f13.net

I'm not a big fan of Micrsoft interfaces but damn THIS IS COOL. (http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) Apparently available winter 2007.

Yea, saw that last night. It's only going to be in casinos and restaurants and shit at the end of the year. Going to be expensive.

Cool, so the touchscreen handling introduced by the Apple iPhone is on the best way to become a universal feature. Can't say I don't like that.

Apple invented touchscreens now?

That's borderline retarded.

I mean the multi-touch technology, obviously. Stop trolling you two. It was on purpose that I didn't say invented, but introduced. They were the first one introducing a mainstream device that uses that technology. And I hoped then it would become more widespread. And that happened quite fast and I'm glad. Nothing more.

Go wash the sand out of your vaginas!


Edit: You want a really nice tech demo about that technology try http://www.perceptivepixel.com/ (http://www.perceptivepixel.com/). Which has nothing at all to do with neither Microsoft nor Apple.

Nifty. They better make the surface buffable, looks like a scratch magnet. I wonder if they will enable usage of some type of tablet remote for very large or physically inaccessable displays.

Money shot just took on a whole new dimension!

What?

The demo of the guy using this tech to play WarCraft may be one of the sexiest things ever.

http://tinyurl.com/2tao2v

The part in the MS video with the credit card payments, I thought, was pretty damn sweet.

If they are going to set these up in casinos to begin with, that could get interesting. "What happens here stays here" might not apply when naughty vacationers start setting down digital cameras and and phones on the thing  :-o

If it comes with a beer can holder I am so there.

Wouldn't you get a sore back being hunched over that thing for hours at a time?  And I'd imagine sore arms/shoulders if it was wall-mounted and you reached up to touch it...

It's "listening".

I think I remember seeing this desktop technology demoed about 1-2 years ago, where a guy had a desktop that was basically like a desk. He was stacking files and icons with gestures and it looked like they were all these tiles. He stacked like 10 pictures, then did a gesture on the pile and could fan them out in multiple ways, then he did the same thing with program icons. I thought it looked useless.

Now that I am working with plats and satellite photos a lot I'd love one of these things.

but it makes drinking fun! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKehq6qsdY)

I think that the newest thing about this is that Microsoft are involved. Camera-projector interfaces have been hot in university research for the last few years. Now that M$ are hard at work patenting stuff, I'm sure we'll see more of it, and they'll make lots of money, but it'll probably end up stifling the innovative work in this area. I still want a synth like Reactable (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEDia3CFdfg).

Well, risking my anti-Microsoft street cred (I still don't run any MS OS on my 3 machines - all OS X or Ubuntu, don't feel I'm missing much in PC gaming yet, that may change) I have to say that of all the other efforts to develop/innovate in this space, it hasn't come to market.

Stuff that occurs in University's but is never released to me is not that interesting, when it's primarily a end user improvement. Stuff I can buy is. So while I don't credit Microsoft with developing it, and I recognize that their entry to this market may stifle some innovation - I haven't seen much of this "innovation" first hand because no-one seems interested in selling it. I remember the demo a year or two ago that was similar and it was very cool (can't remember who did it) but there seemed to be no commercial availability to the tech. So yeah. First to actual market wins.

There are other systems that have come to market - just not any market that's useful to us. Its likely that MS' stuff will lead to something we might acquire sooner than other people working in the area, but even that's not guaranteed at this point. Like I said, the big story is that Microsoft are involved. :)

That guy would get destroyed by mouse + hotkeys.

What does this stuff do besides look neat?  That I can't do now, I mean?

Absolutely, I liked how he was saying that it was very difficult to draw a rectangle around units with a mouse, while he had to hunch over the screen using both hands simultaneously to do his "bi-manual selection technique".  That guy is an idiot.  It is a cool looking technology that will have very little practical value.

It might have been possible to, I dunno...play quicker than the guy was in the demo.

Yea, i think it might have worked a little better if a) they got someone who actually knew how to play War3, and b) used a smaller screen. It could have some rather interesting gaming potential (turn-based games/rpgs ?), but looks a little far removed right now.

