Infostrat Demos Awsome Surface Map

One of the things I've been working on with my Surface unit is a mapping application. You see maps on Surface in many of the demos and the one used with the Concierge application is the best known. So you would think the mapping capability is a fully baked component of Surface. Well, its not.

The technology used in most of the demos you see is based on Microsoft Virtual Earth and while there are VE components for the web and for WinForms there is no easy way of using the technology on Microsoft Surface which is WPF/XNA based and uses a completely different interaction metaphor (touch).

As a result every organization that wants to deliver a global map component to their clients has to figure out how to do it from scratch. This is not a trivial endeavor and I tell you that first hand. I've been working with a couple different technologies including MapDotNet and the VE 3D and both require a lot of programming to get working properly on the Surface.

So when I saw the mapping application demoed by Josh Wall of Infostrat on10 I was completely blown away. It's the coolest mapping application for the Surface I've seen yet.

The globe itself can be moved around the Surface table as a ScatterViewItem like pushing a planet around in space. That's a first. Also they have developed this really awesome "ring menu" which makes the map so much easier to work with when dealing with multiple users. The video showcasing the application is long, but its worth watching. Designers will appreciate the UI, developers the difficulty of the solution, and everyone else the pure eye candy it provides. Here is a shout-out to Josh Wall and Josh Blake for their work on this mapping application. Nice job guys!

E-Ink and Touch

The ReadWriteWeb has great article and video of a new E Ink product coming out of a company called Plastic Logic. It's interface is an integrated touchscreen.

According to Plastic Logic's web site the eReader screen is 8 1/2" x 11" (standard US letter), and its less then 7mm thick and weighs only 16 oz. About the size of a thin magazine, but its rigid which I think is much better than flexible in terms of usability.

What's more is it supports many different publishing formats including PDF, DOC(X), XLS(X), PPT(X), TEXT, RTF, HTML, JPEG, PNG, BMP, ePub, and eReader Format. They also plan to have a publisher program which I guess is kind of like iPhone Apps but for content.

But the best part, of course, is that its touch screen. The importance of combining E Ink products and touchscreen technology can't be understated. It will change the very fabrick of our existence. While the Kindel is nice, this thing is the future. Very cool, guys!

Surface for managing a warehouse

Ben Riga posted a really cool video demonstrating how Microsoft surface might be used in line-of-business applications, specifically a warehouse management application. (Fast forward 2 minutes to get to the good parts). According to Ben Riga:

"The demo during Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote session shows top-down heat-map visualization of the bins in a warehouse. The color-coding gives an immediate view into the status of the warehouse with blue showing cold (i.e. bins with low pick rates) and red showing hot (i.e. bins with high pick rates). Multi-touch is fully supported on Surface allowing multiple warehouse staff to collaborate while manipulating the data to optimize the warehouse for fast picking."

To me this is much more impressive than bubble wrap or music making applications we've seen before. This very practical application of Surface shows how data visualization and direct manipulation can be brought together to make people more effective at their jobs.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

This is not related to multi-touch but a book I edited has been published and is now available for purchase on Amazon.com or at O'Reilly and soon at a bookstore near you.

The book, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, was born out of a presentation I gave several times last year titled "10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know". When I asked fellow architects for advice for that presentation I got lots of great suggestions including one to create a wiki and a book. From that was born the 97 Things project which is about as close to open source as a book can get I think.

The 97 Things project is a wiki-like web site where dozens of software architects have contributed axioms and advice for other software architects on everything from how to manage really bright people to how to architect systems that are simple and flexible. It's not a hard-core technical guide, its advice on how to be better software architect.

The best 97 axioms written by over four dozen authors on the web site were edited and compiled into the book pictured above. I wrote only one axiom in the book and so I'm not the author, I'm the editor. I, with the help of Mike Loukidies of O'Reilly, edited contributions and chose the best ones, but the real credit goes to the dozens of authors who unselfishly contributed to the project. It was for all of us, I think, a labor of love. I gave my "10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" presentation on an O'Reilly web cast to promote the book. It's free so if you are interested please click here to listen and watch.

