That’s me holding up my phone, and in the background the emulator running the app. Incidentally, this picture was taken at the Silicon Valley Windows Phone Meetup, where Tom and I gave a short talk this evening about the app and the support we’ve received from Microsoft while developing it.

The Marketplace section of windowsphone.com.

And that’s the Zune Apps Marketplace page, which I gather has just been disabled, so I was really lucky to get this screenshot at the last minute.

Fun stuff! Please check out the app, and also my other two apps, “Open ” and “Countdown”, which I see just got a five star rating from a kind soul for the latest version. My friend Tom has another app in the Marketplace as well, called “Good Morning” aka. “GMSV EzReader”. A great little app that makes reading the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog from the San Jose Mercury News really nice on Windows Phone.

As I’ve previously written (in February of 2008), there are some computer systems out there that have trouble retaining the functionality of the sound device when Windows comes back from sleep/hibernate.

Since my article from that time is one of the most popular here on my blog, and I was quite fed up by the lack of a driver-based solution, I decided to write a little app to at least put a band-aid on the problem.

This little WPF 3.5-based app, Sound Reset,  lets you reset the device without having to go to Device Manager to disable and re-enable the device. If your device has a different identifier, you can enter the id into the provided text field before clicking the button.

After you download from the link above, unzip the file (for example, using the excellent, free 7-zip) to get the Windows Installer file (SetupSoundReset.msi) and double-click it to install the tool. Let me know if you have any suggestions for changes to the app.

Enjoy!

Over the years I’ve come to realize what it is about agile that makes it work. Agile is basically a mitigation strategy/technology that addresses the human tendency to fail at communicating effectively. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a model I learned about in high school from my language arts teacher – the basic human communication model. This model comes in various forms, but I like the one from my high school years. It’s one of the few things that have stuck with me from that time:

The Sender and Receiver in this case are people (although this model applies to pretty much any communication situation and is used in computer-communication model discussions as well). The Context on each side is complex. It’s made up of a person’s knowledge, cultural upbringing, state of mind, experience, financial situation, family circumstances, and many, many other factors. The Sender intends to convey a Message to the Receiver and the only way to do so is by Encoding the Message (in a way that the Sender hopes the Receiver will be able to Decode) and to pick a Channel for transmitting the Message. The Sender’s only way to verify if the Message reached the Receiver is by some Feedback mechanism, which actually just reverses the situation of the diagram. There are lots of ways that the communication can break down. For example, the Sender might pick an Encoding the Receiver isn’t able to Decode; the Channel might garble the Message so it becomes unrecognizable; or the Receiver might be in a Context that prevents the Message from being Decoded properly. Other communication breakdowns involve the Sender making unstated assumptions about the Receiver’s Context, the Sender picking a Channel that is inappropriate for carrying all the meaning necessary for Decoding the Message, or the Receiver not being receptive to the Message coming through the Channel.

When building software, the central thing we do is to turn ideas in our head into instructions for a computer to execute. If this were a solitary exercise, there wouldn’t be much of a problem: you have an idea; you think about how to translate it into something the computer can do, taking into consideration your skills, the computer environment, your choice of software technology stack, programming language, experience, etc., etc.; you sit down for a few hours, weeks or months to design, write code, test, deploy – and you’re done! In terms of human communication there is none, so the model doesn’t really come into play.

The trouble doesn’t start until you’re working on something that takes more than one person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately, most things undertaken in software these days are of this nature. This means several things. One, there will be human communication going on! Two, the kinds of communication will take many different forms and concern many different topics. And now we’re squarely in the domain of the communication model.

Just thinking of the number and kinds of things that will need to be communicated between people can make your head spin:

• How many features will the software have?
• What are the features?
• How will we know that a feature is done?
• What technologies will we choose to implement the software?
• What computing systems will we support?
• How will we construct the software so it is robust enough, yet easy to change in unforeseen ways?
• What are the major parts of the software?
• How will the parts communicate?
• Will the user be able to understand it and use it as intended?
• Will we be able to deliver the software on time?
• What does on time mean?

And these are just some technical questions. There are others as well, more business related:

• Will the software have value to customers and users?
• Will the customer pay for it?
• How much will the customer pay?
• Will the customer be made mode productive by using the software?
• How will we deliver the software to the customer?
• How will we know if we’re building the right thing?
• How will a customer be able to provide feedback on the software?

Pulling off almost any kind of software effort requires answers to these questions, and more. The nature of software development is one of producing ideas and mental constructs that can be turned into instructions for a computer to execute. If more than one person is involved in this activity, those ideas and mental constructs have to make their way from one person’s brain to another’s, so the people can collaborate to get the software built within some time limit. Agile software development methods bring to this process more formal opportunities for people to interact, increasing the likelihood of this communication happening  regularly and at varying levels of complexity, timescale and team composition.

Let’s take Scrum as an example. Scrum sets up a framework for communication and feedback like this (from high level/long timescale to low level/short timescale):

• At the Sprint level (usually every 2 weeks these days, but Scrum originally used 30 days) –
  Sprint planning/review meetings and Sprint retrospectives. These provide opportunities for medium-term communication and feedback on the production of a usable increment of software functionality.
• At the Backlog grooming level (usually at least once a week, but not specified by Scrum) –
  An opportunity for communication and feedback about user story details that concern upcoming sprints.
• At the Daily Scrum level (every day at the same time) –
  What happened yesterday, what will happen today, what’s getting in the way? This is an opportunity to quickly gather feedback and communicate about nitty-gritty day-to-day details.

Scrum’s official rules (found in the Scrum Guide) were recently updated (in July and October of 2011) to allow for more freedom in selecting practices and experimenting with new things. So, as of the latest edition of the Scrum Guide, Release Planning is no longer part of the official Scrum rules. If it had been, I would have argued that Release Planning and the Release Retrospective provide the highest level of overall communication and feedback loop that Scrum puts in place. Since many people still use Release Planning as a tool, I think the point still holds.

Many people mix in good technical practices as well, which add things like:

• Pair programming –
  Instant, real time communication and feedback on the construction of ideas and expression of those ideas in code.
• Continuous integration –
  Feedback on code quality, feature readiness, etc. on a daily basis or more often.
• User story estimation (part of Sprint planning) –
  Feedback and learning about what a software feature is supposed to do, how it will be implemented, what its acceptance criteria are, etc. Often summarized by a relative size called “story points” based on the Fibonacci series of numbers, which are useful because people are somewhat better at judging relative sizes than absolute sizes.

Human communication tends to break down in unexpected ways. Agile software methods give people plenty of opportunities to communicate and get feedback, helping to mitigate the breakdowns that occur in the complex context of team-based software development.

This tool is unsupported by HP, so use it at your own risk. It did receive some testing, both by HP and a few customers, so I have reason to believe it will work properly for you. Also, in order to use it, you have to accept the license agreement that is displayed when you first run it.

Why write a blog post about it? I want to give a little detail on what it does in case things don’t go as smoothly as they’re supposed to.

The tool basically does these things in order:

• Check that all prerequisites for TouchSmart 4 are fulfilled, including hardware checks
• Installs the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 if needed (a few hosted apps need this)
• Downloads all officially published softpaqs from the HP support website
• Installs the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 if needed (the TouchSmart “shell” needs this)
• Installs all downloaded HP TouchSmart 4.0 software components

Should Windows indicate that a reboot is needed “right off the bat”, clicking a corresponding button in the tool will make sure that the tool is automatically restarted after the reboot. The tool will also automatically restart after potentially installing .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4.0. No reboot is necessary after the remainder of the software has finished installing. If User Account Control is enabled on your system, the tool will prompt for permission to run each time it is launched.

Here is a sequence of screenshots that show the tool in action (captions beneath pictures):

Installing .NET 4.0

Installing the TouchSmart 4.0 “shell”

Preparing to install other softpaqs

Removing older versions of Music/Photo/Video apps

Installing softpaqs

Install progress after third softpaq install

Hosted app registration happening during install

Once all software is installed, the tool gives you an opportunity to burn the downloaded file to a DVD, along with the upgrade tool itself. This will speed up install on other systems a little, since installing from DVD may be faster than downloading from the Internet. Most people probably don’t need this DVD, but it may come in handy, should you want to rerun the upgrade in the future (after a system restore, for example.)

All software finished installing

After clicking the button to prepare a DVD

Windows Explorer window opened with files ready to burn to DVD

Notification that files are ready to be burned to DVD using the Windows Explorer window

The only thing I’ve seen go somewhat awry from time to time is that the download of a softpaq may get to a 100%, seemingly, but not finish. I think this might be caused by the server(s) that hosts the downloads, but I’m not sure. Since the tool is written to perform its operations to full completion at each step before going to the next, it may get stuck and not allow you to close it in this situation. Should that happen, you can hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard while clicking the red button with the little “x” in the upper right corner to close the tool. This will terminate the incomplete download and delete the partially downloaded file. When you run the tool again, the downloads will resume with the not completed download first, and hopefully complete the downloads this time around.

Depending on your Internet connection speed, downloading an installing everything can take several hours, so it’s best to do this when you have that kind of time available.

I hope this tool is useful for some of you.

From the Whole Earth Catalog October 1974, actually titled “Whole Earth Epilog”, Page 324. Founded by Stewart Brand.

Mentioned by Steve Jobs in his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.

TouchSmart 1, aka SmartCenter, aka LaunchPad (January 2007)

The first version of TouchSmart was not called that. It was named SmartCenter and shipped with the very first modern all-in-one touch-enabled PC, the HP TouchSmart IQ770.

This machine was one of the so-called “Dream PCs” for Microsoft’s introduction of Windows Vista in January of 2007. I’ve written about this version of SmartCenter before, so I won’t repeat much of that here.

