Microsoft has come up with a new product called Microsoft Surface, in the last 2 weeks every blogger has written about it, so here’s my share.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special barcode labels on top of it.

Watch this video to see the magic.

Movie Tidbit: When Microsoft announced the Surface computer weeks ago, anti-Microsoft trolls were quick to frame Microsoft as uninnovative and a copycat. Their arguments included several examples of prior touch computing interfaces including the practical and modest desk shown in the blockbuster movie, “The Island” directed by Michael Bay. Well as it turns out, the interactive desk used by Dr. Merrick was actually a Surface computer, all the way back in 2005.

For those of you who haven’t watched “The Island” or forgot this particular scene, it depicts an office environment of the future where a traditional desk, equipment and documents are all replaced by a single interactive desk. In the movie, the desk is shown to be touch-sensitive - responding to both hands and objects like a pen or a ‘control diamond’. The entire table is lit with information and one could open, close documents with the control object.

And we thought it was just another movie gizmo.

- valli

This Saturday the family and I head out to Seattle for Web Design World. We can't wait to step foot on the scenic shores of the Pacific Coast and to greet some of you.

Incidentally, this is a good excuse to announce my other speaking engagements scheduled through 2007:

• September 7 (Brighton, England): d.Construct
• October 2-4 (Orlando, FL): Mobile Web Americas
• October 25 (Cedar City, UT): Southern Utah University
• November 5-8 (Cambridge, MA): User Interface 12 Conference

Hope you'll join me at one of these events...

For MetaFilter’s 8th anniversary, we’re throwing a party at Ground Kontrol (511 NW Couch St.), a bar/80s arcade in downtown Portland. It’ll be from 7pm until 2am on Saturday, July 14th. It is strictly 21 and over because there will be free drinks (roughly 5 free drinks per person, $1.50-$2 per drink after we run out the tab) and games will also be on free play mode. The venue can accommodate about 100 people so I need to do a head count beforehand (at this point I’m not sure if 50 people or 500 are actually coming).

The party is open to any and all current members and you can bring one guest if you want. Please mark “Yes” if you’ve made plans and would like to attend, “Maybe” if you’re not sure yet. If you can’t make it, no worries, feel free to ignore this. Thanks, and I look forward to seeing everyone on the 14th!

RSVP here

Getting an iPhone meant I’d be leaving tmobile after four years of service, and I re-upped my contract last year for a blackberry pearl, so unfortunately that also meant I’d get hit with a $200 contract charge. Today I called to cancel and I knew it might be painful so I decided to record it. The total call was 12 minutes long, about half of that spent with a retention specialist. The best part of the call was both the first support rep and the retention guy saying “you got an iPhone! how is it?” and sounding genuinely interested.

Here’s the part of the recording where the retention guy comes on (he starts with a bit of iPhone FUD, then gives offers):

He gives me the following offers:

• $299 for a Tmobile Wing (”more compatible, more features than the iPhone”)
• 1 month of free service
• transfer phone to someone else
• monthly service reduced from $59/mo to $20/mo

With many, many other lunatics, I found myself sitting on a mall floor, hunched over my laptop getting some work done on Friday afternoon while waiting for the Apple employees to start clapping, cheering and taking our money in exchange for an iPhone.

This experience was really fun. Apple did nothing short of a fabulous job with the launch. Every hour or so they would come down the line offering bottled water and/or hot coffee (Starbucks, fyi. Could be worse.). Once 6pm rolled around, there was much rejoicing, especially by Apple employees (there were nearly 75 of them), handing out high-fives to anybody who would take them. If anything they were too giddy. Once I got into the store, I was directed around to one of many iPhone stations where people with handheld checkout devices were swiping cards and handing over iPhones (they email you the receipt). It was really slick.