The 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know is the flagship of a new series that O'Reilly is publishing. There will be two other books published in the next few months: 97 Things Every Software Project Manager Should Know, edited by Barbee Davis, and 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, edited by Kevlin Henney. Those books are in the works but are already well along and should be ready for print in two to four months.

We Are Looking for another Surface Developer!

Want to be a Microsoft Surface developer? Here's your chance.

We are looking for a skilled .NET/WPF developer to join our small strategic marketing agency located in the Denver Tech Center. As current strategic partners with Microsoft’s Surface Team, we are obviously BIG proponents of the latest and greatest in multi-touch interactive technology. If you want to program for the “next big thing” then we want to talk with you. While you should bring a strong background in various web programming languages, we encourage continued learning and training. When we find the right candidate, this role will likely offer additional training at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ with the Surface Development Team.

Just what is it that we do? Our focus is on managing client’s customer experiences. Through a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative studies, competitive assessment, and statistical analysis we enable our clients to identify areas of improvement that impact overall customer satisfaction. We are in the process of creating a new product development team to further address customer needs – and the .NET/WPF Developer would play a key role in this group. The Microsoft Surface is currently our platform of choice for product delivery, although we plan to add new technologies throughout 2009 as they appear.

Contact me if you are interested. The company I work for CSG is small and agile and a lot of fun. You should have about 5 years experience in software at least two of which is with WPF and .NET. Don't worry about knowing Surface, you can learn on our dime.

Microsoft to buy Gesture Control Company

According to this article at C|Net Microsoft is in the process of acquiring 3DV whose ZCam uses depth perception to register gestures. Not multi-touch gestures, but free-from-contact gestures.

It's expected that this technology will be incroperated into XBox and give Microsoft a compeditive product to the Wii. Imagine bowling by just moving your hand rather than having to hold on to a Wii mote.

Ina Fried of C|NET - one of my favorite bloggers and tech journalists - has a great video interview and demostration of the ZCam in action. As an added bonus we get to see Ina box! You go Girl!

Orange's Touch Watch Phone

Orange, the internet and mobile phone brand of France Telecom, is planning on releasing a touch screen phone in the form factor of a watch, the GD910. While I'm sure this seems pretty cool to a lot of people, personally I think its a miss application of touch screen.

You can see the device being used on this Endgadget blog posting - apparently the transition from one screen to the next is so important that the demo guy hid it with his hand.

Anyway, the fingers completely occlude the screen to the point where it would be pretty hard (I'm guessing) to see what soft keys you are pushing. A much better desgin for very small touch screens is the NanoTouch design by Patrick Baudisch which avoids occlusion by allowing you to touch the backside of the multitouch device.

iBar - Novelty or The Future?

Mindstorm of the United Kingdom has several multi-touch products designed explicitly for the hospitality industry. One product, iBar, has been particularly successful having installations throughout Europe and even in the United States.

While iBar may be visually interesting and a great novelty it also demonstrates that large horizontal multi-touch devices are useful, not just for games (e.g. Air Hockey), but for work and retail. Imagine going into any retail outlet and having the counter top in front of you provide more information about the product you are considering buying.

The potential for multi-touch in the horizontal form factor is impressive and I think we'll see a lot more of it in our local bars, hotels, retail outlets, offices, and even our homes within the next decade. Mindstorm is already working on object recognition and even credit card scanning.

Article on Porting WPF to Surface

Scott Hanselman has written a pretty good blog entry about porting WPF applications to Microsoft Surface. While I think WPF is an great platform for developing multi-touch applications, you need design the application from the ground up to be multi-touch. Most pre-existing WPF applications today are inappropriate for Microsoft Surface.

Slapping a multi-touch interface on a GUI application originally deployed for use with Windows and a mouse is just a bad idea. You really have to re-think the entire design of a software interface when you are deploying it to a multi-touch device.

That said, Scott's application does make sense on multi-touch and anything we can do to improve people's understanding of the Surface (as well as other multi-touch) SDKs is a good thing. Nice work, Scott.

