Quietly, without any fanfare, Microsoft has released the first service pack for Surface, their big multitouch table computer. The update was released during TechEd 2009, but no press release or any other form of promotional material was sent out. Still, there are some really interesting additions in this service pack, making it quite a substantial upgrade for Surface owners.
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2006-03-21
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2008-07-15
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2005-07-06
I can appreciate the merit of the product but I think that this shouldn't be a of a 'separate' product but part of an existing product. What I'd like to see, however, is a stylus based notepad where hand writing can be done to a screen and it is saved as it is rather than attempting to try and convert it into act text. Although I don't like to slam an idea that appears to be good on the surface - I question as to the point of this; is it an experiment in the form of a product?
Member since:2008-07-15
That would, at least in theory, be fairly easy: track the movement of the stylus along the screen and simply draw lines where it moves, then save as an image. It would be fairly limiting though, useful only for notes to yourself or perhaps to send as an image attachment via email or post up on an image site. Just about everywhere else on the internet requires text, so if you were wanting broader functionality for such a notepad you would need to be able to switch image mode on and off at need.
Member since:2007-03-26
PDAs have been doing this for years.
'Notes' is a freebe with Windows Mobile and does exactly this and can even recognise your handwriting and convert it to ASCII - should you wish.
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Member since:2006-01-02
OneNote behaves exactly like this on a TablePC. It keeps the stylus input as 'ink.' If it is actually text and you wish to search it, you can type what you're looking for in a "Find" box and it will do a fuzzy match on your handwriting (I think it keeps around an index of recognized text in the background) and highlight all the handwritten locations where you wrote some particular word.
I used this for about a year in college (alas, I graduated and stopped handwriting text afterwards).
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2006-05-06
I have had the oppurtunity to play with one of the surface machines its actually quite nice and I wish they were less expensive I would buy one in a heartbeat. I do believe Surface is still based on the Windows XP kernel. I think, may be wrong there.
If it was less expensive, it would sell like crazy.