Hasta La Gadget!

Is this the answer to the question we posed back in mid-June? Maybe. While we’re still unsure if Hewlett-Packard has a webOS-based tablet in its pipeline, those on-again / off-again Windows 7 rumors may finally be nearing an end. On the homepage of this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference — which kicks off in earnest today in Washington, D.C. — there’s a pane of Windows 7 slates that are on deck for this year. Er, a pane with vendors promising Win7 slates this year. Sure enough, HP’s logo is front and center, right alongside the likes of Sony, Dell, ASUS, Panasonic, Onkyo, Toshiba, MSI, Samsung, Lenovo and Fujitsu. We’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for more, but for now, feel free to let your imaginations run wild. It’s Monday, after all.

Update: During the event’s opening keynote, which was headed by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the bigwig confirmed some of what’s pictured above: Windows 7 slates will be arriving this year. Interestingly, he never mentioned HP by name (despite teasing us gently at CES with an apparent mystery device), but he did note that devices would be available at various price points and in a variety of form factors — “with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc.” We already knew as much from being overwhelmed by prototypes at Computex, but it’s good to get the word straight from Ballmer himself. Now, to see if anyone’s actually interested in buying a desktop OS on a mobile form factor…

Update 2: Seems Ballmer’s drinking his own Kool-Aid in a serious way, and not just on the tablet front. He noted that Microsoft will be giving consumers “a set of Windows-based devices that people will be proud to carry at home and will fit the kinds of scenarios enterprise IT’s trying to make happen with the phone form factor,” and that Microsoft would be “working vigorously” to “drive enterprise IT and consumers.” Furthermore, Steve affirmed that the tablet sector is “terribly important” for his company, and that it’s “hardcore about this.” He didn’t shy away from calling the range of Windows 7-based tablets coming out “over the next several months” ones that would be “quite impressive,” but honestly — what else would you expect him to say?

Windows 7-based HP Slate referenced at WPC 2010, Ballmer says ‘hardcore’ tablet push coming originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Twitter [simchabe]  |  WPC 2010  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on June 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

Graphics can really add a lot to any presentation, and can help your audience connect with what’s being presented.  One of the new features in Microsoft Office 2007 helps you do this.  SmartArt can be found in Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Outlook 2007, and is used for creating classy diagrams for projects and presentations.

While the SmartArt graphics are included in four different Office 2007 applications, I have found that it’s especially helpful in PowerPoint 2007 where you can bring the graphics to life with animation – something you can’t do in the other apps.

It’s a really simple process that I’ll break down into just a few steps:

• The first thing you’ll want to do is open up PowerPoint 2007.  From there you’ll need to find the SmartArt.  Click on the “Insert” tab at the top, and “smart art” will be one of the options in the illustrations section.
  
• Click on SmartArt to view all of your options.

There’s a variety of different SmartArt choices, and it’s divided into several different categories. Or, you can just view them all at once. Categories include list, process, cycle, hierarchy, relationship, matrix, and pyramid. If you have a reason to be using PowerPoint in the first place, chances are you’ll have some reason to use some of the SmartArt graphics options within your presentation.

Steps continued:

• Once you’ve selected the SmartArt graphic that you’d like to worth with, go to the animations tab and select the animation that you want. The image below shows the list of choices. There are quite a few, so it make take you some time to decide which one is right for your presentation.

  

• After you’ve selected your animation that will be applied to your SmartArt, all that’s left is to view the finished product! The video below shows what the animation looks like in action.

If by chance you decide that you don’t want the animation included anymore, all you have to do is go back to the animations tab, and in the “animate” section click on the drop-down list and select “no animation.” This will remove the animation from your graphic.

It’s a very simple process, but one that will really add a lot to the graphics in your PowerPoint 2007 presentation.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review for Sunday’s SummaryMicrosoft Office 2007 Goes ArtisticCyberNotes: Enable Presentation Mode in PowerPointYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryGmail Now Has Integrated PowerPoint Viewer

In a magic trick that only geeks can pull off, researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there.

Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.

The project, called “Mouseless,” uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands.

