Hasta La Gadget!

Check out this fantastic timelapse of Microsoft’s original headquarters being built. Back in 1985, when planners plotted out the rising company’s campus, Microsoft figured it’d need 88 acres of land in a forest near a one-stoplight suburb of Seattle called Redmond. The first office complex was a total of four star-shaped buildings you see in the video, built over the course of 7 months. Now, its 125-building campus sprawls over 500 acres—a city unto itself. [Microsoft] More »

Kinect for Windows will arrive in style to China and other new markets starting October 8th, sporting a brand new SDK. The new developer kit will add features like color camera settings and extended depth data, as well as more tools and samples like a UI demo based on Kinect‘s so-called human interface guidelines. Chinese users won’t be the only ones waving hello for the first time this fall though, as Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, and Poland have also been added to the list. All told, 38 countries will be able to tinker with the Kinect by the end of the year, and Microsoft envisions an era “where we’ll be able to interact intuitively and naturally” with our computers. Some of Redmond’s userbase may want it to start somewhere else with that quest.

Filed under: Peripherals, Software

Kinect for Windows SDK to add new features, markets originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Sep 2012 05:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has this really great habit of publicly tracking the development of all its products. Windows 8 has been thoroughly documented over at the Building Windows 8 blog, and now Office will have its time to shine over at Office Next. The site will give the engineers and developers toiling away in Redmond an outlet to provide updates, discuss design decisions and offer peeks at the new features being baked in. It won’t be just a place full of bullet lists either, PJ Hough, the VP of program management for the Office Division, promised in his inaugural post that the data and feedback that informs their choices will also be shared — telling you not just what, but why. Is there anything new to share right now? Sadly no, but it probably won’t be long before the pages of Engadget are filled with the minutia of Office 15’s development.

Filed under: Software

Office Next blog is here to answer all your burning questions about the future of spreadsheets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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