It could make for fun tabletop miniatures games.  Battletech or Warhammer done without all the tweaks to turn them into RTS.  Otherwise, I'm not real excited about the applications.

Very cool.  I have no idea what I, personally, would use it for yet, but if they make the technology sufficiently cost-effective, we may start seeing stuff like this all over in a few years.

Also, yeah, I found that guy amazingly stupid when he said how it was 'difficult' to draw a box with a mouse.  Wtf.  Never clicked and dragged before?  You can do it on your windows desktop!  That aside, it could be a quicker and more efficient interface for some games.  Especially if the UI was designed to work with such an interface.

Bullshit!  Photoshop, people, Photoshop!  Do you know what a pain it is to draw with a mouse sometimes?  You can use a pen tablet, but frankly I think they suck.  A tablet PC that you can draw directly on the screen would be great (I wish I had one), but a whole table for your canvas?  I'm getting an erection just thinking about it.

ETA:  Actually, Surface in easel form would be the bee's knees.

Saw this years ago. They've been working on it for almost as long as I've been playing MMORPGs. It's not just a multi-zone touchscreen. It's an R&D effort to completely redesign computer use. Kinda like that crazy screen Tom Cruise used in Minority Report (yet another Kubrik movie adaptation where you can so easily see the difference between his ending and the Hollywood one).

Philipps and Magnavox have also dumped buckets of cash into R&D in this area too. For now we have consumer-ready tablet PCs, which are now beginning to not suck.

It's kinda like e-ink, flexible LCD screens, flying cars and habital space. Everyone knows they are coming. Everyone wants a piece of the action. But everyone is also waiting for someone else to dump nonrecoverable costs into making it a reality so they can come along and create parasitic business models.

And iPhone didn't invent shit. Apple is the Blizzard of the tech world. That's not an insult.

Normal people don't draw in photoshop.

Normal people with normal skill levels use automated filters to process photographs in photoshop - they don't draw on photos for anything other than comic effect.


It's nice, but to most people it is nothing more than an evolutionary upgrade for people who use tablet PCs, and a decent tool for graphic artists.


It's nothing like flying cars.

It's like the replacement for your laptop's touch pad.

Scratch that, it actually is the replacement for your laptop's touch pad.

Perhaps you'd like a TouchTable (www.touchtable.com (http://www.touchtable.com)).  They were demo'd in 2005 at the ESRI User Conference:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2pPeW4cUgU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2pPeW4cUgU).  No need to hunch over the TT45 model (the smaller one, only 39"x22"), as it's on a stand and can be elevated and pivoted as desired.

Just customize your HDTV with a touch interface (http://www.cybertouch.com/touchkits.html) and use it right now. I'm thinking the Microsoft thing is multitouch though and I don't think these custom ones are.

Not while it's that expensive, that big, and tablet PCs do a better job at it.

I am probably wrong here. Ya it is me. But part of the deal is you lay your camera on it and the pictures download, you lay your Ipod on it and it syncs. Its brain dead for the brain dead. Its touch screen and close distance RF and plug and pray all over again. Can we make a computer so dumb that Joe Sixpack can use it? Sure boss I can do that!

And?  That's a good thing.  Making using a computer more intuitive and easier for the average Joe is the fucking goal.  If you need to measure your epeen with esoteric bullshit then I'm sure any number of Unixes can accomodate your desires.

You're thinking like mouse & kb are the be-all-end-all final say in interfaces.  They're not.

CAD, 3-d modeling, hell building design in general would benifit from this type of interface.  It requires new programs, yes, but this is superior to mouse + KB in those apps.

Yeah, the code-slinging IT sector types maybe not the best interface for them. However, it's much more intuitive for the rest of the population. Not to mention this type of interface avoids RSI and 'mouse wrist' a hell of a lot better.

While it's nice to discuss high concept user experiences, that's all this really is. Look where it's headed. Look what it costs. Look who it's for. It's a nice toy, but I don't expect to replacing this or my next generation computer with one of these. Maybe when my 4 year old starts college or something.