“Like many other projects in the past, including the Nintendo Power Glove and the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, this attempts to see how we can use new technology to control old technology,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who hasn’t worked directly on the project. “It’s just an intermediate step to where we want to be.”

Though new user interfaces such as touchscreens and voice recognition systems have become popular, the two-button mouse still reigns among computer users. Many technology experts think the precision pointing that a cursor offers is extremely difficult to replicate through technologies such as touch and speech.

Last week Intel CTO Justin Rattner said though Intel research labs is working on new touchscreen ideas, the mouse and keyboard combination is unlikely to be replaced in everyday computing for a long time.

In the case of the Mouseless project, the infrared laser and camera are embedded in the computer. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present under their palm, the laser beam lights up the hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera detects this and interprets the movements.

A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximately $20 to build, says Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project.

Mistry is one of the star researchers in the area of creating new user experiences. He previously developed the “Sixth Sense” project, a wearable gestural interface that lets users wave their hands in front of them and interact with maps and other virtual objects — much like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

The Mouseless idea is not as big a breakthrough as Sixth Sense. Though it is fun, it is difficult to see a real-world case for getting rid of hardware while keeping interaction the same. User interfaces are going beyond the point-and-click interaction that the computer mouse demands. And mouse hardware itself is cheap, so there’s not much of a cost saving here.

Check out this fun, partly animated video to see what the Mouseless can do and how it works:

Photo: Mouseless Project

See Also:

• Gestural Computing Breakthrough Turns LCD Into a Big Sensor
• Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen
• Experimental Touchscreen Has Physical Buttons That Can Pop Up, Disappear
• Intel Researchers Turn Counter Tops Into Touchscreens
• Finger Fail: Why Most Touchscreens Miss the Point

We recently got some hands on time playing Microsoft’s new motion based Kinect at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. Just as Chris Kohler reported over at Game|Life, the interface definitely gets you off the couch causes some copious perspiration. And, yes it’s much like the Wii; your butt is no longer anchored to the futon and you’re actively engaging with your video games.  But the lack of any sort of physical controller is extremely odd. (Your body is scanned and tracked as your avatar mimics the movements you make in meatspace.) The self-conscious weirdness of reaching out into the air and gripping a non-existent steering wheel is something I’m not sure folks who spent the better parts of their childhoods gripping a Nintendo controller will readily take to.

And that’s a serious question that Kinect raises: is this active way of interacting with your video games sustainable? The fact that Wii Fit has sold over 22 million copies might seem to be a resounding “yes” but I’m not sure if it’s something that will translate over to games where you’re racing cars or blowing aliens up. Will you want to come home after working for eight hours, fire up Kinect and traipse around Reach, looking for the Covenant? Or would you rather gun down some Elites from the comfort of your couch? Unless it meant exercising Force powers, I think I’d rather have some sofa time.

After playing Kinect Joy Ride and Kinectimals for the better part of a half hour, I was a tad tired physically, but mentally wiped out. At the end of the day I’m not entirely sure if people will want to shell out $60 for a game that demands so much active participation. I can see Kinect becoming a fun little silo of games you play at parties on multiplayer mode. But for solo campaigns, I seriously doubt gamers will be able to maintain steady interest.

You thought about shipping off to Warsaw for the Imagine Cup 2010 finals, didn’t you? ‘Tis a shame you didn’t, because Microsoft is fixing to hand out Windows Phone 7 prototypes to every last finalist at the show (around 400, we’re hearing). The winning team has already received their handsets after receiving a mighty round of applause from developing Beastware, and while it’s impossible to tell from images so far, the phones that they acquired look to be the same as the Samsung device we toyed with back in June. Funny — we reckoned the finalists at a show like this would be in that elusive Kin generation.

Update: Microsoft just pinged us with a clarification. Only the Rockstar Award winners are getting prototype devices today, with the rest of the finalists on a list to receive “a retail Windows Phone 7 device when and where they become available.”

[Image courtesy of artificialignorance]

Samsung’s Windows Phone 7 prototype slipping out to Imagine Cup finalists originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MobileTechWorld  |  Twitter [@imaginecup], [@ai]  | Email this | Comments