Giant Multi-touch Air Hockey

As reported by Engadget (and a dozen other sites), this enormous multi-touch table was developed by UI Centric using a 103" Panasonic plasma TV and U-Touch overlay.

UI Centric built this huge multi-touch device and the Air Hockey game in an incredible 4 days. The used the U-Touch's inferred technology and wrote their own gesture engine. They used WPF to develop the game itself. Nice work guys!

Physics Engines and Multitouch

One of the most important design concerns in multi-touch interfaces is called "Super-Realism". Super-realism means that objects on the screen with which you interact demonstrate behavior rooted in, but not entirely limited by, real world physics.

For example, the pinching and stretching of photos - the quintessential multi-touch demo application - results in natural feeling shrinking and expanding of documents or pictures. In reality, pictures don't shrink or stretch when you touch them, but it feels realistic in multi-touch. That's an excellent example of super-realism.

Important to making super-realism work is basic physics. When you push and object across the screen it should travel a distance proportional to your push and decelerate to a stop. The sub-systems in multi-touch applications that make objects on the screen behave like real word objects are often called Physics Engines. Physics Engines for multi-touch are really starting to become important and the main purpose of this blog post is to bring your attention to a couple of them.

Thanks to a posting by another blogger I was made aware of a physics engine that’s' been developed by the Microsoft Technology Center for the Surface (see this video). This Physics Engine works with XNA. Anther physics engine for use on the Surface is being developed by Tiago Andrade e Silva for WPF developers (see this video). There are lots of other physics engines to choose from, just Google the term and you'll find what you are looking for. One last one I wanted to point people to is Crayon Physics which was developed for use with a stylus – it’s a lot of fun.

Rear Projection TV as a Giant Touch Wall

If you've been salivating over the big flat screen TVs and trying to figure out what to do with huge rear-projection TV you bought in the 90's, I have an answer for you: Turn that old rear-projection TV into a giant touch screen!

MAKE magazine pointed me to this blog post on IDEO Labs about how the converted a 67" rear-projection TV into a huge touch wall. The instructions are pretty detailed and fun to read and the cost is considerably less than buying a Surface computer (especially if you have a big rear-projection TV gathering dust somewhere). IDEO labs were not the first to do this they cite a similar blog posting at arbi.trario.us from November last year. Both systems use lasers and touch systems developed by the NUI Group - the ultimate resource for do-it-yourself touch screen enthusiasts.

JavaScript Multi-touch API for Safari iPhone Browser

I haven't done any iPhone development yet but I always figured when I do it will be with the iPhone SDK in Objective-C, not a web browser application in JavaScript. Why? Because I didn't think JavaScript supported multi-touch until I read this great post on Ajaxian.com.

Apparently, Apple provides a pretty good multi-touch API to the Safari browser on the iPhone so now you can create web applications that are multi-touch. I suspect that this doesn't work on anything other than the iPhone web browser but its a solid first step to enablinig web developers to leverage multi-touch. That's something that will be come very important as more and more desktop and notbook computers ship with multi-touch screens.

It will be interseting to see if the iPhone multi-touch JavaScript API is ported to other browsers on other devices or if something different is used. Right now I would guess that Apple will not open up its JavaScript multi-touch API to other plateforms which means that different browsers will probably support different multi-touch JavaScript APIs until someone (W3C?) defines a standard.

If you have an iPhone than visit this iPhone LightBox applicaiton to see a multi-touch web application at work. The application doesn't work on anything other than the Safari browser. In Firefox and IE on my Vista desktop it won't run. It works great, however, on my iPhone and, using a mouse, in my Safari browser on my Vista machine. If you have a multi-touch desktop or laptop with Safari on it, try it out and let me know if it works.

To learn more about developing multi-touch JavaScript web applications for the iPhone (and possibly Safari desktop) I suggest starting with this blog post by Neil Roberts which is very well written and should provide you with the jump you need to get started.

Stantum raises the multi-touch bar

The thing about multi-touch is that in addition to taps, holds, and other gestures there is also pressure. Neither the iPhone’s capacitance technology nor the Microsoft Surface diffused illumination technology can detect pressure, but resistive technologies can. In fact, most touch screens up until more recently used resistive technologies but they could only track a single contact.