Keyboard and mouse are not be-all. They are both non-intuitive ways to manipulate what one is seeing. But there's a reason they've been adopted and ingrained in our culture. That will change as whatever future version of Surface makes it to consumers in a form they can afford and find useful.

I liked the ideas of putting stuff on it to transfer data, but I've seen no less than four versions of that idea over the last six years, two that were just close-the-circuit power-supply pads and two which included data. Big shit. It's like this thing (http://www.bloggingdemo.com/images/2005/02/VKB1.jpg). I have one. Works well, if you don't mind bruising your fingertips. Probably will not take off in its current form. But the baseline tech means it can only project a keyboard. Or the Heliodisplay (http://www.io2technology.com/). Really cool, wish I had one at home. Good luck getting one.

There's a lot of R&D going on in human interface. Nobody's ever been happy with keyboard and mouse. Surface is on the conservative end of that spectrum. It's cool, but it's potential to change the world won't be measurable for half a decade at least. It's not even in the early-adopter category yet.

Combined with good haptics I can see the table being used for some of those high concept things.  As just a glorified tablet, not so much.

Voice recognition is on the way. Unfortunately it is damn hard. I was doing optical charair ecoi nditonal recondition in the 70's I am doing it now. It takes hours. The Machines have 256K ram, That does not help. But voice recognition is the way to go. It is what is  natural. But OCR is proving that what humans do is not easily replicated in a machine.

Your spell checker sucks gass

At first I saw this on the news and said "Oh cool!"  :-o
then they said M$FT had made it... so I wondered who they stole it from.  :roll:
I think the only thing M$FT is good at is stealing other peoples shit and then FORCING you to use it.  :|


Would someone please hurry up and port DirectX to Linux so we can be done with windows once and for all?
I mean really...
 :mob:

:roll:

Pro Tip: Any posts with $ for a S in Microsoft are automatically skipped.

Yeah.  Turns out, Joe Sixpack has a lot of money.

And there are alot more Joe Sixpacks out there than some people are willing to consider.  Bringing intuitive technology to the masses cheaply is how you win the game, not by keeping it non-intuitive or specialized and expensive.

I only used that because standard ASCII doesn't have a pentagram as a character

I have half an inkling that this is going to be like that period in like the early/mid-nineties where virtual reality was supposed to be the future of everything, until people realized it was crappy, expensive, and didn't do anything they needed.

Don't we auto-ban for this?  I was sure there was a rule somewhere.....

Aww, come on.  It's cute.  It's like taking a time machine back to the 1999/2000 era of Slashdot.

On second though, Slashdot is still pretty much like that.  Okay, ban the fucker.

Yea, that was sorta my point as well. It's fine to try and lead with technology, but it's the total user experience, including business model that matters. 1992 VR is today's Second Life, something that's successful. Wrap a VR room around some future iteration of SL that looks good and then you'll see successful VR.

It was actually this that got me started on MMORPGs in the first place. I was a big fan of VR stuff in the 90s. But it wasn't until UO when I started to learn just what people would want to do with the tech.

So wait... you guys like Microsoft?  Did I miss a fad or something? or are those apple commercials having a bigger backlash than even I thought?

Everyone at f13 is obviously a Microsoft sycophant.

lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllz -.-

Drone 743 reporting in.

No, seriously, CharlieMopps, it's not about us liking Microsoft. It's that Microsoft bashing is so 90s (liike blind Mac love). We're in the ambivalent acceptance stage, leveraging a means to an end.

Your problem is that all those hatefests have a fixed lifespan after which it goes into the next cycle. You could at least have gone and tried "Atari sucks, my Amiga rules you all. Tramiel for president" for real nostalgia. At least that comment had a specific date when it became obsolete after which it became "Amiga sucks, my Atari rules you all. Jack Tramiel for president" :-D

You sink all that money into a million blind holes, and someone gets lucky -- and something changes the way we do business. (And probably not even remotely in the way anyone thought).

This stuff? Smarter, multi-touch screens and interfaces are the future. Somehow. People are starting to drop serious money onto it because they can see the basic outline (if you make your screen the control interface -- why bother with extra bits?), and sooner or later someone will get it "right" in a way that clicks with the masses.

