Silverlight Car Konfigurator

Although you may not speak German, the smooth experience of the Konfigurator comes through via the images and motion. You can check out a video of the Konfigurator in action or start using it to customize your own Mazda. Keep an eye out for the Deep Zoom of the interiors, which ends up being a great way to check out textures.

Configure your own car now here...

Multi-Touch Apps Without a Multi-Touch Screen

Multi-touch (MT) is a big part of Windows 7. MT is exciting and opens up new choices for UI interaction but the enthusiasm will quickly fade if you don’t have a multi-touch enabled monitor.
The good news is that there are multi-touch devices coming soon to your favorite hardware dealer. Hardware vendors like HP, Dell and Albatron want to have their products available before the October 22nd, 2009 release of Window 7. DigitTimes reports that a number of companies will be competing for a place on your desktop.

Touch panel makers, including eTurbo Touch, Mildex Optical, and Integrated Digital Technologies (IDT), are showcasing multi-touch technology supporting Microsoft Windows 7 at the ongoing Computex 2009.

The touch panel makers are introducing improved capacitive touch panels for medium- to large-size products, with prices 50-60% more than traditional capacitive touch panels and 60-80% less than projective capacitive touch panels, according to market sources.

One of the biggest obstacles in programming and testing a multi-touch (MT) application is enabling developers who don’t have MT computers to interact in a simulated MT way.

The Surface team solved this problem by creating a Surface emulator. Since the Surface has a five camera vision system buried in the depths of the table they needed to create a emulator that mimics that camera system on a normal PC.

It’s similar if you plan on adding MT to your Windows 7 application. For various reasons your dev team may not have MT devices for all team members. Both testers and developers need a way simulate user touches from their legacy hardware. Unfortunately there is no official emulator available from Microsoft. But there is a third party work-around that solves that problem.

Google's Gmail and More Finally Lose 'beta' Tag

First VLC, now Google. The kids are all growed up! Google has finally decided to ditch that pesky beta tag on several of its major projects. After five years of use, Gmail is apparently finally ready for prime time, along with Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs (in process).

The reason for dropping "beta" from the products seems to be largely political: businesses are reluctant to have their critical infrastructure depend on software that's perpetually in beta. By getting rid of the moniker, Google is aiming to convince more enterprises to consider its products as suitable for their business. And, of course, given that those are the people actually paying real money for the product--instead of us consumer leeches who pay only by having our eyeballs assailed with ads--that's a smart move on Google's part.

As Google's Matthew Glotzbach, the director of product management in Google Enterprise wrote today on the company blog: "We've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark."

On a related note, Google is also adding some new features for those paying customers: email delegation and relegation, allowing businesses using Google Apps to easily comply with various data-retention laws.

Beta was once almost a mark of status for Web services, but it's become less so over the past few years, as they've become more and more popular. Even photo-sharing site Flickr got out of beta (and into "gamma," no less)--back in '06. Take that, Google!

Microsoft Gazelle- Browser Based OS

You may have heard updates on Microsoft efforts to built a browser based/controlled OS earlier this year. Here few more updates from MS Research team.


In February of this year, Microsoft Research released a paper (PDF) about a new web browser they’re calling “Gazelle,” which is really less of a browser and more like an operating system. According to the paper, what makes Gazelle different than any other browsers out there today is how it’s able to exclusively control and mange the system’s resources.

Now, in a new article on Microsoft Research’s site, we get a little more insight about what exactly Gazelle can do.

One of the features of Gazelle is its ability to manage devices. Unlike with other browsers, where device management takes place (like accessing a webcam for instance), it’s done via plugin. In the Gazelle model, the browser kernel itself “protects principals from one another and from the host machine by exclusively managing access to computer resources, enforcing policies, handling interprincipal communications, and providing consistent, systematic access to computing devices.”

The kernel also exclusively manages the principles by placing them in a separate protection domain using an OS process. That way, if misbehaving code arises it only affects its own protection domain, leaving everything else including the kernel and host system intact.

Sadly for us, though, Gazelle is not a project that will develop into a workable prototype - it’s just research. “I would like to see Web applications achieve function and quality parity with desktop apps,” says Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in he Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond. “That’s the ultimate goal of this research.”

See more here...

Bing Vs Google!

Do you want to know which search engine is better for you, here is website for you Bing vs Google.

Ever since Bing’s launch, there’s been a lot of talk about which search engine is doing a better job. Can Bing compare to Google? Does it do a better job? Or does it do well with some queries and not others? If you’ve had trouble making up your mind about this, there’s a new site that can help you figure it all out. The site is called “Bing vs. Google,” and, like it sounds, it’s a comparison site that pits two sets of search results against each other. Like any other search engine, Bing vs. Google has a simple homepage with just a search box in the middle of the screen and a bit of text explaining what it’s all about. To use the site, all you have to do is enter in a query as usual and hit “search.”

The fun part, of course, is the search results page. Bing vs. Google shows the results in a split screen, bing on the left, Google on the right. Squashing the screens like this can lead to a bit overlapping text in some cases (see, for example, how the results overlap Google’s sponsored links in the image), but it’s still a good way to easily get side-by-side results.

Using the links at the top, you can change the layout of the page to a horizontal split, if you so desire, or you can switch off one engine entirely and show just the one set of results. Either way, if you were having trouble making up your mind (or just making the switch to a new default search provider!), Bing vs. Google can help you put things in perspective.

See more here...