Having trouble reading the news on your Samsung Galaxy while juggling a coffee cup? If you must use your tablet with only one hand, this demo shows users using only their eyes to interact with their tablets.
Plus Microsoft is looking for a few good ideas for Surface apps.
Who’s got the right strategy for uniting content across desktop and mobile devices? (And who’s utterly failing?)
:excerptstart Microsoft has unveiled Windows 8, redesigned to function on a variety of mobile and desktop platforms and compete with Android and iOS. There are a couple of things conspicuously absent.
“Earlier this morning, at the Build Windows conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft made it patently clear that ‘To the cloud!’ is not merely a throwaway phrase: it is the entire future of the company. Every single one of Microsoft’s services, platforms, and form factors will now begin its hasty, leave-no-prisoners-behind transition to the always-on, internet-connected cloud.” netbuzz pointed out that even the famous Blue Screen of Death will get a new look. “Lastly mikejuk writes: While everyone else is looking at the surface detail of Windows 8 there are some deep changes going on. Perhaps the biggest is that Metro now provides an alternative environment that doesn’t use the age old Win32 API. This means no more overlapping windows — yes Metro really does take the windows out of Windows.”
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/14/2219226/Windows-8-Roundup
Meanwhile, prospects for Flash are looking increasingly less flashy.
“The Microsoft Windows Engineering Team has announced that the Metro interface web browser in Windows 8 will not support plug-ins — Adobe Flash included. Users will still be able to open a traditional browser interface to make use of legacy sites that rely upon plug-ins. This news follows a recent blog post by the Internet Explorer 10 team pushing the use of HTML5 video as a replacement to Flash video. With Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and other major players already backing HTML5 — is Adobe Flash finally dead?”http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/09/15/1257249/Windows-8-Wont-Support-Plug-Ins-the-End-of-Flash
JavaScript’s seemingly inexorable march toward becoming the universal language of new media recently opened a new beachhead on the Web server. With an effusion of excitement about, and profusion of frameworks for, using JavaScript for such server-side tasks as accessing databases, the homely script that started out as a love child of Netscape and Internet Explorer could end up displacing such respected languages as PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green didn’t help matters during a demo of Windows 8, when she called HTML5 / JavaScript “our new developer platform“–freaking out legions of developers who’ve diligently learned Microsoft-only platforms from Visual Basic to C#. Will Microsoft say nyet to .NET?