Teachers (even in elementary school) LOVE smartboards and projectors. They'd eat this shit up. Gamers? Fuck that demo -- I can think of a million ways to handle it better than that idiot did, in ways that work so much better for me than a mouse and keyboard.

For multi-play on the same screen, I see a problem -- and I don't see controllers for consoles dying. (For that matter, I can see lots of times when having a touch-sensitive surface seperate from the monitor might be more workable than drawing directly on the screen).

But computers and technology are getting to the point where we can start using more intuitive inputs -- which include voice and touch -- and I'm not surprised people are sinking serious money into looking for a way that works. I couldn't tell if you if Surface will be anything more than an expensive toy with limited use -- but sooner or later, someone's going to make bank on something similiar.

My wife would drop $$$ on at least one of those if she could read building plans on it, although it would have to be much larger.  Extra points for having a calculator in there so she didn't have to use one of those ancient desk calculators, and if she could pull up a window with Arbitrary PC Program, she just found her new desk.

I'm to lazy to use the search feature, but this has come up before here -- I'll say again what I said then. Nothing will change until we go 3D, and even then, the switch only benefits people who need to model 3d directly.

On display:

2d displays won't be going away. There may be UI changes, but aside from when you are trying to model 3D, flatspace is perfectly fine for business applications. There will always be a computer screen and flatspace for most applications.

There won't be any revolution until we go to ubiquitous 3d imaging, either externally via a futuristic holo-cube type display, or with a slightly-less futuristic multiple 2d display false-perspective device. Or possibly you could try for direct neural induction, but that's wayyyy out there.

This would be for CAD/entertainment purposes only, and would probably start with military for training purposes, shift from there to CAD users for manufacturing, and then finally to the entertainment industry.

On input:

An interesting case study would be a mid 40's manager communication method with voicemail and speakerphone, and contrast that with the mid 20's new style of shooting off e-mails while chatting with two or three people at the same time. Text simply allows a co-ordination and time-savings that's unparalleled (at the expense of some intimacy, admittedly) and the keyboard suits the task admirably.

The monitor+keyboard is suitably ubiquitous and while not strictly intuitive, we have our first "real" generation growing up with it from birth. Many people can type faster and more conveniently than by recitation, which is why I'm surprised there are still serious pushes to make voice an input device.


Anyway, the issue really isn't display, at it's heart is input and modification of data -- aside from someone growing up with direct neural output device, mouse and keyboard and tablet are ubiquitous and good enough not to be preempted until the switch from 2d to 3d comes. And even then, it will ONLY be for 3d modeling -- CAD, architecture, modeling, and animation. What we have now is good enough that there won't be another true revolution until we figure out how to read the brain.

The fact is that moving the 'selection' device from a mouse which only requires a twitch to having to physically move your arms around simply does not give you any performance boost. You essentially have 'two' mice, and this does give you a bit more flexibility, however you're slower since you're required to move your entire arms.

One thing often missed by "only for CAD" thoughts on 3D is just how much in life people would customize if they could. And considering that most things in life are 3D, I forsee a much greater need for 3D manipulation in the future than professionals in the field.

Yes.

We have GUI, we're going for TUI.. Tactile User Interface.  3d display and touchscreen are 2 things that would help with this.

Oh noes, we need a new OS.

Microsoft sees this, and is working on it.

Yes, we have a generation learning on mice and keyboards.  That simply means they're going to have Carpal Tunnel and RSI much earlier. Mice are not "good" but they were simple analog devices.  We simply hold on to them because they're familiar.  If we'd had good, responsive touchscreen tech in the early 80s, Apple would have used those rather than mice.

Actually mice *are* good. They did studies back in the 70s at Xerox PARC into various pointing devices and mice were the best back then and they still are today for general puprose manipulations (some artists like graphics tablets for graphics works).

No they wouldn't have. Touchscreens are incredibly imprecise compared to a mouse. Think about the "resolution" of your finger compared to a mouse, even one back then. Now think about having to hold your arm out constantly to point at things at the screen. Combine the two and you have one of the worst possible ways to manipulate things on screen.