Touch-first [+Win8]

Of course, the main point of even embarking on a project such as the SmartCenter software was that Windows wasn’t even remotely ready for touch interactions. Every app on the Windows Desktop requires the precision that the mouse pointer provides. Fingers and touch can’t hit the tiny controls accurately enough. So SmartCenter was designed with that in mind, and as a result had large targets all throughout its user interface. Here are some sample screenshots:

Note that all buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, scrollbars, etc. are large enough to be easily tapped with a finger. Note also that, for example, the on-screen keyboard that is used for entering a ZIP code in the Weather app defaults to the correct layout, i.e. the numeric one.

Live app data in shortcuts [+Win8]

This idea wasn’t really all that new, of course. Snippets of live app data displayed in a mini-view of sorts had been introduced with Windows Sidebar gadgets and other widget-like UIs on other operating systems, but SmartCenter was the first to use live data as part of the shortcut that launches an app. You could say the shortcuts were more like mini-versions of the full app. Live data is of course hard to demo with screenshots, so here is a small video clip of the SmartCenter home screen (or start screen, if you will), showing shortcuts that update their information as time passes:

This major version of the SmartCenter software was delivered with four total releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4. Towards the final delivery of version 1.0, it became clear that a standardized way of getting the live information from the apps was needed. This became a major area of investigation and investment for the next major version of the software.

TouchSmart 2 (June 2008)

The second generation of TouchSmart software, 2.x, was introduced with IQ500/IQ800 series hardware. These two hardware models marked the beginning of the monitor-like appearance of the TouchSmart PCs. The IQ770 was a “multi-volume” chassis – these new models had a “single volume” design, supported by the “easel” style feet that were used in the follow-on generation as well.

The 2.x series of software was released in three versions: 2.0, 2.5 and 2.8.

Fixed layouts for apps [+Win8]

With SmartCenter 2.0, we introduced the concept of fixed sized layouts for the TouchSmart apps. We initially picked three: small, medium and large. You can see two of the three illustrated by this screenshot:

The Tutorials, Canvas and Calendar apps are shown in medium size, while the remaining apps are shown in small size. By tapping on an app, you would go to the large size:

This layout is purposely not called full screen, since there is a reserved area at the top of the screen for navigation, app name/time and music playback controls.

Tiles concept [+Win8]

In order to make it clear that the app representations in SmartCenter were not just icons, we decided to call them tiles, or rather “live tiles.” This term was used in the developer documentation that was produced to help other people plug their apps into SmartCenter, and so we had “small tiles,” “medium tiles” and “large tiles.” For each tile size we gave guidance about how to use it appropriately. We introduced the term “layouts” to suggest that each tile size should use a different layout of basically the same content or information. As you notice from the screenshots above, when the Weather tile is small, it shows only basic information. In the large tile, the information is more full-featured and also provides access to settings for the Weather app. The medium tile for Weather looks like this:

As you can see, this layout for Weather includes only the current conditions and the forecast for the day.

With TouchSmart 2.0, a big investment was made to produce media consumption applications: Music, Video and Photo (often shortened to “MVP”) as well as a WebCam and DVD app. The screenshot above shows other apps that were published later (Netflix and Recipe Box, for example), but that just goes to show that following development guidelines has benefits: newer apps can work with older SmartCenter versions…

Other changes from the 1.0 version include the top and bottom row of “tile scrollers” and the music playback control set (aka. “media plate”) that I already mentioned. The tile scrollers had two different behaviors, depending on how full they were. If enough tiles were present, the scroller would become an infinitely looping container. If not enough tiles were present, it would have “snap-to” endpoints.

The TouchSmart 2.0 software was unveiled at a big press event in Berlin, Germany. Several of my colleagues were invited to attend to make sure everything went smoothly from a technical perspective. The most nerve-wracking part was that the TouchSmart IQ500 was to come out of a pedestal on stage after sitting inside said pedestal for an extended period of time before its unveiling. People were not sure the thermals were designed to handle as little exchange of air as this posed. Here’s a video from the introduction to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about (skip towards 1:18 or so to see the pedestal and the TouchSmart lifting out of it):

As you can see, everything worked out pretty well. This was the biggest introduction ever made for a TouchSmart PC line. No event after that had that much effort put into it.

TouchSmart 3 (October 2009)

With the third generation of SmartCenter, we piggybacked onto the 600/300 series of hardware. The enclosures still used the easel stand design with three feet for support, and the exterior was tweaked a bit along with the screen aspect ratio (now 16:9 instead of 16:10).

Generally, though the concept was largely the same, except for the software. A big investment was made to produce more apps for the TouchSmart software suite, and this brought us apps like Canvas, Twitter, Hulu, Live TV, Link, Movie Store, Recipe Box and a bunch of others. The TouchSmart software development guidelines were augmented with more of a proper SDK with app samples, installer samples and more guidance.

New layout

SmartCenter 3.0 introduced another layout that we called wide-interactive. You see, in SmartCenter 2.x there was no way to interact with the medium sized tiles in the upper tile scroller (except for in the browser, but that’s a small detail). In this version we wanted to provide interaction with the app in the upper scroller. In order to do that properly we needed a bigger size tile and a new layout to have enough space for interaction to make sense. Here’s a screenshot of 3.0 (running on a 16:10 screen, not the aspect ratio it was designed for – so circular elements are “squished”):

In SmartCenter 3.0 the touch scrollers no longer “looped” infinitely, but each had a “snap to” end regardless of how many tiles were present; each wide-interactive tile was given a colored title bar to add a little splash of variety and visual interest. In addition, the “media plate” and other control elements on the home screen were redesigned to appear a bit lighter than before. Also, standard button glyphs were introduced for closing and minimizing SmartCenter. Oh, and the clock was moved around and given a day of the week display. Phew – at least the Personalize button stayed almost in place…

The final big change was that tiles in the bottom scroller no longer used the small layout. They were simply icons to launch the app into large layout directly. This was done to improve performance and load less stuff at the startup of SmartCenter.

TouchSmart 4 (September 2010)

Okay, so here we are, almost at the last chapter of this brief history (which is turning out not so brief after all…) TouchSmart 4.0 was introduced with the TouchSmart 310 (and 610) series of hardware. These departed from the easel-type stand and went to a single-foot design (I know there’s a better term for it, I just can’t think of it at the moment).

TouchSmart 4 didn’t see much investment in new apps, but focused on new capabilities provided by the SmartCenter framework.

Infinite Canvas [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

A major goal of the SmartCenter framework software had been to provide an almost limitless space for apps to live in. With SmartCenter 4.0 that goal was finally realized. Not only did the framework provide for an infinitely expanding space for hosted apps to live in, it also did away with the upper tile scroller and let the apps be positioned freely on the canvas. This is what TouchSmart 4.0 looks like after initial startup:

And once again, things were moved around on screen: The clock from lower left to lower right (and it was given a function: click to show a mini-calendar), personalize from lower right to lower left (and the word personalize removed). The “media plate” music playback controls were removed and put into the music app instead. The volume control was separated out from the media plate and put in the upper left. The bottom carousel was redesigned and had the infinite looping re-introduced (to allow for a bit of visual and interactive playfulness). Tapping a tile launches the corresponding app:

Apps can be moved around freely and the carousel shows a colored highlight for each running app:

If you look at the above shot closely, you’ll notice the Weather app in what looks like another layout. What’s happening there is not a new layout, though. It’s simply the wide-interactive layout, shrunk down to an “inactive” size. Thus we called it “shrunk layout” or “shrunk view”.

The button next to personalize in the lower left can be used if the app you’re looking for in the carousel is hard to find: QuickLaunch is sorted alphabetically:

Parallax background [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

Scrolling the canvas (or panning it, if you prefer) is done by grabbing empty space (with mouse or touch) and moving from side to side. To add a little visual interest to this, and to demonstrate the departure from the 3.0 tile scrollers, we added a parallax effect to the background to give you the illusion of looking into the distance on your screen. Several sets of parallax backgrounds were developed for variety’s sake, to be picked in the personalize area.

Magnets

Another major feature of SmartCenter 4.0 was the introduction of something we called “magnets”. These represent active content that originally came either from an app or from SmartCenter itself (in the case of Graffiti magnets). Magnets eliminate the need to start an app when you want to enjoy a favorite piece of content, be it a photo, video or some music you want to keep handy for quick enjoyment. Here are a few magnets placed on the canvas (they can be “pinned” so they always stay visible or “unpinned” to scroll with the canvas):

Here’s what it looks like after panning a bit (while playing the fireplace video):

You can see the pinned magnets haven’t moved and the background looks slightly different (the islands have moved at different paces to give the illusion of depth as they’re moving).

Okay, let’s see what it looks like in action:

TouchSmart 5 (September 2011)

And that brings us to the latest generation of SmartCenter (as of this date), i.e. 5.0. This version of the TouchSmart framework software was brought to market with the just recently introduced 520/420/320 series of TouchSmart PCs. The exterior of the machines has been updated once more to keep up with design trends, but otherwise the single-volume enclosure is still the chosen form.

