Saturday, October 23, 2010

Microsoft Adaptive Keyboard - UIST






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You may recall us thinking outloud about the idea of an advanced keyboard using LCD displays for each key and a touch LCD panel across the top. We call it our Adaptive Keyboard and it's an idea that Steven Bathiche has been thinking about for many years in our Applied Sciences Group. This year we gave prototype hardware to a group of students and asked them to present their ideas at this year's User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) symposium.

I headed out to New York to see what the students had come up with and there were plenty of good ideas. You can see the official winners here. A couple that stood out to me included WHACK, a system to dynamically remap keys so your passwords are always different and can't be captured by keyloggers, several visual clipboard applications,and one application that allowed the keyboard to be a visual interface for editing videos.

Watch the Microsoft Hardware Blog for more information.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

.NET Gadgeteer






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At Maker Faire 2010 New York, the .NET Micro Framework team and Microsoft Research (Cambridge) showed off their new device: the .NET Gadgeteer. It's like LEGO for electronics.

In this video, Colin Miller explains some of the details on the board. The board itself has a multitude of connectors, and each is labeled with a letter. A sensor is then used to tell the end user which port to plug into, and all of this allows Collin to create a basic camera using only about three lines of code!

Colin did misspeak, however. He referred to the Device Solutions board as the Embedded Fusion board. That was the old name.

Dare to Dream Different Winner






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Dare to Dream Different was a contest held to see what cool ideas people could come up with using a standard hardware reference board using .NET Micro Framework. During the final judging, I got together with the finalists and talked to them about the projects they submitted.


First Place winner James Ng shows us his very cool (though in this iteration - large) wearable system for controlling automation and replacing things like car keys, credit cards, and passwords. He even made a carbon fiber shell for the reference board.

Building devices with .NET Gadgeteer

Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is a rapid prototyping platform for small electronic gadgets and embedded hardware devices. Individual .NET Gadgeteer modules can be easily connected and programmed using C# to make fully functional devices.

This video shows how easily .NET Gadgeteer modules can be connected together to build devices, including a simple MP3 player and digital camera.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Microsoft LightSpace

Microsoft LightSpace brings Surface (plus shadows) to any table (video)
It's hard not to love the crazy stuff happening at Microsoft Research, but it's also hard to imagine when any of it is going to actually start changing the way we interact with our PCs. Surface was bested bySecondLight as the coolest tech we can't buy, and now here comes another successor: LightSpace. This gets rid of the expensive table in favor of a (surely not cheap) series of projectors hanging from the ceiling paired to a 3D camera. The camera detects the relative position of things and instructs a projector to apply a Surface-like interface onto any flat surface. From there a user can literally grab any file they like and carry it over to another surface, where it will be displayed. It's all demonstrated quite handily in the video below, and while the system does look a wee bit rough at the moment, the potential is surely there. Just like it was with SecondLight, and Surface, and Courier...more

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Google Street View Now Available in Ireland


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A big bone of contention in many countries, Google's Street View mapping service today goes live in Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica, meaning Street View now has a presence in all seven continents.
Launched in May 2007 in five US cities, the panoramic imaging service has gone on to map cities on every corner of the planet, attracting ire and admiration along the way.
Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering at Google Earth and Maps, wrote on the company's blog: "We often consider Street View to be the last zoom layer on the map, and a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person – whether you're checking out a coffee shop across town or planning a vacation across the globe. We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas." more

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

CCEnhancer Makes CCleaner Even Better

CCleaner is one of the most popular programs for cleaning up the extra files and leftover data on your PC. Although I haven’t had much use for it on my more modern PCs (Windows 7 apparently does its own maintenance regularly) I know I’ve used it in the past to restore friends’ older and somewhat abused PCs to a fresh and clean state, sometimes even dramatically boosting performance in the process.

But I did not know of this: CCEnhancer can add to CCleaner’s capabilities by providing support for hundreds of extra programs beyond those supported by default.

According to FreewareGenius, the add-on app supports 270 extra programs including things like Quicktime and Flash, for example, it works even as a portable app, offers 1-click operation and is simple to use. Nice - who knew? You can try CCenhancer for yourself, just download it from here. It’s free, but donations are accepted.

Panasonic Toughbook S9

Panasonic's Toughbook line hasn't only been impressing in extreme durability lately, but also in extremeweight-loss. Joining the 3.2-pound Tougbook C1, is the newest 12.1-inch Toughbook S9, which weighs just three pounds. And yes, Panny's claiming it's the lightest 12-incher with an optical drive, and our quick research seems to prove that claim right. Even more impressive is the power that's packed into the featherweight chassis -- it's got a Core i5-520M processor, 2GB of RAM, and a shock-mounted 320GB hard drive. Thought that Panasonic gave up the durability for that weightage? You'd be wrong -- the magnesium alloy case can still withstand a 2.5-foot operating drop, meets all the Mil Spec 810-G drop procedures, has a spill-resistant keyboard, and can take more than 220 pounds of pressure on its lid and base. It does sound great for when someone drops it off the airport security belt, but that's until you hear about the physical beating it'll take on your bank account -- it'll retail for $2,499. Yeah, we wish we had better news to end on, but perhaps the press release and pictures below will turn that frown upside down. More

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Netduino Plus


The two new Arduinos should spell good things for the Arduino heads out there, but meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks... Secret Labs is launching its .NET-friendly Netduino Plus, which adds Ethernet and microSD to a regular Netduino board (which in itself is a sort of high powered, Visual Studio-compatible Arduino, with a 32-bit 48MHz ARM7 processor, instead of Arduino's 8-bit number, but pin compatible with Arduino "shields"). Unfortunately, the networking code eats of a good majority of the board's already meager code storage and RAM, but you can always flash the original Netduino's firmware on here if you'd like. Right now the board is in a "public beta" while the firmware gets some extra tweaks, but you should be able to drop $60 on the final model by the holidays.

Buy a Netduino Plus from here...
Download development kit here...
See few sample projects here...

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Microsoft Research Lab: Z3 - An Efficient SMT Solver

Z3 is a high-performance theorem prover being developed at Microsoft Research. Z3 supports linear real and integer arithmetic, fixed-size bit-vectors, extensional arrays, uninterpreted functions, and quantifiers. Z3 is integrated with a number of program analysis, testing, and verification tools from Microsoft Research. These include: Spec#/Boogie, Pex, Yogi, Vigilante, SLAM, F7, SAGE, VS3, FORMULA, and HAVOC. It can read problems in SMT-LIB and Simplifyformats.

Links: