Quietly, without any fanfare, Microsoft has released the first service pack for Surface, their big multitouch table computer. The update was released during TechEd 2009, but no press release or any other form of promotional material was sent out. Still, there are some really interesting additions in this service pack, making it quite a substantial upgrade for Surface owners.
Surface SP1
The service pack incorporates changes and updates based on the feedback from “more than 180 partners in 11 countries”. It comes with quite a number of user interface updates, but also a lot of work has gone into improving the SDK and the underlying system of Surface.
When it comes to the user interface changes, Microsoft has focussed its efforts on tailoring the UI for touch. Many of the additions are a little hard to put into words, so the best way to learn them is to simply show them (video from CrunchGear).
There have also been a number of changes under-the-hood. The SDK has been further improved to allow for support for any .NET framework; they’re also ahrd at work at integrating WPF and XNA. As you could see in the video, the identity tags have been refined, and now support storing 128bits of data. Support for Windows Update has been added as well – quite perplexing though that it wasn’t in there in the first place. They also added a stress-test application (you can see it running at the end of the video above) which, as the name implies, makes sure applications can actually handle boatloads of touch inputs at the same time.
Surface SP1 can be obtained by emailing the Microsoft Surface Business Desk [email link] with the subject heading “SP1 Upgrade Request”, or by filling out the form on the community Surface site.
Beyond
Loosely related to the release of SP1 for Surface is Microsoft’s ambition to standardise gestures across their products, from Surface, to Windows 7, to Windows Mobile. The goal is to make sure that one gesture will yield the same result in all those products, so that you only have to learn one set of gestures.
In the meantime, Microsoft is also at work on the next-generation of Surface, which is said to include an additional projector which can project images above the actual Surface display in the form of overlays. This second generation is still 2-3 years away, however.
I hope prices for Surface machines come down soon, and that Microsoft will start offering them to ordinary consumers. This is some great and fun technology.
I like how the person in the video keeps saying, “I almost crashed it by…”. I guess they even include the BSOD? Funny… Will they ever learn?
From the video: they now use “128 bit tags, so you can have about a billion of them”
Edited 2009-05-16 16:20 UTC
Still seems like a gimick to me.
So far Microsoft does seem to be targeting this towards shops using Surface tables as gimmicky demos. So yes, it is gimmicky, and that seems to be the target so far.
All four owners of Surface rejoice!
I can appreciate the merit of the product but I think that this shouldn’t be a of a ‘separate’ product but part of an existing product. What I’d like to see, however, is a stylus based notepad where hand writing can be done to a screen and it is saved as it is rather than attempting to try and convert it into act text. Although I don’t like to slam an idea that appears to be good on the surface – I question as to the point of this; is it an experiment in the form of a product?
That would, at least in theory, be fairly easy: track the movement of the stylus along the screen and simply draw lines where it moves, then save as an image. It would be fairly limiting though, useful only for notes to yourself or perhaps to send as an image attachment via email or post up on an image site. Just about everywhere else on the internet requires text, so if you were wanting broader functionality for such a notepad you would need to be able to switch image mode on and off at need.
PDAs have been doing this for years.
‘Notes’ is a freebe with Windows Mobile and does exactly this and can even recognise your handwriting and convert it to ASCII – should you wish.
“Beat up Martin” => “Eat up Martha”
OneNote behaves exactly like this on a TablePC. It keeps the stylus input as ‘ink.’ If it is actually text and you wish to search it, you can type what you’re looking for in a “Find” box and it will do a fuzzy match on your handwriting (I think it keeps around an index of recognized text in the background) and highlight all the handwritten locations where you wrote some particular word.
I used this for about a year in college (alas, I graduated and stopped handwriting text afterwards).
I have had the oppurtunity to play with one of the surface machines its actually quite nice and I wish they were less expensive I would buy one in a heartbeat. I do believe Surface is still based on the Windows XP kernel. I think, may be wrong there.
If it was less expensive, it would sell like crazy.