Integration of Windows apps, desktop icons

The biggest change in SmartCenter 5.0 regards the blending of the two environments that were previously separated: SmartCenter and the Windows Desktop. This means you no longer need to exit the SmartCenter environment when you want to run Windows apps. Here’s a screenshot of SmartCenter 5.0:

Note that the Windows 7 taskbar is fully visible and that you can use it for launching apps and seeing what apps are running. The SmartCenter app carousel now has the icon highlight turned on permanently and only shows a short animated starburst as an app is launched. You also see all your desktop icons represented on the SmartCenter canvas. As you can see, the magnets overlap the desktop icons, which can be a bit of a clutter issue. No worries, you can turn off the desktop icons via Settings, if you don’t like them on the canvas. Or you can rearrange your magnets so they occupy different space:

In general, SmartCenter 5.0 attempts to bring the touch-first environment of past generations together with the traditional, mouse-centric desktop. That’s a value-proposition you don’t have in Windows 8, which is most likely not available until sometime in late 2012 anyway…

Automatic panning/scrolling

One additional thing SmartCenter 5.0 does is automatic panning of the canvas/desktop whenever an app is launched. This removes the need for you to have to rearrange app windows frequently when you want to switch from one app to another. The canvas pans automatically to make more room for every app you start. To return to an app, you just click on it in the taskbar or the app carousel. Another video might explain it a bit better:

This behavior can be turned off in Settings as well, in case it’s not useful to you. There are many, many areas that I haven’t touched on in this post, such as all the personalization and customization aspects that SmartCenter contains and how they changed over time. Or the fact that you can make your own parallax backgrounds (not documented anywhere, unfortunately, but pretty easy to figure out for enterprising souls). Or the easter eggs, oh yes…

Let me make some general remarks about the last four generations of SmartCenter: Any apps written to observe the guidelines of SmartCenter 2.0 are able to run on SmartCenter 2.0 through 5.0. A nice compatibility feature. Of course, older versions of apps needed updates as new SmartCenter functionality was introduced (or removed, as with the media plate removal in 4.0), but as you’ve seen, the Netflix app (which was published with SmartCenter 3.0) runs just fine in SmartCenter 2.0 and 5.0 as well. What’s more, if you know what you’re doing, you can have all the versions of SmartCenter 2.0 – 5.0 running on the same system. That’s how I was able to collect screenshots and videos for this post. Oh, and the technology underlying all these versions of SmartCenter is Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0. The various apps were written in anything from compiled-to-native-code-Python to WPF to Adobe Flash. The software development process used since about SmartCenter 2.5 is anchored in Scrum, an Agile software development framework.

This concludes my brief history of the TouchSmart software. As you have seen, Windows 8 definitely picked up a lot of the features that the SmartCenter framework pioneered: Live tiles, fixed layout sizes for apps, parallax scrolling with an expandable space and touch-first design. Until Windows 8 is available, the TouchSmart 5.0 software suite is most likely the best alternative for touch – combined with new thinking on how to add something more to the the desktop environment – that you’ll find on an all-in-one PC anywhere.

One way to do this is to use a PowerShell script (I found one here).

Here’s the script code in case you don’t want to follow the link:

cd "C:\build11"

[Environment]::CurrentDirectory=(Get-Location -PSProvider FileSystem).ProviderPath

$a = ([xml](new-object net.webclient).downloadstring("http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/wmvhigh"))

$a.rss.channel.item | foreach{ 

    $url = New-Object System.Uri($_.enclosure.url)

    $file = $url.Segments[-1]

    $file

    if (!(test-path $file))

    {

        (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($url, $file)

    }

}

One problem with this might be that you don’t want all videos. So you’d have to filter the RSS feed that the script pulls down. There’s no documentation on how to do that, but a little experimentation shows that you can do this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/wmvhigh?t=.net%2Bframework

The available filters (for the t parameter) are:

.NET%2BFramework

Access%2BControl

Applications

ASP.NET

Assessment%2Band%2BDeployment Kit

Async

C#

C++

Certification

Charms

Cloud

Compliance ​

Continuous%2BAvailability

Data

Database

Debugging

DirectX

Drivers

Elasticity

Expression%2BBlend

Files

Games

Graphics

HTML5%2Band%2BJavaScript

Hyper-V

IHV

Keynote

Manageability

Media

Metro%2Bstyle%2Bapps

Metro%2Bstyle%2Bdevice%2Bapps

Networking

Odata

OEM

Parallel%2BComputing

Performance

Power

Pre-​Recorded

Printing

Remote%2BDesktop

REST

Roaming

Scalability

Security

Sensors

Silicon

SQL

Storage

Touch

UI

Platform

User%2BExperience

Virtualization

Visual%2BBasic

Visual%2BStudio

WCF

Web

Windows%2BAzure

Windows%2BPhone

Windows%2BRuntime

Windows%2BStore

Wireless

Workflow

XAML

If you’re just interested in the slides, use a query like this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/slides?t=.net%2Bframework

In general, the query can be constructed like this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/

[type]?t=[tag]&term=[free text]

Where [type] can be one of: wmv, wmvhigh, mp4, slides

You can add multiple t arguments.

So if you’re interested in slides related to “client” topics, this might be your query:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/slides?t=async&t=charms&t=expression%2Bblend&t=files&t=games&t=metro%2Bstyle%2Bapps&t=metro%2Bstyle%2Bdevice%2Bapps&t=touch&t=ui%2Bplatform&t=user%2Bexperience&t=windows%2Bphone&t=windows%2Bruntime&t=windows%2Bstore&t=xaml

My interest in Windows Phone 7 development grew partly out of my experience with writing a simple app for WebOS and partly out of conversations with a friend at work who was really excited about what at the time was the “forthcoming” new mobile OS from Microsoft. I hadn’t paid much attention to Microsoft’s moves in the mobile space, since I’d always been a fan of Palm PDAs and didn’t own a cell phone for a really long time. I figured I was reachable either at my desk or at home most of the time, so why carry a phone and pay another monthly bill on top of all the other ones?

A long conversation on a BART ride got me curious, though, so I checked out the announcements and demos Microsoft gave at the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. All I can say is – I was hooked. The user experience presented by Microsoft made sense to me, the user interface was clean, simple and fresh, and the development toolset / technology was something I was pretty familiar with (Silverlight being the close cousin to WPF, which I’ve worked with intensively over the last few years as part of creating the TouchSmart software UI framework.)

Since I had already gotten my feet wet writing a simple app for WebOS, I thought it would be fun to write the same app (more or less) for Windows Phone 7. I had to wait a while for the tools to come out, though, so I had some time to read and learn more in the meantime.

My friend at work heard about a group that was forming around some people from the Silicon Valley Bay.NET user group who wanted to study and learn Windows Phone 7 app development. He had already joined the group, which had its first meeting on June 15, and encouraged me to join as well, so I did, somewhere around late June 2010. The group was incredibly useful in pointing out resources, encouraging people to follow a sort of curriculum and generally keeping one’s spirit up. Not to mention getting to know the Windows Phone 7 developer evangelists in Silicon Valley, William Leong, Kenny Spade and Doris Chen. Without the group, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it.

When I started work on my app, I took advantage of what I had done on the WebOS predecessor. As it turned out, Microsoft’s phone app templates use a close cousin to the WebOS Model-View-Controller pattern that’s very familiar to WPF/Silverlight developers: Model-View-ViewModel. Transferring some of the business logic (the Controller) was relatively straightforward. But because of the differences between C# (the language initially supported by WP7) and JavaScript (the WebOS business logic language) I decided I could do better with my data model than I had done in JavaScript. Ah, the joys of a typed language with excellent tooling support (Visual Studio 2010 Express)! So I rewrote most of the business logic and added a proper unit testing project to my solution. Producing the user interface was an entirely different matter, of course. On WP7, the UI has to be built in either Silverlight or XNA Game Studio. I went with Silverlight, since I already know WPF quite well.

Unfortunately, the version of Silverlight on the phone (version 3, “plus”) leaves out lots of good stuff from WPF, so I couldn’t do some things that I would have liked to do. One thing that I had come to appreciate in particular from WebOS were “editable” text blocks, where the normal mode of operation is that the text is simply displayed without any adornments, but when you tap on the text, it turns into an edit box, where you can change the content. I liked this control so much, I just had to write my own version of it. The Silverlight limitations on WP7 (I can’t remember at this late stage if it was lack of style inheritance or something else) made the result not quite as elegant as it would have been with WPF, but it ended up working well enough. Mobile apps are all about removing clutter and unnecessary steps, so eliminating the need for an edit screen seems to be a good choice, even if the control that enables this isn’t a “standard” control everyone knows about.

On the WebOS app, I didn’t have to worry too much about application lifetime management, in other words I didn’t have to write much code to save and restore the state of the app. WebOS provides multitasking abilities for apps; Windows Phone 7 on the other hand only provides for a single app to run at a time (at least Silverlight apps, “native” apps have more advanced capabilities, including the ability to do things in the “background”, but non-OEM developers can’t currently write “native” apps [Microsoft will remedy some of this with the now final “Mango” update]). Writing the required “tombstoning” code was some extra work, but Microsoft had provided good sample code at a free developer event that I attended. Part of that sample code also included methods that make it easy to work with “isolated storage”, which is what used for storing an app’s data. Thankfully, I didn’t have to resort to using typeless JavaScript objects, but could use fully typed first-class objects with methods and persist them in isolated storage without having to write my own translation code like I had to with WebOS.

After I had made good progress bringing the Open app to the same level of functionality that my WebOS app had, I noticed that there was a Bing Maps control available from Microsoft, and thought it would be interesting to see what I could do with that. The Open app allows the user to enter a store address. Wouldn’t it be nice if the app could draw you a map to the store, and based on the route’s duration tell you if you can get to the store in time before closing or if the store will be open by the time you get there? Certainly! It was surprisingly easy to use the Bing Map control (except for one thing that I’ve blogged about before), and I had the new feature implemented in a matter of hours. I think what took longest was to get my API key to actually be approved/deployed by Microsoft.

After testing the finished app and checking it against Microsoft’s publishing guidelines, I proceeded to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace (now called AppHub) to start the publishing process. Because of my involvement with the peer learning group hosted at Microsoft, I had gained access to the second wave of “early access” certification for Windows Phone developers. This meant that I was able to work through the submission process before it was open to the public. I had a few hiccups getting that far, eventually got approval to start submitting my app for certification.

