The teams are cranking away here at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA. BizSpark and the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team is sponsoring another Incubation Week this week, focused on Windows 7 applications. The teams spent Monday getting training on the features of Window 7, and spent Monday night getting systems set-up and running. For some reason the network was awfully slow on Monday so my team, Take Publishing, built an add-hoc code management system with Mesh – so the code could be ooze syncing in the background all the time. I love Mesh, there are so many times when your thinking, now how do we, oh, use Mesh. Hopefully some day it will just be built into the operating system and we will have a nice 1 billion machine peer to peer share.
On Monday night, we were all feeling a bit fried and, well, we had a few beers and kicked back. Now, a bunch of hard core geeks, in an MTC loaded with a few million dollars worth of hardware and a Surface machine can get a little interesting. And lucky for us, one of the leading Surface experts around, Russ Williams was in the house. After wondering how to turn the Surface machine on for about 20 minutes, we found him and he proceeded to show us the latest goodies on Surface. Which included an application that had some advanced physics capabilities so could manipulate the effects of attraction and gravity on objects floating around the Surface. This is where the SuperNova chips come in. Russ pulled out a bag of small round chips, about the size of a quarter, that you would put on top of the Surface. One was a SuperNova chip. It essentially represented a massive gravitational pull, so all of the animated objects on the Surface desktop snapped to the exact place where the physical chip was sitting.
You may think we were just messing around, but in fact this was all research. The team that I am working with here was a recent graduate of TechStars. Take Publishing is setting out to change the world of comic books and graphic novel publishing and consumption. They have a comic publishing platform, a storefront and readers for different devices. The Take Publishing team was watching how Russ manipulated the different applications on the Surface and started asking about the gestures and how they work in Windows 7. Russ said, well most of all these gestures do work in Windows 7, and that helped the team immensely in planning how a casual reader would flow through a comic book with a variety of simple gestures.
Now the Take Publishing team, and their consultants, Vertigo ( visual designers and developers extraordinaire ), have been cranking 18 hours a day putting those concepts into functioning code. You can flip through the catalogue of comics that you have downloaded and synced to your reader, and HP TouchSmart PC with 4 points of multi-touch. You can move, pan, page, zoom, and even scratch the comic to interact with it. It's better than a paper comic and in super high resolution full color so you can appreciate the artwork as well as the story. I used to have a huge collection of the Flash and Hulk comics – I would love to have those again on top of this platform. Remember when you went on iTunes and downloaded all those Deep Purple records that you threw away but never really got around to buying the CD ( if you have grey hair like me). Well you are about to do that with comics, when the Take guys are done with this application.
Tomorrow we get to play with the demo. Wait till you see it.
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