Microsoft today demoed the new multi-touch portion of their next gen operating system Windows 7 yesterday at the All Things Digital conference. For those not familiar with multi-touch, it was brought into the main stream by Apple's iPhone in June of last year and lets users concurrently use multiple touches on their device's screen to perform commands or actions. An example is using a pinching motion with your fingers to zoom in when viewing a picture. The video below is a great demonstration of Windows 7 multi-touch capabilities. The interesting comment from Microsoft is that Multi-Touch will be built throughout the operating system. This change can be a dramatic one for programmers who will need to learn new APIs and coding tools to take advantage of the technology. As the technology is expected to be integrated into the next versions of Linux and Mac OS, we certainly hope that there is commonality when it is integrated into browser technology. The next version of the … [Read more...]
What is going on with the OLPC Initiative?
What a love/hate relationship! Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child's chairman, and Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday that Microsoft would be offering Windows XP at a $3 license fee to be installed on the XO laptop. Targeted at $100, the XO laptop currently costs just under $200 and needs to meet critical mass to drop the price down to that level. It is VERY telling though that Microsoft has finally agreed to offer it's operating system to the OLPC initiative. First off, Microsoft is getting concerned about losing its' market share in the Operating System category. The OLPC XO laptop currently runs Linux. Traditionally, Microsoft has been anti-open source. Also, Apple's Mac OS X Leopard is increasingly gaining market share in the consumer sector and is expected to take another huge leap when the 3G iPhone is expected to be released worldwide in June. The IPhone runs a full version of Apple's operating system. Microsoft is obviously slowly feeling pressure against … [Read more...]
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