OneNote and Magic Pen

Microsoft seem to be doing something pretty cool here. Tight integration of a custom UI device (the stylus on their latest Surface tablets) with their note-taking app. OneNote.

Obviously I'm sticking with OWL, but this is pretty nice. And you can imagine them taking it a lot further. Extra buttons on the pen. What about a chording-keyboard on a pen? Other apps. accessible through OneNote etc.

Video of Microsoft's Crystal Ball

Multi-touch Missile Command!

On seeing this, perhaps it would be cool to have two players either end of a M$ Surface, firing hundreds of colourful missile trails at each other. Could be kind of beautiful.x

Microsoft's Crystal Ball ?

Microsoft surprise me. They seem to have jumped in with Surface - which may look suspiciously like Multitouch even if they don't credit it in the history - but actually appears to offer something more. Surface puts together a large multi-touch screen (in a table-top) with smart objects interacting via (I suppose) radio and touch.

The example applications in movies on the MS site are about as uninspiring as you can imagine (although pitching to expensive bars and restaurants is probably a good idea in the short-term, so menus and interactive drinks make sense) but you can see that if the hackers are just allowed to get their hands on this there'll be some interesting results.