It's also far more imprecise. Your hand and fingers are designed for fine motor control. Moving your arms around, not so much.

What if it was a vertical concave multitouch screen? I didn't render in a keyboard/mouse but I think it would work pretty good if you had the option of using both interfaces. I'm not sure how that big of a screen would work in a business environment but it might be nice as an artist workstation, conferencing/airport workstation, or in internet cafes (and obviously gaming).

Mitsubishi has images of a similar prototype (http://www.merl.com/reports/docs/TR2004-034.pdf).

(http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/8857/concavefq1.jpg)

Sticking your arms straight out to manipulate things on a screen is just a bad idea unless you have the shoulder muscles of a basketball player and even then it's far less efficient than moving a mouse around. Vertically oriented touch screens are fine for simple things like subway ticket dispensers or whatnot where pointing at huge on-screen buttons is more intutive than trying to manipulate a trackball or joystick or some other fixed pointing device (since mice wouldn't work in that sort of public display).

Having the touch screen in a horizontal position works better since you have some place to support your arms/hands while you are manipulating things on screen, rather than having to use your shoulder muscles to suspend them in the air, so it's far less tiring.

I can see a horizontal touch screen being a bit of a pain in the neck (literally speaking).  Looking down at my hands for long periods of time just doesn't seem like it'd be comfortable.  I get a stiff neck even with an ordinary vertical monitor if it's not elevated up to eye level.

This is something I completely agree with.  There's no other method of communication which is faster and more efficient for me than using a keyboard and mouse right now.  I can type faster than I talk, especially with how I often lose my train of thought mid-sentence, or pause to think of whether I'm saying something correctly.  I don't know why, but I don't have that problem anywhere near as often on a keyboard.  It's one of the reasons I dislike voicechat in games, and why I prefer to talk over IRC, ICQ or AIM than to telephone someone or use a voip program to talk.  I don't talk as well as I type, I add 'um' and pauses in a lot..

On a more amusing note....you know this will happen.
(http://farm.tucows.com/images/2006/06/data_bsod.gif)
Not to imply Windows or Microsoft-bashing, as I personally like the company and think we wouldn't have come as far as we have without them, if only because no one else ever marketed good ideas and simplification of computer operation effectively.

Anyway, this Surface thing is interesting because it presents new options in a commercial platform.  I'm sure it has a considerable number of excellent practical applications, many of which have already been touched on.  It will probably need refinement to be ideal for these things, and for other things we haven't yet considered, but for those that get used to it, it will be quite good, I bet.  The only trouble with new interfaces is that many of us I'm sure, will have considerable trouble learning to use them.  We've been using a keyboard and mouse for so many years that anything else is going to have a pretty high entry barrier, because it's going to need to entice us to actually learn how to interact with the computer more effectively than we already do, and by enough of a margin that we consider it worth taking the considerable effort it's going to require to get used to the interface enough for it to become as second-nature to us as a mouse and keyboard currently are.

One thing I can say - even if it doesn't enhance our primary computing, it may well become some sort of media-center for digital photos, music, etc.  I can certainly see a Surface table with its own Media Center type PC attached for the purpose of pictures, video, music, etc, being a common living-room feature in a number of years, assuming it's not prohibitively expensive.

I keep thinking the subject says Microsoft Scarface.

I don't think voice will replay anything -- but supplement it. It's another form of input device -- and computers can already track input a hell of a lot faster than we can give it. Multi-touch + voice means I'm capable of giving three (two hands and my voice) forms of input simultaneously.

Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End proposed wearable computers (basically built into your clothes) that projected onto contact lenses, and were controlled through body, finger, voice, and muscular movements. Fully configurable -- novice users would simply type on virtual keyboards, whereas expert uses could use simple (and almost unnoticeable) twitches to do far, far more.

