The Ripple Effect

Over the course of the past two weeks my life has changed substantially. On Friday, December 12th my Microsoft Surface was delivered to my home and set up in my office. I had a blast that evening and weekend writing a simple paint application for my kids and experimenting with the Surface SDK. Surface computing or multi-touch in general, is such a compelling human-computer interface it's likely to change the World of computing over the course of the next 10 years.

Excited about my new Surface device but conscientious about my duties at Curl, I curbed my enthusiasm and focused on my day job Monday and Tuesday morning. At 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 16th I joined a prescheduled conference call with my boss and friend, Richard Treadway. It was then, when I was introduced to a human resources person that I had never met, that it hit me. I was being laid off.

It turns out the Curl is re-organizing their marketing efforts and had decided that a VP of Developer Relations (that was my job) didn't fit their new marketing strategy. My position was eliminated effective immediately. I'm not bitter about this at all. In fact, I'm grateful for the time I worked at Curl and thankful for all of the friends I've made while working there. I hope to cross paths with folks like Richard Treadway, Jnan Dash, Bert Halstead, David Kranz, Doug McCrae, John Chrisholm, Julie Wider, Mike Gordon, Takayuki Youshida, and all the others at Curl in the future. They are good people who are passionate about their product and rightly so!

Since the 16th, I've been talking to a lot of people about getting a new job. The economy is really, really bad. I've never experienced so much difficulty finding opportunities. That said, I have secured interviews with a couple of companies in January and I'm working on more and so I'm optimistic that I'll be employed full time by the end of February.

With the lay-off and the holidays I haven't had much time to post to my blog or to do anything else related to multi-touch. My Surface unit lay dormant until yesterday when I fired it up and started doing some development again. I'm starting to think that this lay-off was the beginning of a great new start. Seriously, I'm not just saying that. I suppose I should be depressed, but I'm not. In fact, I'm excited because I can focus on my current passion, Microsoft Surface, with few distractions. I loved working at Curl but getting laid off at this time in my life may have been the best thing that's happened professionally in several years. I don't know what will come of this, how this will impact my life, but I'm looking forward to a change.

Photoshop with Pen and Multi-Touch

The Media Interaction Lab has a good video on the use of multi-touch combined with pen computing to work with Photoshop. The part where the person is editing illustration of an elephant is pretty convincing. The other parts where the person is doing a really poor drawing of an adjustable wrench is less interesting in my opinion.

While editing the elephant illustration the person is wearing a black glove on her Pen hand, which could be to reduce glare from the overhead projector or reduce capacitance while drawing.

Prior to seeing this video I had thought about how Surface might be used for advanced illustration and photo editing. I like the idea of using a pen in combination with multi-touch - that makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't use an overhead projector - rear projection is better - and I would probably want a surface that is tilted like a drafting table. Those would seem to be must haves to make the solution viable.

Using a inferred pen is something I've also been thinking about. There is a video by the brilliant Johnny Lee on how to make a light pen (lots of other stuff too. This guy is awesome and he was just hired away by Microsoft). I think you can make Surface ignore finger and blog interaction in favor of a light pen which would allow the user to lean on and over the table with out getting hit tests from their arm or sleeve. It's something I hope to investigate.

iPhone becomes a Credit Card Terminal

There are a lot of iPhone applications in the Apple App Store but most of them are games (something like 60 - 70%) and of those that are not there's not much to look at. It actually reminds me of all the gadgets and widgets that were introduced when Google Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets became popular for a while (2005 - 2007). Lots of choices but not much substance.

Today, however, I heard about an iPhone application that acts as a credit card terminal. Pictured to the left the iPhone credit card terminal application, developed and sold by innerfence, allows you to enter a person's credit card number, expiration date, transaction amount, and zip code and you can get an authorization for their card and charge for goods. Bad cards? No worries, if its not active than the authorization won't go through!

This is going to be priceless for vendors on the go. For example, at the Minneapolis Art fair every year artists (the good ones) might sell tens of thousands of dollars in art. They all take credit cards but they use the old carbon paper and mechanical swipe machines. Very 1980's. There is no way for an artist to know if the charge will go though when they call it in later after the event is over. Another one is cab companies. The few cities were cabs have credit card processing machines, the driver has to give up 5% of the fair to use them. That sucks. However, if the cab companies allows drivers to use their iPhone they can save a lot of money in fees and the driver can stop getting gutted every time a charge card is used.

The innerfence Authorize.NET service costs something like $50.00 per month with no transaction, set up, or minimum transactions fee. It's a dream for any road warrior merchant!

Btw - the gateway service that does the authorization using SSL can be used without an iPhone. I think its about time we wrote a Surface application that accesses that gateway. Now we are really talking about doing business with Surface!

The Neuromancer of Surface

I just received an email from Microsoft telling me that my Surface unit has shipped. It's supposed to arrive Friday morning and I can think of little else.

The past couple of days I've been working into the night (my own hours) on a Surface application for visualizing and editing photos on Flickr. I've learned a lot about WPF and Surface and I expect to accomplish a lot more before my Surface unit actually gets here on Friday. I want to be able to launch my first Surface application by the end of the weekend.

My wife is in charge of uploading our photos to Flickr which she does about once a week. Hollie, my wife, is a true Luddite in many ways and her duty to upload pictures to flickr is taken reluctantly and solemnly like dish duty. She doesn't like it but feels it needs to be done.

My goal with this first Surface application is to make the act of viewing and uploading new pictures to Flickr so easy and fun that my wife will actually enjoy it. Is that possible? Can my wife have a computer experience that she enjoys? It's a challenge to say the least. If I can make uploading, commenting, and tagging photos fun for my wife I can create applications that are inviting to anyone.