After lunch, we got a hands-on presentation of Surface, the multi-touch table system. That was really fun. You’ve seen the videos, etc. When you start playing with it though, your head starts buzzing with all the possibilities. A few interesting points: First, someone asked what kind of hardware it runs on. Surprisingly, it’s a fairly mid-range computer under the hood, running Vista. Secondly, the table top version you see is probably going to be released some time next year. Obviously it’s going to be pretty expensive, and is not really considered a consumer device. It would be more for retail stores, restaurants, entertainment, etc. The eventual consumer version would be a much smaller, more portable device – something you could carry from room to room and hang on the wall. Not sure the timeline on that.
After that, we had a presentation on Popfly. Although it can do some pretty cool things, I really felt that it looked like crap. Essentially, it seems that the developers who created it also did the design for it. Looks like some of my first Flash apps. 🙂 A decent design makeover would do wonders for it.
The next presentation was on feedSync and SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), which to be honest, I didn’t really get. Seems to be some kind of way of syncing up multiple RSS feeds from different sources. I think mainly, I’m just getting tired and zoning out a bit.
Up now is a beta of a new web analytics package. May be some more zoning out time for me…
Bill Gates is up in less than an hour though.
That has got me laughing. If you’re talking about the mashup designer surface we, the developers, did indeed do the design for it. If it’s any consolidation most of the design work was done in notepad and in the Visual Studio XML and Javascript editors in not much time with not many people .
LOL Andy. Well if it’s any consolation, I know developer design when I see it. It looks like something I would have designed. 🙂
LOL 🙂
/me note to self: spell checking is not a replacement for proof reading…