PDC 2008, Day 2 – HP TouchSmart front and center
October 28, 2008 11:55 pm
The PDC keynote this morning was amazing to me. It felt like the HP TouchSmart PC was utilized for about half of the entire keynote by Steven Sinofski and Julie Larson Green. Four machines on stage, front and center.
Since the HP TouchSmart doesn’t have VGA out, there was a camera guy up on stage during the demos, which I thought worked out really well, sort of bringing the audience up on stage with Julie.
Naturally, the machines had been wiped clean and had a Windows 7 build with the new taskbar installed (6933, the build on “The Goods” is 6801 and doesn’t have it). NextWindow, the people making the touchscreen, are making a Windows 7 compatible driver available so you can start developing for Windows 7 touch today, using the TouchSmart. Of course, I’d rather you develop something for the HP TouchSmart UI that we’ve created, and you’ll be able to download some documentation for that soon, from the community site TouchSmartCommunity.com.
But I digress.
If you ever doubted that .NET and WPF were ready for “prime time”, doubt no longer. According to Scott Guthrie’s keynote, Visual Studio 2010 will have its user interface migrated to WPF. That almost blew my mind. Microsoft transitioning their bedrock developer tool to WPF – they wouldn’t do that lightly. Here’s a shot of how WPF in VS 2010 will enable useful visualizations and hookup to external tools:
Scott, too used TouchSmart for his keynote:
And Tesco used it for their demo as well:
And the machines that were all covered up tightly in the big room yesterday:
Yup, all TouchSmarts, ready for Multi Touch hands-on-labs:
The Windows 7 booth had one:
The WPF team did too, although I don’t have a picture of it.
The coolest “giveaway” of PDC 2008 has to be the Sensor development kit from the Windows 7 team. It’s got a hardware board from Freescale with a bunch of sensors, accelerometer and LEDs, all powered via USB, and accessible via the new Sensor APIs in Windows 7. Here’s a shot of the booth:
I can’t wait to play with it.
What a day. Not sure it gets much better than that.
2 Responses to “PDC 2008, Day 2 – HP TouchSmart front and center”
[...] One blog comment about Guthrie’s keynote that I found from GeekTieGuy: [...]
It must have been a great experience to be at PDC 2008! I’m happy to see all of the TouchSmarts, and I’m excited about the possibility of WPF taking off.
By the way, I love my TouchSmart, even though I’ve always been a Mac person.
(The sensor development kit looks interesting, too.)
Thanks for the post.
Lynn
Care to comment?