Stantum Technologies has been selling a resistive technology that can handle multiple contacts including a combination of fingers and stylus for a while now. Next week they will be demoing screen technology that can also distinguish between soft, medium, and hard pressure. That adds a whole new dimension to multi-touch!

Another thing that's cool about Stantum is that you can get these multi-touch kits for 4.3", 3.5", and 2.5" screens with USB connector and a multi-touch gestures engine and API that you can use with Windows, Mac, or Linux. It would be to create your own multi-touch interface from scratch - especially for hobbyists who can't wield a soldering iron (like yours truly). I haven’t found out how much their kits cost or what language their API is written in, but I've sent them an email and hope to find out soon.

Now to be honest Stantum is probably more interested in developers testing their technology for devices which will be produced in the thousands not one-offs developed by enthusiasts, but you never know what someone tinkering in their garage will come up with!

Update January 20th, 2009

Engadget has a good article on the Stantum touch screens include a cool video showing how versatile they are.

Resources for Multitouch in Windows 7

Szymon Kobalczyk has a nice blog post explaining how to get started with multi-touch in Windows 7 including which hardware you can use and even a little bit on development SDKs - the bottom line on the later is that there really isn't any SDK focused on Windows 7 (sans WPF 4.0), but you can adapt other frameworks for use with the operating system.

He even has a link to a Silverlight multitouch framework. He promises to post more in the comming days. Nice work, Szymon!

Update

Adam Hill was kind enough to send me a link to another blog by Kevin Marshall with more guidance on developing Windows 7 muli-touch applications in WPF. The blog entry includes pointers to examples that map C# to native Win 7 multi-touch events and even a gesture engine. It's a great blog entry and a nice complelement to the material already mentiond.

Siftables - the coolest of NUI applications

Multi-touch, when done correctly, is a subset of a greater discipline called Natural User Interfaces (NUI). NUI includes multi-touch but also speech, in the air gestures, facial recognition, and a lot more. NUI (aka Tangible User Interfaces) is so new its hard to find a decent defintion of it. If anyone can provide a pointer to a good defintion I would love to have it.

Thanks to Dave Mark's blog, I found out this morning about a new NUI application developed David Merrill called Siftables. I won't even try to explain it - its best experienced by video. Of course as something really new and cool it was presented at TED - which seems to be the best venue for tapping into the best inventive minds of our century.

Multitouch Programming for HP TouchSmart

Not long ago I blogged about the difficulty of finding SDKs for some multi-touch platforms including the HP TouchSmart. It turns out there is an SDK of sorts for the HP TouchSmart: .NET 3.5 and WPF!

That's right you can program TouchSmart multi-touch applications in WPF. There are little things you need to differently to make your WPF applications work in TouchSmart, but the guidance is there to help people get started. I don't have time to learn how to program an HP TouchSmart (way too busy with Microsoft Surface development right now) but I'll provide pointers for people who are interested. Here are the links you'll need to get started:

HT TouchSmart Software Development Guidlines 1.5
For whatever reason you have follow an install process which essentially unzips a PDF document. The document itself is a little difficuilt to follow but will make a lot more sense if you first read the article listed next.

An HP TouchSmart Application Development Guidelines Primer
This is a good article for doing a first attempt but its not more than a primer. You'll probably run into all kinds of problems doing anything more advanced in which case you can turn to the TouchSmart community forums.

TouchSmart Community
In addition to the forums there are some articles and a couple of example applications but the forums are where you will probably learn the most. Make sure you search the forums because there are already a lot of newbie questions which have been answered - its likely your problem has already been addressed. If you don't find an answer than ask away - it looks like people are pretty helpful on this forum.

The guidelines I found talk about the IQ500 series, a Desktop computer, so I'm not positive it will apply to the HP Touchsmart tx2 pictured above or any other TouchSmart machine for that matter. The answer probably lies in the forums.

Windows 7 will Ship In Time for Christmas

TechARP has the scoop! A document sent from Microsoft to OEMs show that the Windows 7 ship date is currently scheduled for December 10th, 2009.