Publishing an app is probably about the same amount of work for both WebOS and Windows Phone. I get the impression that Microsoft’s testers are quite thorough, at least they were when I went through the process. They’re also pretty fast. After preparing all the required materials (several app icons, background image for the Phone Marketplace, marketing text, etc.) and submitting the app, it took about 3 days to get it approved, if I remember correctly. According to my xap file timestamp, I produced the 1.0 version on October 18, 2010 and it was released on October 21, 2010. The awesome folks at wp7applist.com (thanks Luigi!) helped me track down that it was among the first 2000 apps submitted, at #1983 or so. [Incidentally, I published a second app, called Countdown, which also took 3 days to get approved (submitted on December 26, 2010 and published on December 29, 2010; it was #5123 in the Marketplace).] When I updated one of my apps to version 1.1, I got a failure report back (I hadn’t tested tombstoning well enough) and was impressed by the quality of the report. It really helped me find and reproduce the issue quickly.

I have not had time to update either of my apps any further since publishing version 1.1, but perhaps some of the new features in “Mango” will encourage me to do so. A live tile for the Countdown app has been requested in the reviews of the app, for example, and producing that functionality without Mango would require me to create and host a web service, not something I’m willing to pay for at the moment. With Mango, the app itself will be able to update its tile…

Speaking of payment, you may wonder if this venture has been worth it from a monetary perspective. I would say “not quite”, but since I haven’t spent anything on promoting my apps I don’t know if it could have gone better. Open is $1.99 and Countdown is free. Open has a trial version, which is ad supported and Countdown is free with ads. I’ve sold 5 copies (at this point) of Open and made perhaps fifteen dollars in ad revenue from both apps (so no payouts on either front yet). I was lucky enough to get my $99 Marketplace fee refunded due to publishing two apps by a certain deadline for a Microsoft promotion. But figure in the time I spent on creating the apps, and this definitely has been an exercise more for the sake of learning and personal enjoyment than for the sake of financial gain.

Finally, since this is part two of a series on mobile development, I need to comment a little on the two experiences of doing WebOS versus Windows Phone. To me, the phone/OS experiences on the two come pretty close. WebOS is similar to the HP TouchSmart 2.x/3.x concept of an app carousel and works beautifully. I like WebOS a lot from a user perspective (I just REALLY wish there was a WebOS phone model closer in size to the iPhone or my current LG Quantum or the Samsung Focus), but developing for WebOS is hampered (for me at least) by the relative lack of good development tools. Windows Phone provides a unique user experience, hampered a little by the lack of multitasking, but absolutely SHINES in the area of development tools. Microsoft also invests a LOT into the developer ecosystem, as evidenced by the evangelists participating (on their own time, no less) in peer learning groups, such as the one I participated in. They use this as a vehicle to give people early access to phone hardware for testing and to keep the energy and motivation up among developers. I’ve not been aware of such support existing for WebOS.

After Phil McKinney announced a WebOS app development contest at HP’s internal technology conference, Tech Con ’10, I was somewhat drawn to trying my hands at this unknown “beast” (lure of the prize? Maybe.) In a conversation with Jon Rubinstein on the first evening of Tech Con I had mentioned how Microsoft’s tools provide incredible developer productivity and I asked if Palm’s toolset provides something similar. Jon mentioned project Ares and encouraged me to try it out. More on that later.

Over lunch that last day of Tech Con, I mentioned in a conversation with my colleagues that I was going to develop an app that helps you keep track of store opening hours. After lunch I had a little bit of time before my flight back to California, so I rudely ignored my fellow travelers and started downloading and installing the “regular” Palm WebOS tools: Java, VirtualBox, Eclipse, the SDK toolset, Google Chrome and the Aptana Studio plugin for Eclipse. I didn’t start writing code right away. I had just finished installing stuff when it was time to get on the shuttle for the airport.

My next steps were to read up on the overview documentation that Palm provides at http://developer.palm.com and to start running the emulator and toolset. I’m no stranger to (D)HTML/CSS and JavaScript. One of my first projects at HP was developed almost entirely using that combination. Admittedly, that was quite some years ago. I’m a little surprised that someone would build a mobile platform based on technology that old, but I guess the rationale is sound: anyone who can develop a webpage can now develop mobile apps. (I’m not entirely sure I’d want just anyone who theoretically can do it to actually do it. Sorry. Little digression.) So, I’m no stranger to the technology, but I still needed to brush up. So I went off to www.w3schools.com to check out the JavaScript references (in particular the Date class docs) etc. Part of the journey also took me to a few articles at Linux Magazine (WebOS is based on Linux – another decades old technology stack, hmmmm – but then, so is the Windows Kernel and a bunch of other pieces of software) where some of the details around data persistence were explored. I knew that I’d have to store the data locally, since I couldn’t possibly support running a web/cloud service anywhere. Some other detours led me to the JSON website and the Prototype framework.

My first tentative steps were to get the app from the Linux Magazine articles up and running, which didn’t take too long. Then came experimenting with my “business logic”. Palm apps are nicely partitioned according to the Model – View – Controller software pattern, so trying out some “Model” approaches was worthwhile. During all this, I kept bouncing back and forth between the Linux Mag articles, the SDK documentation, Palm’s developer forums and the JavaScript documentation at w3schools.

After working with the TimePicker widget for a bit (store opening hours are central to the app, after all), I settled on using Date as the main “Model” for the app. Unfortunately JavaScript can’t store Date in the local persistence layer of WebOS. What can be persisted are object primitives (strings, integers, lists, arrays and such), and Date is not one of those. The persistence format in WebOS is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is a string representation of a JavaScript object that the JavaScript interpreter can “rehydrate” by calling “eval()” on the string that’s retrieved from storage (or a web service call). Date objects don’t persist well, so I had to work out a way to “dehydrate” and “rehydrate” my Date-based data model. I’m sure there are better ways to do it than what I came up with, but my method is basically to “dehydrate” by calling Date.getTime() and storing that away. “Rehydration” is the reverse: construct a Date object from the stored getTime() value (which is the number of milliseconds since the “epoch”, Midnight on January 1, 1970).

After settling on the data model, I started some work on the business logic. I figured out the rules for determining a single day’s open/closed status and did debugging on that. This is where one of my frustrations with the toolset started to surface. Debugging is pretty painful on WebOS at first. It seemed that all I had at my disposal were “tracing” statements in combination with looking at log files in the emulator. To do that, I had to connect to the emulator running the app by using Putty (an SSH client that’s included in the toolset) to localhost port 5522. And every time I made a code change, I had to re-deploy the app, etc. It wasn’t until the end of my project that I discovered the semi-standalone log viewer from palm, hosted at http://ares.palm.com/AresLog and the corresponding debugger at http://ares.palm.com/AresDebug. The unfortunate thing, of course, is that these two only work if you have a live Internet connection. The other unfortunate thing is that my data model is an object that none of the tools know how to “Visualize”. By that I mean that even though AresDebug can show me my Date object, it can’t show me the various interesting “parts” like the Date, Month, Year or Day.

After making progress on the logic for one day of opening hours, I worked my way toward the logic for a whole week of opening hours. This meant starting to work with arrays of objects and that made the debugging situation worse. Now I had to trace a set of Date objects seven times in order to make headway. Seeing the log output from that was really messy.

In parallel to the business logic work, I started sketching out the UI flow and settled on four scenes/cards to use in creation/editing of store opening hour information. Most of these scenes were easy enough to come up with. The main problem was aligning items in list widgets so their placement was “pleasing to the eye”. That sometimes required padding and using tables in the HTML code along with general CSS tinkering. While using <div> elements with certain palm CSS class styles (“palm-group” in particular), I discovered that using a self-closing <div /> element could create issues with rendering the UI properly. I had to use opening <div> and closing </div> elements to get the correct rendering. Another thing I found a bit maddening was that I had to resort to padding in list rows to get items centered vertically. The style inheritance tree was just too much for me to wade through. I tried a couple of times, using the Palm Inspector, but it didn’t get me very far.

After most of the UI was settled, I had to finalize the business logic. This took the bulk of my development time, and was quite frustrating because of the difficulties of debugging/tracing/seeing traces using the Palm log tool via SSH. I ended up spending all of Memorial Day weekend on this (except for a few hours on Sunday where I got away to spend some quality time at a pool party). Memorial Day was another full working day where I thought I had finalized all the business logic…

Alas, I discovered in preparing my app for submission to the Palm site that there were still bugs lurking and that I needed to tinker a bit more with the UI. So I added a few images, twiddled icon sizes around, wrote up the required “marketing” text, etc. Each morning and evening I tested the app only to conclude that there were still calculation bugs.

Finally I convinced myself that it was time to formalize my testing efforts, so I put together a table on paper, sketching out various valid and invalid/tricky test data scenarios. I then coded these up in some “unit tests” (really just part of the app’s logic, but the tests only run if a certain flag is set in the startup code).

Other finishing touches included making the store opening hours definition less repetitive/labor intensive, adding a splash of color here and there, making it possible to delete the entire database and enabling two buttons in the UI based on conditions related to the store data the user enters: If a phone number is entered, enable calling up the dialer app to make a quick call to the store – if an address is entered, enable a button to take the user to a map of the store using the built-in mapping app. And with all those things in place, I finally submitted the app to the Palm catalog on June 4, 2010.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention the Ares development tool yet. That’s because I didn’t use it much. Once I started on the path of using the SDK tools, I was unable to “round-trip” the app between Ares and the SDK toolset. I could upload the app just fine, but the App UI didn’t show up in the Ares environment. So perhaps I should have started out using Ares, but then I would have been limited to developing only while having a live Internet connection. Not something I find very comforting.

How much time did I spend on this adventure? Since I didn’t keep a log, I can only make rough estimates, but here’s the breakdown from memory:

Reading SDK docs
2 – 4 hours

Download and install tools
2 hours

Reading other articles
1 – 2 hours

Reading JavaScript docs
4 – 6 hours

Coding
6 – 8 hours

Debugging
30 – 40 hours

Refining UI, testing
8 hours

Preparing for submission
2 – 4 hours

So that’s somewhere between 55 and 74 hours. A lot of effort for a simple app? Probably. Worth the time, considering the value of the prize? Perhaps not. Great value in learning the ins and outs of a new platform and having some serious geek fun? Absolutely!!!

