A Windows 8 Developer Preview was released several months ago and an updated preview is due to be released any time (word on the street is end of February). When you look at Windows 8, and you consider statistics such as the one in my headline, you can see that things could get interesting when Windows 8 hits the market.
Microsoft officially announced that a new Kinect for Windows device will be released on February 1st along with a commercial license for using the Kinect SDK. This new device shouldn't be seen as simply a toy any more than a computer mouse is a toy.I posted an article today on Codeguru, "Kinect for Windows: A New Interface for Your Apps." In this article, I touch on the licensing, show a bit of code, and more. Using a few lines of code, You'll see how little code is needed to start integrating with a Kinect! Rather than my repeating everything here, take a look at the article! Click now!
At Microsoft Build, Microsoft released a developer preview of Windows 8. There are a variety of pre-beta downloads you can grab today if you want to check out the preview of Windows today. In addition to including the next version of Windows, you also get a chance to see Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 Developer Preview.
Lots of different people have written for Codeguru, Developer.com, and our other sites. It is great to see some of these writers expand their efforts into books and other project.
A larger clickpad could make it possible to use multi-touch without having a multi-touch screen. This embedded video below shows the Synaptics ClickPad experience on Windows 8. In many scenarios, this approach makes a lot more sense than touching the screen itself. For example, I have to stretch to touch my screen. My keyboard, is "at my finger tips!"
I wrote most of this blog entry prior to the news of Steve Job's passing and thus held off posting it. Jobs made a huge impact on the computing industry and his impact will continue to be felt for a long time. His work with Pixar and NeXT computing were amazing and they pale next to what he did with Apple. I remember looking over a coworker's shoulder at a demo of the Next system and thinking it was very cool. That was back in the days when we were also seeing demos of things like new versions of OS/2 and having a different reaction.