Now if we could get them to ship WPF 4.0 with multi-touch support than I'll really be excited.

(thanks to slashdot.org for the heads-up).

Enough with the Touch Screens, Already!

While touch screens are all the rage these days, there are plenty of reasons not to use a touch screen interface at all. Ryan Jones says "Enough With The Touch Screens" in his blog and makes a lot of good points. The most important seems to be speed of input. His sentiments on the subject resonate to some degree with my own experiences. I remember 20+ years ago working in the stock room of a retail store. I had this "electric" adding machine with which I could add columns of numbers at a blinding speed - something I could not do with a soft keyboard on a touch screen.

The ability to quickly input data depends on the fact that you can do it by feel, without looking. A touch screen makes that nearly impossible. The keyboard I use has big buttons and is fairly loud. I like that. I tried the new Apple keyboard which is thin and flat and quiet and I hated it. When it comes to typing and power tools, give me big buttons and lots of noise.

Although I don't text a lot I think the same is true for people who do a lot of thumbing on their cell phones. In Asia it’s not unusual for a person to send and receive hundreds of text messages a day. I don't think you could do that as fast with a touch screen as you can with those little phone buttons.

The point is that while touch screens and multi-touch screens in particular are just plain cool, they are not a silver bullet. In fact, there are times when a touch screen is the worst possible solution. As multi-touch designers and developers its important that we are aware of the limitations of touch screens and the benefits of plain-old-buttons.

It's the Multi-touch SDK's Stupid!

I remember when Clinton (the Husband) was running for president against Bush (the Father) back in 1992. The slogan for the Clinton campaign was, "It's the Economy Stupid!". The point was that while Bush Sr. was doing well on foreign policy he was disconnected from the realities of the US population which was in the midst of a recession. True or not the slogan stuck and variations of it have been used ever since.

While I'm very excited to see so many multi-touch and touch mobile devices (e.g. iPhone, Palm Pre, HTC Touch Pro) and multi-touch desktops (MacBook Pro, HP TouchSmart TX2, Dell Latitude XT2), tables (Microsoft Surface, Ideum MT2, SMART Table, GestureTek Illuminate, IntuiFace 2G, Perceptive Pixel, Multitouch Cell, iTable, Teliris, CUBIT), as well as operating systems (Windows 7, Mac Snow leapard) I'm a bit discouraged by the lack of SDKs available.

The Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface have SDKs but a lot of other devices do not. What's the point of having a multi-touch device if third party vendors cannot create applications for it?

Take Windows 7 for example, according to rumors it may be out the end of this year but a multi-touch SDK won't be available for Windows 7 until WPF 4.0 is released. When will that happen? HP TouchSmart has multi-touch but no SDK that I'm aware of. Some multi-touch tables such as Ideum's MT2 offer an SDK (via NUI Group's open source Touchlib or commercial Snowflake gesture systems) but many others including IntuiFace 2G and SMART Table do not. Android has built in support for multi-touch but you won’t find it in the Android SDK.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm the one who is stupid. Maybe all these devices offer SDKs and I just can't find them. I would love it if the vendors corrected me on every count! (Please include pointers if you know of an SDK)

Attention vendors: If multi-touch developers cannot develop applications for your multi-touch device then your product's support for multi-touch is little more than a gimmick. While having multi-touch capable devices is really important, having SDKs released with those products is just as important. I suppose in the scheme of things the device must come first, but really can't vendors do more to provide SDKs as well?

Update February 12, 2008
There is a SDK for HP TouchSmart after all. See this blog post for more details.

Microsoft's 100000th Patent On Object Recognition

In the movie The Island a large multi-touch table is used by the evil Dr. Merrick to review the files of one Jordan Two Delta. It's a technologically thrilling scene where information is spread out and collated with the simple swipe of a glass pyramid (Video). Here is an interesting blog entry about its design. It looks great and to be honest it puts Minority Report to shame, but that's just my opinion (btw - I think the Minority Report gestural interface is inane - the subject of another post).