Why the big number on Debugging? This is where I get back to the productivity question/issue I posed to Jon Rubinstein. Debugging was so painful and time-intensive because the tools just didn’t provide what I needed. What I would have wanted was an environment that provides a coding and debugging experience that helps track down bugs in a matter of minutes. Variables should be easily inspected, breakpoints set / made conditional, etc. etc. The Palm Ares debugger provides some of this, but there is still lots of room for improvement.

All in all, it was great fun writing a WebOS app and learning about the platform. I highly recommend you do it yourself, if you are so inclined.

Old and new campus land

New campus building

New campus aerial shot

New campus aerial shot

New campus aerial shot

New campus view

New campus view

Landscaping current

Landscaping future

Campus view

Trees current

Trees future

New campus view

New campus building details

New campus statistics

New campus view

New campus view of cafeteria

New campus aerial view

Thoroughly impressive. Wow.

I keep all my “data” on a separate physical hard drive so that in theory it’s easy to swap out the OS drive or upgrade it without too much fear of losing information. This also makes it easy to migrate the data to a bigger drive when I inevitably run out of space. Some time ago I did just that, switching to a 1 TB drive from a 500 GB model.

It had been running well for about a year (I think), when I looked at the SMART data and saw that the reallocated sector count was dangerously close to the limit value. I didn’t think I needed to worry about it quite yet, so I left it alone.

But a few days ago I got a call while at work: “The computer is saying something about a hard drive going bad, and I don’t know what to do.” Oh boy. So I dropped everything after finishing up a meeting and bought a replacement drive (1.5 TB this time), ready to deal with the worst.

As it turned out, things weren’t in too bad of a shape. Windows 7 itself seems to be doing a much better job at monitoring SMART status than Windows XP did:

Just for kicks, I started eventvwr.msc and looked at the System events. Sure enough, there were a couple of entries mentioning disk issues:

For more detail, I looked at SpeedFan’s output:

Yup, the reallocated sector count had reached its limit.

Since Windows 7 ships with the excellent Robocopy command line tool, I decided to use this to copy everything from the failing drive to the new one. I thought I could use a USB-to-SATA adapter I had lying around the house, but after some time I concluded the adapter must be flaky. From time to time the drive connected to it would act funny when looked at with Windows Explorer. Folders wouldn’t refresh when asked to and sometimes folders that were supposed to be on the drive didn’t show up in Windows Explorer. Also, the copy process seemed fishy when looked at with Process Explorer:

Looking at I/O Bytes History, I saw big initial spikes of traffic, then a weird drop-off, followed by a long period of inactivity between each file copy operation. Too bad I don’t remember when I bought that USB-to-SATA device, because it definitely needs to go back for a full refund or replacement.

Anyway, I ended up hooking the new drive up to a free internal SATA port inside the computer, and from then on the copy went quite smoothly. The I/O traffic pattern looked much more evenly distributed.

After finishing the copy, I checked the drive manufacturer’s website to see if the drive was still in warranty. Their online systems couldn’t tell me for some strange reason, even though I typed in the model and serial number correctly, and even the failure code that their test tool spits out. A quick call to their warranty department confirmed that it was still within warranty, and so I initiated the exchange for a fresh drive.

The final step in this was to erase the content of the old drive, just to be sure nobody could get to it, should the manufacturer’s promises of destroying the drive not come to pass. For that I used Eraser, a free tool that has many, many options for overwriting the entire drive with random data patterns, making it pretty much impossible to recover anything.

It’s always a bother when hard drives go bad, but sometimes it is possible to avert complete disaster. Windows 7 is much more proactive than its predecessor XP in terms of early detection of problems. This gives you time to move important data in time.

Of course, should a head crash happen, this would be useless, so I also have an alternate backup. No longer at Mozy, though. With my amount of data and their recent pricing changes, I decided to go with CrashPlan, partly because of their option to ship me a drive for the initial backup so I don’t have to wait for months to upload everything. The other part is that they still offer unlimited storage. And I need that.

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/07/hps-touchsmart-610-and-9300-all-in-ones-tilt-and-twirl-on-out/

CNet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20030815-17.html

Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2014154942_hp_unveils_reclining_touch_pc.html

ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/hp-announces-new-touchsmart-all-in-ones/5027

FT.com: http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/2011/02/the-reclining-hp-touchsmart-610-video-review/

PCMag.com: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379438,00.asp

TFTS: http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/02/07/hp-shows-off-new-line-of-touchsmart-pcs-hp-touchsmart-610-and-9300-emerge-offer-high-power-in-a-high-concept/

AllBusiness.com: http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/company-structures-ownership/15479504-1.html

Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_technews/20110207/tc_yblog_technews/hps-unveils-new-sliding-touchscreen-pcs

ChipChick: http://www.chipchick.com/2011/02/hp-touchsmart-610.html

Windows7News: http://www.windows7news.com/2011/02/07/hp-launches-touchscreen-desktop-market/

VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/07/hp-designs-a-cool-reclining-touchscreen-display-for-star-trek-style-experience/

GamesBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/07/now-this-is-the-way-to-play-touchscreen-games-video/

TrustedReviews.com: http://www.trustedreviews.com/pcs/news/2011/02/07/HP-Announces-Two-New-TouchSmart-All-In-One-PCs/p1

TGDaily: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/53980-hp-touts-uber-cool-swivel-pcs

EWeek: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/HP-Spruces-Up-Image-with-New-TouchScreen-Desktop-PCs-883622/

EWeek slideshow: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Latest-HP-PC-Lineup-Goes-for-Cool-with-Colorful-New-TouchScreens-182412/

Yeah, vanity post.

Instead I got error messages, followed by a rollback of the uninstall I was in the middle of.

Why did I need to uninstall QuickTime and iTunes? Because after finally upgrading my last Windows XP machine to Windows 7, iTunes wouldn’t start properly.

I searched the web for a while to see if I could find good information about the problem, but all I found was useless, generic “use control panel to uninstall” stuff and google-spam-gamed links advertising some complete uninstaller tools.

So I decided to take matters in my own hands. I fired up an elevated command prompt and regedit and dug through the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Uninstall) to find the uninstall string for removing iTunes. I ran that, and – to my surprise – it worked! All I had to do now was uninstall QuickTime, so I found the uninstall string for that, and kicked it off. I got a warning about uninstalling my Pro Key and confirmed that I wanted to do that. Things seemed to progress nicely, but then the rollback happened. Ugh. So I fired off the uninstall once more, this time adding logging:

MsiExec.exe /I{E7004147-2CCA-431C-AA05-2AB166B9785D} /l*v log.txt

It failed again. Good, now I had a log of the failure. Digging though the log, I found this error:

DEBUG: Error 2769:  Custom Action RemoveQT7ProKey did not close 1 MSIHANDLEs.
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2769. The arguments are: RemoveQT7ProKey, 1,
Action ended 13:58:03: RemoveQT7ProKey. Return value 1.

“Okay, so if that action causes issues,” I thought, “let me see if I can remove it”. To do that, I looked back in the log for the cached MSI file that the uninstall uses:

MSI (c) (F0:B4) [13:57:50:043]: Package we’re running from ==> C:\Windows\Installer\100f740b.msi

I then changed the security descriptors on that MSI so I could modify it and used Orca to drop the row that invokes the custom action that attempts to remove the Pro Key:

MSI (s) (84:6C) [13:58:00:119]: Doing action: RemoveQT7ProKey

I saved the modified MSI, ran it again, and lo and behold – QuickTime uninstalled properly!

I’m talking about a control (actually, a Widget in WebOS) that initially looks like a regular text label, but when you tap on it, it turns into a text box that lets you edit the contained text. WP7 does not have anything like this out-of-the-box. So I decided to create my own.

I made a UserControl that consists of a TextBlock and a TextBox. The TextBox is normally Collapsed (Hidden doesn’t exist on WP7, you’d have to use Opacity=”0″ instead). When the user taps on the TextBlock, it is collapsed and the TextBox is made visible. Once the TextBox loses focus, the reverse happens, and the text from the TextBox is transferred to the TextBlock. Since it can be useful to be able to style the TextBlock and to provide InputScope, I’ve also added a few DependencyProperties to enable that. The code is a little “smelly”, perhaps, because it could be refactored into a proper CustomControl, but what I have so far works well enough for me.

If you want to use it or just have a look, feel free to download the source code for TextBlockEditable.

1. The Location type on the Phone has no constructor that takes 2 parameters (the Desktop version does). You’ll have to construct a Location object with the default constructor and then set the Latitude and Longitude fields separately.

2. LocationRect also has no constructor that takes 2 parameters. Here you’ll need to do a little more work and assign the North, West, South and East fields appropriately after constructing a LocationRect object with the default constructor.

3. MapLayer has no static function called SetPosition that lets you map Location objects to something appropriate for a MapLayer. Use the regular instance member MapLayer.AddChild() instead.

With these changes, you can make the Desktop sample on the Bing developer site work on a Windows Phone 7 device.

Only a little vanity post; a collection of links to stories and other potentially interesting tidbits.

These were some of the first mentions of the HP TouchSmart 310 with HP TouchSmart 4.0 software, unveiled on September 20, 2010.

Most of these have no real reviews yet, they just “wordsmith” the press release or other people’s “wordsmithing”. But that won’t stop me from highlighting “good stuff”.

CNet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20016921-1.html

The new case is graceful enough, and the $699 starting price for its low-end AMD CPU and 20-inch display is fair, but the biggest news for this new all-in-one may lie in its software. [My emphasis]

First, HP has tweaked the main TouchSmart software interface to streamline the way you access and organize media and applications using touch. In addition to organizing applications in a carousel layout, now you can also "pin" apps and individual media files to a more dynamic background featuring various parallax-animated environments. HP says this design lets you organize your touch software in a more natural manner, akin to how you might organize a desk.

