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Kudos to liorz for beating me to it (link to post in Hebrew).
Veteran readers of Tidbits might recall my fascination with the "Multi-Touch Screen" technology developed by Jeff Han of NYU and how it might revolutionize the way we interact with our computers.
Microsoft Surface promises to be a commercial implementation of a Multi-Touch Screen that will hit the market this winter (according to their PR site). See Bill introduce the product at the Wall Street Journal's D conference:
It's very surprising to hear that Microsoft has beaten Han's Perceptive Pixel in bringing this technology to the mass market. Perceptive Pixel only sell to heavyweight clients, mostly security and intelligence organizations. Microsoft claims the idea for a multi-touch table has been rolling around in Redmond since 2002 - that in itself is a surprise to me.
I believe that if Surface is really as good as it advertises itself to be then we're in for a major revolution that will leave our computers free of keyboards and mice. I hope this will happen sooner than later - depending on how good the implementation is and how quickly prices will drop to reasonable levels.
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Back after a long period of time away from the internet. This won't be much of a comeback though, as I'm getting married (!) the day after tomorrow and then I'm going here for a week: Santorini on 43places.
But I digress. I just want to recommenced Paint.NET. In a sentence, it's the open source Photoshop. It's a free for download open source photo editing software.
Of course it's not a real competitor for Photoshop - certainly not for professionals - but all the basic stuff is there - the lasso tool, gradients, layers and a lot of special effects. It's perfect for the casual user like myself.
It's open source and it's written in .net 2.0. Which means even I can tweak it and contribute to its development.
I heard about it from Jeff Atwood's post "Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor" over at Coding Horror. After you've read it and agreed with every word, there's also a followup post for you to read: "Basic Design Principles for Software Developers"
See you after I get hitched! --urig