What is really interesting is the use of that glass pyramid which is essentially a tagged object, something that's already available to Microsoft Surface developers. Tags are similar to bar codes but look like the side of a casino die with the dots in the wrong places. The idea is that you can place the tag on any object to give it an identity and then using that identity and the shape of the object itself you can create menus or other interactions that occur when the object is placed on the table. There is pretty cool video that illustrates the use of tagged objects on Surface.

Well it turns out that Microsoft has been awarded a patent on the concept of associating data with objects making it difficult for other multi-touch tables to incorporate similar functionality. By happenstance this is Microsoft's 100000th patent but what is more important in my opinion is the number of patents that surround the use of gestural interfaces in general including multi-touch.

If we are not careful, innovation in this new interaction paradigm will be difficult. I know some argue that patents encourage innovation because you have to figure out non-infringing methods to accomplish similar tasks but when it comes to fundamental capabilities like object recognition and gestures I find it difficult to see how the industry benefits.

As I said before I'm not an expert on patents or their interpretation but it doesn't take a patent lawyer to understand that the impact of these types of patents, while perfectly legal, are just bad for the rest of us.

Kindle 3 will have a touch-screen

Amazon.com announced the Kindle 2, sleeker than the iPhone but about twice as heavy, the Kindle 2 is a nice improvement over the original which has sold over 500,000 units since its introduction at the end of 2007.

The problem with Kindle 2 is that it has no touch-screen. You would think this would be a no-brainer - after all the Sony Reader has a touch interface, but according to this C|Net article combining touch-screen with E-ink reduces resolution something that is extremely important in an eBook reader.

Still if you examine the device it seems obvious that it would benefit from touch-screen technology. A touch-screen would allow the Kindle to have a software keyboard and page controls which would reduce the size, make it easier to hold, and eliminate accidental button-activation when holding the device. I would be surprised if the next version of the Kindle didn't sport a touch-screen but for now Kindle lovers are stuck with a 20th Century interaction model.

Update February 14th, 2009

Check out the prototype for the Fujitsu's eBook. It uses a touch screen.

Pattie Maes upstages Jeff Han at TED 2009?

MaximumPC has an interesting story about a new computer interface developed by a team of research at MIT lead by Dr. Pattie Maes called, "Sixth Sense".

Sixth Sense is a small device that hangs around your neck like lanyard and automatically provides you information based on gestures or simply your surroundings. For example, if you are talking to someone that is recognized by The Sixth Sense it can project meta-data about the person (background, publications, or whatnot). It also responds to gestures you make in front of the lanyard mounted camera.

The device itself is a modified mobile phone with a camera that provides access to the Internet. I'm not sure if its projects information on any surface or just on your eye (think Star Truck Cyborgs). Anyway, the video is not available yet but the story by MaximumPC sounds like it was a real crowd pleaser. This is quite a bit beyond multi-touch and if the demo lives up to the hype it probably makes Jeff Han's landmark presentation at TED 2006 look archaic.

That said, I'll always be a big fan of Jeff Han and that presentation three years ago. He wasn't the first to do multi-touch but he sure did break the ice in a really big way. The multi-touch industry owes Jeff Han its gratitude.

Update March 10th, 2009

The TED conference has finally released the video of the presentation which is really good.

Update Feb. 6th, 2009

Engadget has posted videos of the amazing Six Sense technology complements of WIRED magazine.

Update Feb 5th, 2009 (afternoon)

FastCompany has more information on Six Sense with some cool photos!

Ideum mt2 Table is very cool!

Ideum, a company that develops computer and web exhibits for museums, announced today that they have released their own large multi-touch table, the mt² Table.

With screen 50" diagonal screem the mt² is significantly larger than Microsoft Surface (30" diagonal). It also offers higher resolutions, 1280 x 720 compared to Microsoft Surface's 1024 x 768, and it looks really cool to boot!

What I really like about the Ideum mt² Table is that it uses the NUI Suite 1.0 Snowflake gesture recognition system which supports the TUIO protocol and can therefore be programmed in several languages including Adobe ActionScript 3 (Flash), Java, C#, C/C++ and even Python. I would love to write a multi-touch application in Flash!