In addition to the new background, HP has also updated the specific touch applications to the TouchSmart suite, most impressively with a new Marvel Comics streaming service, from which you can buy touch versions of more than 8,000 titles from the Marvel library. That number dwarfs the 500 Marvel titles available from Apple’s iPad application. The Marvel app and the entire TouchSmart suite, dubbed TouchSmart 4.0, will also be available for download by owners of current TouchSmart all-in-ones.

Hot Hardware: http://hothardware.com/News/HP-Debuts-Omni-100-And-TouchSmart-310-AIO-PCs-Along-With-New-tm2-Notebook/

ZDNet “The Toy Box”: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/hp-rolls-out-omni-100-touchsmart-310-all-in-one-desktops-20-hd-widescreens/18143

VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/20/hp-launches-fancy-touch-based-desktops-and-an-app-store-for-touch-apps/

The latest software transforms a user’s boring Windows desktop into a “magic canvas,” which appears to be an overlay on top of the computer screen. You swipe your hand across the display to move the transparent overlay. You can drag applications, music, photos, videos and other web content directly onto the overlay. HP refers to these objects as “magnets” since they are just like the magnets you put on your refrigerator with notes attached to them. You can pick multilayered wallpapers to bring the illusion of 3D depth perception to a screen. You can also browse through material via the carousel at the bottom of the screen — all with the touch of a finger.

You can use existing TouchSmart apps such as Twitter, Hulu, Netflix, Recipe Box and the HP Music Store powered by Rhapsody. All of those apps can be started and used via finger taps on the touchscreen. You can use the webcam to film a personalized video message and post it directly to your friend’s Facebook wall.

The HP TouchSmart Apps Center has a small collection of apps available now. You can access them via a TouchSmart Carousel. Some of the apps contain a lot of content, such as the Marvel Comics app and the Cartoon Network app. The Marvel app gives you access to more than 8,000 comics. You can tap on them and read them page by page on a a beautiful high-definition display. The Cartoon Network app offers news updates on shows and characters.

PC Magazine: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369352,00.asp

The TouchSmart interface is much more advanced than the competition, including Sony, MSI, and Gateway.

TG Daily: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-brief/51618-hp-launches-new-much-cheaper-touchsmart

HP has rebuilt its TouchSmart software for the 310 model, making it easier to organize and play back media from the touchscreen, as well as adding enhanced everyday computer applications as well. When the first TouchSmart computer debuted, its touchscreen technology was more of a novelty than anything else. Since then, gadgets like the iPad have made touch more relevant and important than ever, and have shown everyone that it can be a powerful computing tool.

Also added with the new TouchSmart announcement is a deal between HP and Disney to offer digital Marvel comics. TouchSmart users will now be able to stream special versions of classic comics, and then literally thumb through them with on-screen controls. More than 8,000 Marvel titles are available, which HP says is the most extensive digital collection ever offered from any content partner.

HP is also launching a new "app store" interface for touchscreen programs and games, making it easier for developers and consumers to take advantage of the PC’s touch capabilities.

Existing TouchSmart users will also have access to this and the other enhancements being made for the 310, with the release of a sweeping software upgrade. TouchSmart 4.0 will be downloadable for anyone who owns a legacy TouchSmart computer from HP.

Softpedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/HP-Releases-Three-New-TouchSmart-and-Omnio-PCs-157124.shtml

TechConnect: http://www.tcmagazine.com/tcm/news/hardware/30503/hp-intros-touchsmart-310-and-omni-100-all-one-pcs

Geeky Gadgets: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/new-hp-touchsmart-310-only-699-20-09-2010/

Waleg: http://www.waleg.com/techgadgets/archives/020976.html

Electronista: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/09/20/hp.intros.omni.100.touchsmart.310.all.in.one.pcs/

Digital Trends: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/hp-touchsmart-310-pc-offers-improved-touch-based-software/

IC Tech News: http://ic-technews.com/laptop/1493-hp-touchsmart-310-priced-at-price-just-699-a-complete-software-redesign

Chip Chick: http://www.chipchick.com/2010/09/hp-touchsmart-apps-center.html

Product Reviews: http://www.product-reviews.net/2010/09/20/new-hp-touchsmart-310-review-specs-and-release-date/

Financial Times: http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/09/touchsmart/

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/20/hp-announces-touchsmart-310-and-omni100-all-in-one-pcs/ [Love all the trolling and spewing of prejudices on this one…]

SlashGear: http://www.slashgear.com/hp-touchsmart-310-omni100-and-touchsmart-tm2-get-official-20103191/

[Update]

GottaBeMobile: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2010/09/22/hp-touchsmart-software-gets-more-touchable/

The Touchsmart’s UI is much more fluid and touch applications are no longer required to run in full screen, offering a little breathing room.The Touchsmart’s UI is much more fluid and touch applications are no longer required to run in full screen, offering a little breathing room.

[…]

The new revision of the software looks like a big improvement compared to what’s on my TouchSmart 600xt, which my wife and I use as our bedroom PC.

eWeek (with Slideshow): http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/HP-Omni-TouchSmart-310-TouchSmart-tm2-Unveiled-175093/

Tom’s Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TouchSmart-Omni-HP-All-in-Ones-AIO-touchscreen,11332.html

DesktopReview: http://www.desktopreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1222&Review=HP+TouchSmart+310+Multitouch+all-in-one+First+Look

HP has what appears to be an ingenious solution. After a program is launched, a couple of fingers swivelling across the screen automatically shrink the application into a cube and paste it onto the TouchSmart’s background. The background itself can then be scrolled through, just by touching it anywhere on the screen.

One really cool aspect of engineering the software like this is the parallax effect that HP added to the wallpaper. As you scroll through the desktop, items in the foreground move at a different rate relative to items in the background.

While we didn’t see it demonstrated, an HP rep also mentioned that the TouchSmart will ship with software to generate these movable backgrounds with pictures that customers take. The effect won’t be as strong as the ones included by HP, but being able to customize it even that much is a nice bonus.

Windows Experience Blog: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2010/09/21/hp-updates-their-touchsmart-software-amp-all-in-one-pc-lineup.aspx

To couple the new hardware, HP is revving their TouchSmart software to offer a number of new capabilities.  They’re saying that with it, the desktop transforms into a “Magic Canvas” where users can easily drag apps, and content – even web content – directly onto the desktop.  There’s also a new multi-layer wallpaper that gives the machine a lot of depth.  I haven’t had a chance to work with these new features directly, but I have seen a demo and it looks really nice.

[/Update]

A little promo video of the new TouchSmart 4.0 software:

Product Marketing Manager Ken Bosley presenting the TouchSmart 4.0 software on YouTube:

The HP Video channel with tutorials:

http://h30429.www3.hp.com/?fr_chl=ce319b479b9d330ec6ef5a60bd25d2567c423f97&rf=bm

For developers:

TouchSmart 4.0 SDK: http://www.touchsmartdevzone.com/download/3369/HP-TouchSmart-SDK-4.0-English/

And I may have some details to add myself if and when I find the time…

Along the way, I discovered that the lab exercises solution files show a different icon in Windows Explorer than the ones I create using VS 2010. The reason is that the lab exercise .sln files contain the following line:

# Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

which results in this icon (see the tiny phone next to the “10”?),

whereas the ones I create contain this line instead:

# Visual Studio 2010

which results in this icon (no tiny phone)

When I open a .sln file with the former line in it, the Express version of VS2010 runs. When I open a .sln file with the latter line in it, the regular version of VS2010 runs. Strange. It seems that the line is just an innocent comment, but apparently not quite. Either way, after repairing the toolset both solution files allow me to work in the XAML designer.

[Update 2010-05-05: I originally wrote this for the CTP that worked with VS2010 RC. Now that an updated set of tools has been released to work with VS2010 RTM, the folder name has changed. It is now called 30319.31 as far as I can tell. That is likely to change again for future releases, so just be aware of that. The steps should still work.]

If you have several machines that you want to install the Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools on and don’t want to have to wait for the download on each machine, here’s a little tip for how you can make yourself an “offline” installer:

1. Start with a clean Win 7 machine.

2. Download the web installer (vm_web.exe) from Microsoft and save it to a folder of your choice (let’s say C:\WinPhone7). Start the install.

3. Let the download happen, but when the install itself starts, temporarily cancel it (you can let it finish after step 5).

4. Go to %Temp% using Windows Explorer.

5. Copy the folder 30128.39 to your folder of choice from step 2.

6. Create a Install_WP7_Tools.cmd file containing the following:

xcopy 30128.39 %temp%\30128.39 /I /E
vm_web.exe
pause

7. Copy the folder of choice to a USB storage device.

8. Use the Install_WP7_Tools.cmd file on your other systems. The tools should install and skip most of the downloads quickly.

If you don’t start with a clean Windows 7 machine, the files that the vm_web.exe tool collects in the 30128.39 folder may not contain all the files needed for the install, so you may see a few things extra get downloaded while using the .cmd file on other machines.

On my clean 64-bit Windows 7 machine, I got the following files as part of the toolset:

C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\Ixpvm.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\dotnetframework\dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\help\HelpSetup_x64.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\mtpack\NetFx_DTP.cab
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\mtpack\NetFx_DTP.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\rdbg\vs_expbsln_x64_enu.cab
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\rdbg\vs_expbsln_x64_enu.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\silverlight4\Silverlight.4.0_Developer.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\silverlight4\Silverlight4_Tools.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\silverlight4\silverlight_sdk.exe
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\vcruntimes\x64\vc_runtime_x64.cab
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\vcruntimes\x64\vc_runtime_x64.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\watson\dw20shared.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\sde_xde64-enu.cab
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\sde_xde64-enu.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\vs_sdeprolightup-enu.cab
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\vs_sdeprolightup-enu.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\WindowsPhoneDeveloperResources.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\WindowsPhoneExtensions.msi
C:\WinPhone7\30128.39\1033\VM_EXP\wcu\windowsphone\XNAGS40_setup.exe

A total of about 320 MB.

