers and touch computers is that the surface computer also has vision in that it can recognize things on its surface. In general it is the shape of things, but it can also recognize a 128 bit tag that is used with the system. This gives it some additional recognition.

In the keynote on Wednesday, Microsoft research also demostrated the ability for a Surface computer to transmit two images. While you are looking at the table, you see one image; however, you can hold a piece of transparent paper above the table and get a second image. For example, you could have a topicgraphica map on the table, but when you hold a piece of transparent paper over the table, the paper shows the road lines. Very cool. Very hard to describe. It does it by sending out alternating images very, very quickly.

Brad!

[Shaggy Hiker]

I've already seen a video on that one. It looks seriously cool (and seriously expensive). Multi touch has all kinds of uses, but the surface computer will have even more if the price is not prohibitive. However, as TG noted...there will be prints.

The solution for that is an electrostatic screen shield such as you can put onto PDA's and cell screens. You'd need to do that, and doing so for a full screen will be more difficult than doing so for a tiny PDA screen. There are issues with bubbles. Perhaps a rubber roller would help.