After I took it home, I plugged it into iTunes and went through the activation process. I think it’s brilliant that Apple didn’t do activation at the store. It’s such a waste of time to sit there and pick out your cell plan, billing and all that stuff at the store. Other companies could learn a lot from this process. iTunes of course is becoming a silly name for this application, but I’m not going to complain.

After the activation (took about a minute), I fired up the iPhone. It had synced over all my email settings, Safari bookmarks, address book entries, and appointments. Totally flawless.

Using the iPhone has been a lot of fun as well. There was a lot of talk about the typing as it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. I’ve heard everything from declaring it “unusable” to “it’s surprisingly easy”. I’ve done plenty of typing on it for the two days I’ve had it. Apple suggested you use your index finger for the first few days, but I skipped that and went straight to two-thumb typing. I’m coming from using the Treo quite a bit for a year now, and for a lot of that year I was a pretty heavy emailer on it, so I’m used to the hardware keys. Now that I’ve switched to the iPhone, I think it’s a piece of cake. I still mess up from time to time, but it’s not the train wreck that many predicted. It works great. And I wouldn’t dream of sacrificing all that screen real estate for a bunch of hardware buttons. It’s hard not to think of the naysayers as either whining or having some kind of agenda.

The iPhone isn’t perfect. It has some flaws that I hope get fixed in some revisions. There’s no copy/paste functionality. I’ve already wished for that a number of times. One feature that’s great about some of the apps is that if your rotate the iPhone 90°, the screen rotates with you. Unfortunately this isn’t present in every app, including Mail. I’d like to see that show up more. I’d also like some more apps, namely an RSS reader. A fancier camera would be nice, the 2 megapixel one is fine, but it would be nice to see something a little meatier. (I’ve seen people wonder how to upload pictures taken on the iPhone to Flickr – here’s a hint – just email the photo to Flickr. It’s like one and a half steps.) Lastly, I’d like iChat on there.

Honestly, I expected to be more disappointed. With all the hype, I was sure there would be something that wouldn’t live up to my expectations. It was almost as if I wanted some naggly thing to make me wish I hadn’t bought the iPhone. My only gripe isn’t with the phone at all. AT&T coverage in some parts of my house is kinda lousy. I’m still just scratching the surface of how many really impressive things I’ve experienced so far. It’s been a lot of fun.

After my initial problems, I got a new iPhone from my nearby Apple store and spent several hours using it. My first reaction is that it’s very good, meeting the almost impossible expectations I had for it. Photos are fun and look great, movies are nice and will work great on planes, and the iPod functionality looks good.

The thing that really knocked my socks off was Safari.

I do almost everything in a web app, and even with my blackberry pearl I was stuck with a crippled browser that could only use about half the apps I need. It was a breakthrough over my last device (which was painful for more than 1 or 2 web page views) but I never thought having a full copy of safari on a phone would be so liberating (especially since I only use firefox on my mac).

I have a set of tasks I normally do to keep up on all the workings of metafilter, but I used to only be able to check email and read the front pages of my sites on the pearl. Typically that was the bare minimum and I would wait until I got to a desktop to finish the rest of my work. Last night while catching up on some fluffy TV, I used my iphone for about two hours and it was pretty close to what I do with a laptop. I could check the sites, use all my admin tools. Ajax effects worked throughout and I could finally check my bank balance from my phone (my bank’s site requires javascript and locked out my last 2 phones).

Usually before I go to bed, I have to sweep through half a dozen sites and apps to make sure everything is on the up and up. I learned that I could do everything on the iPhone, and I could do it from anywhere on earth. This is going to be great for airports and other places where I used to feel bored, trapped, and in dire need of internet access.

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop. Once I get more used to two-thumb typing, the last limitations that keep it from feeling like a real computer will be gone.

1. I can eat and breathe fire
2. I was flying planes solo before I was old enough to drive
3. I’ve dived on an active, underwater volcano
4. I lived in a tent for a whole summer while surfing in Devon
5. I helped set up a dive shop in Thailand when I was 27