Anyway, according to this article at installsite.org, you can embed transforms into an MSI in a way so that Windows Installer will automatically apply them according to the system language when your MSI is loaded. This is the undocumented feature. If your MSI is simple enough that you don’t need dialog boxes/UI, but you just blaze through a default install, yet you want the few messages that show up by default to be localized, what I’m about to describe might be enough for you.

Here’s what you need: WiX (Windows Installer XML toolset), MsiTran.exe and some sample MSI scripts from the Windows SDK, and finally some custom-written scripts to glue the whole thing together.

I’ll assume you already have WiX installed (possibly in conjunction with Visual Studio), and that you have a simple, single-language WiX project handy.

You can get the Windows SDK from Microsoft as an ISO image (this one is for Windows 7). You can then mount this image using Magic Disc, Daemon Tools Lite or some other ISO-peeking utility. If you don’t want to install the entire SDK just to get the MsiTran.exe and MSI script samples, open the ISO up using your tool of choice and find the folder Setup.

To install just the tools package that will give you the MsiTran.exe, run WinSDKTools\WinSDKTools_x86.msi. MsiTran.exe will be found in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin after this. I suggest copying this file to your WiX installer project folder.

To get the script samples, run the MSI WinSDKSamples\WinSDKSamples_x86.msi. Once you’ve done this, you’ll find the sample scripts in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Samples\SysMgmt\Msi\scripts. Out of all these scripts you only need WiSubStg.vbs and WiLangId.vbs. I suggest copying them to your WiX installer project folder.

You should know ahead of building the original WiX project which languages and how many languages you’ll end up needing. Your original installer needs to list all of these in a comma separated list in the Summary Stream (and the list can’t contain 0). In WiX that looks like this:

<Package
  Compressed="yes"
  Description="My Installer"
  InstallerVersion="200"
  Comments="My Software Installer"
  Languages="1033,1031,1028,2052,1030,1043,1035,1036,1040,1041,1042,1044,1046,1034,1053,1049,1055,1045,2070"
/>

Once you’ve built the single language MSI using WiX, you run a script for each language you need your MSI localized in that does the following:

• Copy the original MSI to a new file
• Modify the newly copied MSI so it contains a different ProductLanguage using WiLangId.vbs
• Create a transform that captures the difference between the two MSIs using MSITran.exe
• Embed the transform in the final master installer using WiSubStg.vbs

Here’s the script that does it (I call this CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd):

set MsiName=%1

set lang=%2

set langcode=%3

copy %MsiName%.msi %MsiName%_%lang%.msi

cscript WiLangId.vbs %MsiName%_%lang%.msi Product %langcode% > CreateLangTransform_%lang%.txt

MsiTran.exe -g %MsiName%.msi %MsiName%_%lang%.msi %lang%.mst >> CreateLangTransform_%lang%.txt

cscript wisubstg.vbs FinalMasterInstaller\%MsiName%.msi %lang%.mst %langcode% >> CreateLangTransform_%lang%.txt

cscript wisubstg.vbs FinalMasterInstaller\%MsiName%.msi >> CreateLangTransform_%lang%.txt

All you have to do as a post-build step (either in Visual Studio or as part of your build engine of choice) is call this script once for each language you’re interested in (I call this CreateLocalizedInstallerAllLanguages.cmd):

if not exist FinalMasterInstaller md FinalMasterInstaller

copy MyInstaller.msi FinalMasterInstaller

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller da 1030

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller de 1031

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller es 1034

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller fi 1035

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller fr 1036

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller it 1040

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller jp 1041

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller ko 1042

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller nl 1043

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller no 1044

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller pt_br 1046

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller sv 1053

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller zh_cn 2052

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller zh_tw 1028

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller ru 1049

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller tr 1055

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller pl 1045

call CreateEmbedLangTransform.cmd MyInstaller pt_pt 2070

You’ll need to look up additional language codes in Microsoft’s documentation if you need more than the ones listed above.

Note that I’ve modified the scripts above from the ones I’m actually using to make them a little more generic, and I haven’t tested every aspect of them, but they give you the gist of it.

Here are the script files zipped up.

Linchpin is at its core a self-help book. It’s meant to help you realize that if you want a shot at being indispensable, in whatever human realm (but mostly at work), you have to make some hard choices in your life. The reasoning for this takes you on a brief tour of economic systems, psychology, neuroscience and societal systems, including the education system.

You’ll read about Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Adam Smith and how a system is emerging that leaves an opening for a new role in economic systems: so-called “linchpins,” people who don’t need access to capital in the traditional sense, whose contributions are difficult to make interchangeable/replaceable and who make these contributions for the sake of contributing, not for the sake of making money. Making money, argues Godin, comes as a byproduct of the contribution that a linchpin makes. In a way, part of this book is about how the emerging global economic situation is made up of Communism and Capitalism remixed. And the best (perhaps the only) way to get by in this emerging system is to become a linchpin - an artist who gives of his or her creativity, ingenuity and humanness freely without desire for reciprocation. Linchpins are intrinsically motivated.

The self-help aspect of the book is that Seth is trying to convince you that this is the kind of role YOU want to play, because doing otherwise is a dead-end in the system that’s now emerging worldwide. Seth’s reasons for wanting you to become a linchpin are well-meaning and honest. He’s attempting to give you the best advice he can, based on the way he sees things unfolding right now. It’s hard to accurately summarize what the book says constitutes the behaviors and attitudes of a linchpin, and it would probably diminish the experience of reading the book. There are plenty of examples and inspiring stories in the book, and they make for really interesting reading.

At times it feels like the book is a collection of somewhat distantly related blog post blurbs, woven together loosely by a few underlying threads. It’s a little hard to follow at times, keeping up with the jumps and turns, and maybe this is just a logical consequence of Seth frequently sharing a lot of his thoughts in blog post format. It’s become his style. That doesn’t make the underlying threads any less important, though.

In a way, the case for the linchpin idea is made with a hermetically sealed argument. If you want to argue that the idea won’t work for you, the book has the counter-argument ready that this is your “lizard brain” speaking. It is the most ancient part of the brain (speaking in terms of evolutionary age), the part that is most concerned with survival and basic biological functions. Given the chance, your lizard brain will win over the more developed, more “recent” parts of your consciousness. It takes hard work and tricks to overcome the resistance that the lizard brain represents. The book takes a long, hard look at all that. In fact the book says that your lizard brain hates it when you read books like Linchpin.

I have no doubt that the book is spot on in saying that we don’t need more things cheaper, faster and more average. We’ve lived in a system focused on that for only a short time (a couple of generations), but it seems like forever (we have bad memory). We’re ready for getting back to outstanding things. Art that moves us, makes us feel connected, builds us up, helps us form new tribes. We’re hungry for real, human interactions, ready for forming new bonds with people in whatever way that might happen. We’re tired of the simple exchange, the transaction that leaves us distanced from each other. We look for ways to get more involved, to matter to each other. Linchpin shows us how, by encouraging us to bring all of ourselves into each part of our lives, at work and at home (but it’s mostly about work).

That being said, I don’t think everyone can be a linchpin. All large systems (ecosystems, societies, companies) have hierarchies and layers. Ecosystems, for example, have tons of species that are needed “below” to feed the outstanding species at the top. I think it’s similar in the workplace. And in a way, the book has an answer for that. Nobody is a linchpin all the time. Even the most successful people spend most of their time doing ordinary things. It’s the moments of extraordinary acts that make them linchpins.

I also think that the road to becoming a linchpin is long and hard. The “resistance” can’t be overcome “suddenly.” It’s a slow learning process. In fact, the book argues that the best way to beat the resistance is to slowly try to build a platform that looks “harmless” to the resistance, so that when you’re finally ready to take the leap, you have a network of “friendlies” that are ready to see what you have to give. A lot of the arguments the book makes depend on an assumed network that supports linchpins. For example, you shouldn’t be afraid of getting fired for breaking rules, because it will be obvious to others that you have linchpin characteristics, and they will hire you in a heartbeat. This requires that you’re well-kown. The hard part is getting noticed. The Internet accelerates the “race to the bottom” (outsourcing, standardization, commoditization) and at the same time makes it harder to be remarkable because you have to stand out among a vastly bigger crowd. Seth says you don’t have to be an outlier (probably in the Malcolm Gladwell sense) to become a linchpin, but it seems to me that somehow you do, at least a little bit. Maybe not an outlier in a “global” sense, like a world-famous movie star or musician, but certainly in your local environment.

Linchpin encourages everyone to contribute “art,” saying that it’s the only thing that is hard to commoditize. I wonder if a flooding of the marketplace with “art” won’t commoditize it somehow anyway. Another question in my mind is how today’s megacorporations can become more human, more remarkable? It certainly isn’t going to happen overnight. There’s a lot of inertia in big systems. I suppose the only thing to do is to focus on “art” that’s within your grasp, and slowly build from there.

My own attempt at this (giving things away through this blog) have so far been – how do I put it - interesting. Interesting in the sense that I have given things to people without expecting anything in return, and in specific instances where personal contact was involved, haven’t even gotten back a “thank you.” Maybe what I’m capable of giving away online is not “art” enough. Maybe I have made it too hard to receive.

To me, Linchpin is a perfect specimen of a self-help book, because you really have to do it all yourself. Nobody can help you. Want to make artful gifts, as the book argues linchpins do? You have to figure out what your art is. Want some help figuring it out? Sorry, there is no map (not entirely true; there are seven characteristics a linchpin exhibits, but you still have to figure out how to apply them to yourself or how to develop them). Hesitant to start? That’s your lizard brain holding you back.

 
Proof that it happened. 100024 views.