One of the interesting aspects of Surface is that MS appears to be trying to create a back-end for all the myraids of wireless devices -- cellphones, PDAs, Blackberrys, digital cameras, etc -- drop them on the table and simply flick data back and forth without having to worry about protocols or configurations or file-types or anything like that. Basically using Surface as an abstraction layer to allow multi-device communication. Expanding on that would mean Surface -- your coffee table, basically -- would turn into a hub for your home. Control your TV, sound setup, work as a gaming station (you could choose where to project the signal -- TV or desktop), hub for your network of PCs, laptops, tablets, whatever.....heck, maybe even plop down your remote and have Surface automatically work out what TV and peripherals you have, and set itself up to control them.

Making it into a coffee table -- generally placed near your TV, in the main entertainment room of your home, makes sense. Multi-touch also makes sense -- you'd use it as a GUI where multiple people might be working at once. Someone channel surfing, someone else moving pics from their camera to their desktop or cellphone, etc.

If you gave every business in the world today a bunch of computers with uber touchscreen/voice/3D/whatever technology, about 99.9% of them would shove them into the closet untouched.  They'd be too smart to waste time and money retraining all their employees to use completely unfamiliar interfaces that aren't going to increase productivity one bit.

Everything we saw done using Microsoft Surface in that video could be done faster and cheaper with a conventional interface.

And nobody is going to buy a coffee table for ten grand just because it can display photographs and play music.

Microsoft isn't betting anyone will. That's why they're being marketed to casinos and resteraunts. It'd be fairly trivial, for instance, to integrate in a menu system and games for customers to play into that thing. (Well, it'd take some doing -- but the software would be pretty much a one-time expense, as would the hardware).

As for retraining -- at least some of the demos I've seen are aimed at the basically computer illiterate. My mother, for instance, can't move a picture from her digital camera to her cell phone. Surface would make it a matter of a moving an icon -- something she CAN do.

I think you're confusing Microsoft's short-term and long-term goals with this thing. Short-term, it's to get them out there -- into casinos, a few resteraunts (Vegas grabbing this thing is a safe enough bet). Let the general public get a chance to play touchy-feely with it awhile while MS uses it as a vast proof-of-concept and test-bed.

As hardware gets cheaper and economies of scale start to kick in -- as well as Microsoft develops a stronger back-end and begins layering toolsets, functionality, and better automatic cross-communication between wireless devices -- you'll start to see it trickle into the homes of the early adopters. Microsoft can afford to be patient, and they're betting on something simple -- as wireless devices grow more powerful, people are going to need a hub for them to enable personal networking. The iPhone -- as was the Blackberry before it -- is an attempt to integrate multiple devices into a single system.

Microsoft is going the other way -- they're trying to develop a software solution, and the accompying hardware -- with the idea towards doing it all transparently, and trying to come up with an intuitive interface to use for it.

Give it a decade or so -- I suspect you'll find smart tables and desks edging into the hands of the early-adopters by then, with a price-point higher than a PC -- but lower than a good TV and Sound system.

You are not used to using your voice and speaking off the cuff.  You're used to typing. Folks who spend more time talking are much better at doing what you describe in a conversation but suck at typing in my experience.

Text is also far from the 'efficient' method of communication.. It lacks clarity of tone, subtlety and innuendo... thus green text on this very board.  It has it's uses, and it's strengths, to be sure.  However, those of society NOT social mal-adepts still prefer talking.

And fine, trip, replace "stylus pad" instead of 'touch screen.' 

Way - Yes, they would today.  Because things are still built around mice and keyboards.  There's no use for them in the current systems.   Of course, if you're only thinking about today in Technology, you've already lost because someone else is thinking 5, 10, 15 and 20 years from now at the least.

You're neglecting the fact that this would be very useful for a large group of people; CAD users, graphic artsists, etc.

Sure it's a niche audience, but Adobe has made a shitload of money servicing that niche.  Likewise, something like the Wacom Cintiq (http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/index.cfm) would be damned useful to someone like me and a lot of other people.  The only reason I don't have one is that I don't have the $2500 to buy it, but would I love one?  Shit yeah.

I don't see how this technology would be any different.

I've shown this to two teachers -- tie it into a wall projector, and they drool over the concept for use in teaching. For younger kids -- toddlers, kindergarten, first few years -- let the kids get their grubby hands on it. It's much more intuitive for a kid to reach out and grab something.