The table also comes with preinstalled software including multi-media viewer, an implementation of Google Earth, a 3D model render, and a few other things. It looks great except for the life of the bulb which is 3,000 hours compared to 6,000 hours for the Surface (projections bulbs are expensive). I'm not sure what the pricing or availability is yet - I'll update this post when I find out.

Update Feb. 6th, 2009

The folks at Ideum were kind enough to send more more details about the mt² including pricing.

Pricing for the Ideum mt² Table

• The mt² Table with full hardware and software package: $18,000
• On-site 2 day installation, calibration and care training: $5,000
• 1 Year hardware and software support and updates: $2,000
• Total (includes shipping, assembly and all other costs): $25,000

This is the pricing for non-profit organizations or 501(c)(3) organizations like museums, universities, libraries, and "approved" developers. I have no idea what the pricing is for profit driven companies or if the device is even available to them.

Right now it takes about 6 weeks to get a mt² after ordering it. They hope to bring that down to 4 weeks in the next few months and they may release a "kit" version that would reduce the price of on-site setup to zero. One more thing, although the mt²'s bulb life is only half of the Microsoft Surface they send an extra bulb with every unit so you effectively get 6,000 of bulb life total.

Training for Microsoft Surface

Wintellect will start offering training courses in Microsoft Surface this Spring. The first course offering, Mastering Microsoft Surface develoment with WPF, will be April 20 -24th, 2009 in Dallas, Texas. It's 1o 5 days and 50 hours long.

This is the first time, to my knowlage, that Surface training has been offered outside of Redmond's campus. In fact, I think I attended the very last Surface training offered by Microsoft itself. From this point forward (I think) all training will be provided by Wintellect and eventaully DevelopMentor. At any rate, if you want training in Microsoft Surface your best bet is Wintellect in Dallas this April. No details on DevelopMentor training are available yet.

One Finger Gestures

Frequently the best multi-touch gestures are done with a single finger. The advantage of using a single finger to manipulate a multi-touch surface are compelling. For one thing, a single finger gesture is frequently easier to execute than multiple finger gestures. And, in my opinion, single finger gestures can be much more intuitive then multi-finger gestures.

As an example lets compare the ubiquitous "pinch" gesture popularized by the iPhone, which shrinks or stretches visuals, to the Linja Zax gesture developed by Linja Design Oy of Helsinki Finland. The pinch gesture obviously requires two fingers of one hand with the iPhone or fingers from two hands with something like the surface. While the pinch works really well, it requires frequent and repeated pinching or stretching to progressively zoom out of or into a image. Do this gesture on a global map on a big touch screen enough times and you'll soon get tired of it. The Linja Zax gesture, on the other hand requires only a single finger which traces a spiral. With each spiral (a circle gesture really) the image zooms in or out depending on whether you move your finger clockwise or counter clockwise. It's very simple to remember and to execute and is an excellent alternative to pinching and stretching.

Another example is the Swype keyboard developed by Swype of Seattle, Washington. Swype allows you to enter text by dragging your finger and pausing on keys rather than thumbing, henpecking or touch typing. It's really handy with small devices. Swype allows you to type fairly fast or even really fast when combined with predictive logic. It's a nice alternative to pecking away at a keyboard on a small device.

There are plenty of other examples of nice single finger gestures including the archetype button press, but also other less known examples like the “tack” in which you start with the tip of the finger and roll on to the pad of your finger to indicate tacking something down (Click here and fast forward to 1 minute 19 seconds).

The point is: when talking about multi-touch we should not insist that multiple fingers be used at all times. What is more important is that multiple fingers can be used to allow social computing or more sophisticated gestures. In general, however, I think multi-finger gestures should be used sparingly. Why use two or three fingers (or sometimes a whole hand) to do what can be done with one finger?

Of course its easy to see people going overboard with this – like videos I’ve seen where user have to memorize a number glyphs in order to request menus or help or whatnot. Single-finger gestures are extremely important tool in multi-touch design but like all gestures they should be intuitive and discoverable.