Daily stats leading up to 100000 views.

  
Weekly stats leading up to 100000 views.

Blog stats all the way from the beginning to 100000 views.

People usually reflect on what got them to 100000 views. I guess for me it’s been my involvement with the community site that is connected with the TouchSmart PC. I’ve posted some things here specifically in response to stuff that happened on the community site. As you can see from the dip above, my blog is not particularly popular just for its own sake. It’s usually when something big happens around a release of TouchSmart that people start looking.

Here’s a list of the top posts in case you are into that kind of stats:

For some reason people like to read about my experience with Crossloop. Whoda thunk?

Anyway, no matter what prompted you to pay a visit – thank you!

And Merry Christmas!

If you see me at PDC, say hi, and I may be able to hand you one of these puppies. I only have a limited supply, though. 15 to be precise.

Check out the pictures:

Front of the card

Back of the card

Back of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

Front of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

Today HP is announcing a new Software Development Kit for helping you write apps that play well in the HP TouchSmart “shell” environment. The new SDK still contains the general guidelines that outline both what makes a good app that’s optimized for touch interaction and the general rules you have to play by in order to “fit” into the HP TouchSmart shell.

But this time around there’s more: For the first time there is also documentation for a WPF library that you can use to more quickly write an app that heeds all of the rules that need to be followed. This library has actually existed for a few releases already, but it was not documented until now (for HP TouchSmart 3.0).

There are also two sample applications. One that demonstrates the basics of the WPF library (and that shows you what the shell does to the apps on a pretty detailed level – it’s great for seeing what registered messages are sent to the app, how the app gets sized, etc.) and one that’s a little game. To round out things, there’s some skeleton sample app code as well, so you can get started quickly with your app idea.

Here are a few screenshots of the two sample apps:

“Hello world” Wide-interactive tile

“Hello world” Large tile

Notification with CircleX icon

Notification with CircleCheck icon

“Hello Mole” Wide-interactive tile

The documentation is provided in two forms: PDF for easy printing and reading offline as well as in Windows Help format for easy searching and looking at class library details.

You’ll notice that most of this only applies to WPF development. If you’re not using WPF yet (why aren’t you? – it’s a great platform), the general guidelines still apply and work. The shell is actually technology agnostic, since all it cares about, really, is the window (handle) your app produces. As long as your technology stack produces a Win32 window, you can “play”. The essence of that is something I’ve talked about before.

So where can you get this newfangled contraption? Head right over to http://www.touchsmartdevzone.com/download/file/2074-27 to start downloading. There’s still a license agreement in the installer (to make the lawyers happy), but I believe you can now download the thing without having to consent to the agreement first.

(Update 2010-02-05: The “shell” has been updated from 3.0.32.0 to 3.0.35.0 on HP’s support site. I’ve updated the link here as well)

I can’t get into every detail of the upgrade process (how to install Windows 7, drivers, etc.), but I thought I would list the HP TouchSmart software applications that are currently available for download and suggest a good order of installation to you. This is all just interim, personal information until something official is made available.

So what’s currently up there on the HP support site? Here’s the list (as of the time of this post) in the order that would be good to follow when installing (again, this may differ from whatever official guidance may come out later; it’s my personal take on it as of right now):

• HP TouchSmart 3.0 itself (the “shell”/the “foundation”), called the HP TouchSmart Application Update 3.0.35.0 (15 MB)
• Music/Photo/Video 3.0.2.3228 (158 MB)
• Notes 3.0.3462.28879 (19 MB)
• Calendar 3.0.3476.32189 (6 MB)
• RSS 3.00.0006 (5 MB)
• Browser 3.00.0008 (3 MB)
• Clock 3.0.3572.25998 (2 MB)
• DVD 3.0.1.3123, called HP MediaSmart DVD (not sure why) (64 MB)
• Weather 3.00.0001 (3 MB)
• Webcam 3.0.1.1903 (61 MB)
• Netflix 1.0.29.0 (4 MB)
• Hulu 0.9.7 (4 MB)
• Twitter 1.0.3541.23899 (6 MB) (new 2009-11-05)
• Live TV 3.00.1924 (46 MB)

Note that the Live TV application only works with a certain set of TV tuner models. I snagged the links in this post (which may get outdated over time) from the updates page for the IQ527. Since your model may be different, the Live TV app may not work for you. That’s partly why it’s listed last.

So there it is, a refresh to work with Windows 7 for all the original applications that came with the IQ500/800, plus three new ones (Netflix, Hulu and Live TV.) A total of 390 MB of new software. All for just the cost of download bandwidth and your time to install everything.

Direct interaction / tile size: The biggest change is that the top row of tiles is much bigger and wider in 3.0. This enables direct interaction with the content of the tiles, something the 2.x software didn’t allow for most tiles. This means that you can no longer scroll the top row of tiles by just touching them anywhere and then moving your finger. To scroll you have to use either the colored bar at the top of the tile or the semi-transparent border around the tile.

Resource usage: In order to let you better manage resource usage while running the TouchSmart software, tiles that are placed in the bottom row no longer present any live data as they did in 2.x. So if you find little use for all but two tiles, for example, put the ones you don’t use much in the lower row. That way only two apps have to run (each tile corresponds to an app) and the computer will have more resources available for other tasks.

Tile states: TouchSmart 3.0 still has the concept of two app states: the state a tile is in when it’s in the top row (called “wide-interactive”) and the state it’s in when you “launch” it (called “large”). The difference is more academic in 3.0, since you can now interact with tiles whether they’re wide-interactive or large. In 2.x you could only interact with “large” tiles. To “launch” a tile to the large state, you tap on the colored bar or the semi-transparent border around the tile. Tiles in the large state have access to more screen area, and thus may present more functionality in that state than they do in the wide-interactive state (Canvas is a good example of this.)

Speedy scrolling / “throwing”: One of the more fun interactions in TouchSmart 2.x was the ability to “throw” tiles, giving them momentum with a quick flick of your finger, and letting them spin until they came to rest. You could do this in the top row and the bottom row. TouchSmart 3.0 still lets you “throw” tiles, but now there is a beginning and an end to the row; things no longer just spin. That should make it a little easier to find a tile you may be looking for. Also, a “throw” will now take you to the next “set” of tiles and will always center on a tile. If you’re about to go past the end of the row, a snap-back effect will indicate that there are no more tiles in that direction. This snap-back effect is most pronounced in the lower row, since a “throw” there will take you “further”. None of the tutorial videos actually show these “throw” effects, so play around a bit to experience them for yourself. I think they’re fun, anyway.

More apps, more features: TouchSmart 3.0 introduces a whole bunch of new apps: Canvas, Link, Live TV, Netflix, Recipe Box, Twitter and Hulu. You can read much more about these on the HP TouchSmart product page.

Also, the “main” apps (Music/Photo/Video) have been improved substantially, allowing for home network discovery of media files (support for USB/network/Media Server locations) as well as providing access to Pandora and Rhapsody Internet music services.

Personalization: An area that got a major overhaul in the “Shell” application (branded “HP TouchSmart” proper, but really named SmartCenter by the developers) is Personalization. The introduction of the colored bar at the top of each wide-interactive tile enabled bringing in lots more “color”. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the personalization screens:

On this screen (Manage My Tiles) you can pick a tile to customize in the list on the right (hitting a letter on the keyboard takes you around the list quickly). Then you can choose a color for the tile’s bar on the left, using the various buttons or the rainbow color picker (with an optional RGB color input field for access to all colors). You can also delete a tile. If you do that, and the tile was one of the TouchSmart apps, you can get it back via the Create Tile button (pick the button called HP TouchSmart Program).

You can create a new tile using the Create Tile button:

Creating a Windows Program tile looks like this:

You can choose from a list of programs found on your computer (the list is filtered a bit to suppress irrelevant programs) or use the Advanced button to define everything “by hand”:

Here you can name the tile, type in the full path to the executable (exe) and define any command line arguments in the Parameters box. You can also pick an icon (if the exe has a suitable icon you can use it, or you can pick from a list of icons provided by HP TouchSmart.) If you find the list of icons too limiting, you can place icon files of your liking (best to use 256*256 PNG files with transparency) in the folder %LocalAppData%\Hewlett-Packard\TouchSmart\SmartCenter 2.0\Icons and they should get added to the list [This is for all you fellow geeks out there.]

Creating a Website tile is quite similar, except here the list is made up of Favorites from Internet Explorer:

Typing in your own URL (aka website address) also works.

Tapping the Delete button for a tile just brings up a confirmation screen:

If you delete a TouchSmart Program tile, you can recover it later via the Create Tile button by choosing the HP TouchSmart Program button as mentioned above. That will look a little like this:

TouchSmart 3.0 comes with a lot more choices of background pictures as well. You can select one from the Choose Background screen in Personalize (see the three buttons towards the top: Manage My Tiles, Choose Background and – on the far right – About):

You may not have all of these since my screenshots are from a custom install on a test machine. To add your own background pictures to this selection screen, just copy some pictures to the “HP TouchSmart” folder in the Public Pictures folder of Windows 7. Sadly, the ones I managed to get included in 2.x are now gone

The last area of Personalize is the venerable “About” screen. Here you’ll find the version number of the SmartCenter program itself as well as a “build” number (in parentheses, here you see “build” 32):

I hope you enjoyed this little guided tour around the TouchSmart 3.0 “shell” and learned something new in the process!

If you’re a developer and want to know how you can add your own apps to the 3.0 “shell”, stay tuned. More information on that will be coming out soon.

P.S.: Here’s a list of direct links to some more TouchSmart 3.0 tutorial videos:

General
Canvas
Demo
Recipe Box: Overview
Recipe Box: Headset
Recipe Box: Add a recipe
Recipe Box: Voice control
Recipe Box: Troubleshooting
Touch Tips
Live TV: Setup
Live TV: Watch and Record
Video: Make Videos