Like I said -- Microsoft is thinking big. What interests me isn't so much the coffeetable thing (although I wouldn't turn one down) -- but the fact that they seem to be integrating wireless from the get-go, not just to Microsoft stuff or PC peripherals, but anything capable of sending or recieving a wireless signal. I would bet you solid money -- it seems pretty obvious from the interviews -- that Microsoft's goal here is to provide an abstract backend for integrating all your wireless devices. Surface -- from the table to the multi-touch -- is just their first-cut solution to the situation.

It makes a lot of sense -- from the focus on multi-touch (you want it to be able to handle lots of inputs, from lots of devices, people, and fingers) -- to the fact that they've gone to all the trouble to tie in cameras and cell phones. Shit like flicking bubbles and sorting photographs, that's the's flashy pointless stuff. The real core of it is device interoperability.

They're trying to provide a hardware abstraction layer and command-and-control interface for every wireless device in your life. That's why they're doing it. Multi-touch is just a GUI choice, and flicking photos around -- that's just a 'gee-whiz' factor for the kiddies.

Stylus pad? Are you talking like a pen notebook? Mice are still better, though styli are in many ways more intuitive to use initially. Styli have an "acquisition" problem. When you let go of a mouse it stays where you put it. With a stylus you have to put it down somewhere but picking it back up and holding it in a pointing or writing position takes longer than reaching for a mouse. Or if you hold it between your fingers somehow when you aren't using it it's awkward to type and typing is much much faster than writing by hand. On my DS I usually "hold" it in my mouth if its a game that uses both the stylus and the buttons since that's faster than pulling it in and out of its slot constantly but that's still very awkward. The stylus has other issues as well like being forced into 1-to-1 tracking where the mouse can take advantage of acceleration to move an object farther faster.

People think styli are good because pencils have been around forever. Handwriting itself is actually pretty inefficient. I type almost as fast as I talk though, and that's saying something. Basically, the only time typing doesn't work for me is when the UI requires that same keyboard, or typing at all. I keep thinking of building an outsized trackball so I could drive my character with my feet :)


It's all of that and your coffee table. This is 5, 10 years out thinking, if you're eventually delivering a consumer proposition. But it's coming. Maybe it won't be as a table, but it will be as some countertop display, a fridge thing, all the areas you'd like to use something like this but which are currently dominated by different industries with different margins and different ways of measuring success. No normal middle class person would pay an extra $1,000 to have this on their fridge, for example.

Microsoft is by no means the only one thinking this way. As I said earlier, Philips and Mitsubishi are doing a lot here too. However, because Microsoft has a lot of different points of contact with a lot of different consumers and therefore a lot of different UI experiences, they are best poised to deliver a solution that can work for a lot of different consumers. That's the key. You don't throw this thing at Circuit City and hope for the best. You create the need first.

That's why they're marketing it first to Casinos and certain resteraunts -- get people used to it, to playing with it. Five years down the line, when prices have come down, the early adopters will be familiar with it

And they're betting that proliferation of wireless devices will continue. I really see this as Microsoft's view of the long-term. It'll be interesting to see if Apple can win this -- the iEverything versus the Microsoft Hub.

I'd put the money on Microsoft, simply because I suspect their approach will simply engulf anything Apple does. You'd have your iEverything, and your nifty table that allows you to set it down and toss stuff back and forth between yours and a friends, and control your TV, and setup your TiVo, etc, etc, etc.

As an Apple fan I'd agree provided Microsoft gets there before two things happen:

1.) Apple brands and makes a commodity of it - not likely to happen in the commercial environment given Microsofts timetable
2.) Microsoft doesn't let the media companies take DRM to an extreme. I laughed at the demo video of two women swapping music - if that thing's anything like Vista that's not happening. Microsoft needs to reassert the technologies and consumers right in the handling of media.

But yeah, Apple will be hard pressed to be the iCool provider of this technology in the same timeframe unless MS fucks it up badly.

