Microsoft Surface - A Multi-Touch Screen to hit the market soon?

urig — Thu, 31 May 2007 11:10:20 GMT

Kudos to liorz for beating me to it (link to post in Hebrew).

Veteran readers of Tidbits might recall my fascination with the "Multi-Touch Screen" technology developed by Jeff Han of NYU and how it might revolutionize the way we interact with our computers.

Microsoft Surface promises to be a commercial implementation of a Multi-Touch Screen that will hit the market this winter (according to their PR site). See Bill introduce the product at the Wall Street Journal's D conference:

It's very surprising to hear that Microsoft has beaten Han's Perceptive Pixel in bringing this technology to the mass market. Perceptive Pixel only sell to heavyweight clients, mostly security and intelligence organizations. Microsoft claims the idea for a multi-touch table has been rolling around in Redmond since 2002 - that in itself is a surprise to me.

I believe that if Surface is really as good as it advertises itself to be then we're in for a major revolution that will leave our computers free of keyboards and mice. I hope this will happen sooner than later - depending on how good the implementation is and how quickly prices will drop to reasonable levels.

What's missing in the new Google Reader?

urig — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:24:00 GMT

I've been giving Google Reader a spin and I'm finding it very easy to get used to reading my RSS feeds through it. They've done an excellent job with the UI, as usual.

But then I needed to find an old blog entry from Oren Eini's blog (a book recommendation for a fantasy trilogy of all things) and I've discovered that Google Reader is missing something very important. Something that Google is almost synonymous with - a search box.

What and odd surprise - there is no search feature (that I could find) in the Google Reader. That's like finding out that your brand new Victorinox swiss-army knife doesn't have any knife blades. Or that Nike Town doesn't sell sports shoes.

It's definitely a WTF moment and the only excuse I can come up with for this, is that the Reader is still in the Google Labs and maybe somebody took the search feature off to do some work on it (?!).

test

gui

Microsoft Surface - A Multi-Touch Screen to hit the market soon?

What's missing in the new Google Reader?