Apple seems to have created an interesting niche for itself -- they seem to have a lock on intuitive hand-held devices. The iPod -- and from the looks of it, the iPhone -- squeeze in a huge amount of functionality in very simple interfaces. (Others have managed it, but Apple seems to get there first and get it right). Microsoft, on the other hand, leans towards the big, super-powerful, bulky side of things.

They're trying to branch out, but in the end -- Microsoft seems to think they'll make a lot more money being the backend EVERYONE uses rather than trying to make serious roads into grabbing market share for the front-end devices.

Microsoft has so much freakin' money that they can't help but keep trying to penetrate the MP3 market, the Console Market, the games market.....

I agree with you on DRM, but I suspect Apple's new DRM-free stuff might end up finally breaking that from the other direction.

Frankly, I think the movie and music industries need to step back from DRM and realize the money is shifting to on-demand, and will continue to do so as bandwidth grows to support it. I get my DVDs from Netflix, but it's going to be a hellava lot more convienent when I can simply log on, grab the movie I want to watch, and stream it directly to my TV. Probably using my Magic Microsoft Coffee table. :)

(Tangentially: WHY do the cable company DVRs suck so badly? Ignoring their shitty hardware, they act like they're about five generations behind TiVo. Power flickers fuck them up seriously, their programming is shitty, their GUI is shitty -- same goes for their goddamn on-Demand services, which require navigating the slowest and shittiest-laid out menu in all the fucking land. Why do they suck so hard?)

That's one of the reasons I can't stand Apple; their focus on "consumer" items.  God forbid you allow any expandability into your line up or actually allow your users any real choice, That is Not the Apple Way.  They simply don't want you to actually use your computer the way you want, and in ways they haven't forseen.  Or if you do have that need they'll make you pay through the nose for it (the MacPro lineup).  This is boutique computing at it's worst.

Fuck Apple and fuck Steve Jobs in his pretentious little douchebag turtleneck.  I just wake up every morning thanking God he didn't have the business acumen of Gates when it mattered.

Have you ever worked in corporate America? This is what they spend half their time doing. Constantly training people on stuff to try to increase productivity, regardless of whether it makes any sense. Probably paid a consultant 100k to tell them to do it too.

At least you're not stuck going to a damn "time managment seminar" because your boss's boss (who signs off on your performance review) can't tell the goddamn difference between "Difficulties estimating development time for projects" and "Inability to manage time".

No kidding. I'm not the only one (we use evolutionary development cycles, and for our smaller projects our milestone timelines we establish ourselves based on experience with the relevent module), and our version of "difficulty estimating time" is "Generally off by about 15% one way or the other, generally are too pessimistic". So we're alll going to learn about how if you have a jar, and a bunch of big rocks and medium rocks and sand, to put in the big rocks first.

Thank fucking God. That'll help me to better estimate how long it'll take to code in a customer-requested feature that I know will be respecced by said customer at least 4 times during the process. Maybe I'll use the big rock to brain the customer.

That specific date being 'the twelfth of Never', yes?
(Never give in, never surrender!)


So if MS makes this take hold...does that mean that the Trauma Centre games will be ported to the PC? Or that Kirby Canvus whatnot? :)

This means the Scientology has officially merged with MicroSoft:

(http://img.engadget.com/common/images/8043838849538138.JPG?0.0011020305491563631)

So they just did an event on the Surface pro 4. Shit is goddamn phenomenal. 16gb, 1tb drive and they were running a solidworks model of the pro on it. Very nice.

Also announced a Surface Book, direct competition to the Macbook Pro. Reversable screen. Also very sexy.

Reversible.

Pedant.  :why_so_serious:

Nice necro.

We have a thread for everything. I'm not starting a new one. 😺

The Pro 4 looks awesome, would love one, but even the base m3 is $900 so I'll probably just stick with the cheap (oh so cheap) Chinese imitation tablets I've been using for the last couple of years.

I'll let you know when MS send me my freebie.

 :oh_i_see:

Heh, feel free to send me it if you don't want it.  :why_so_serious:

We preordered a Pro 4 and a Surface Pro for testing this afternoon. They cost less than the laptops we're using and look to be as powerful on spec. It'll be nice if they're actual production-level machines as advertised.