Surface glitches
We’ve got the surface for a while now and have written our first real application. It is based on BruTile and allows you to show various maps, zoom and pan. We created a short movie to show it:
Working Microsoft Surface
Happy as we were with our new Surface we forgot the basic rule of Windows related problems; reboot if in trouble.
We spend quite some time calibrating, recalibrating and reading documentation from the invite only Microsoft site without any effect. In the end Vista asked us to install an update and to reboot the Surface. When it was rebooted we ran the ‘Surface Shell’ application from the Desktop and suddenly it worked!!
The Surface, or at least our version, comes with a set of code examples. We tried several to see how well it works and found out that especially the Grand Piano demo is a crowd drawer (mainly due to the sound probably). The Piano is a limited set of piano keys in perspective view. ‘Pressing’ a key results in a tone, just like a real piano 
Playing piano on a Surface
Microsoft Surface
Today the Microsoft Surface arrived, finally. They arrived in big boxes suggesting big tables, but alas they are actually pretty small. Microsoft envisages them as lounge table, as such they are very low, too low to sit comfortably on a normal chair. Being used to the Circle12 DiamondTouch, the Surface is both small and heavy. Weighing about 80kg it is difficult to move it and the actual display area is about half the size of the DiamondTouch.
We were supposed to have two normal and one developer edition but it wasn’t very clear which one was which so we picked one and carried it to our office. This turned out to quite tricky, this thing is heavy and doesn’t have any clear handles. In the end we carried it by holding the projection-surface …
Once setup we had to fiddle a bit to get the powercable connected and find the proper (two) powerswitches. Once it booted it prompted us an EULA we had to accept. However the Surface is designed to be a standalone machine completely controlled by touch but before the touch was working we had to accept the EULA, which was only accessible by touch … hm
You need to accept to start touch, and you need touch to accept
Showing private data on a public touch table
Designing interfaces for multi-touch tabletop computers;
Basic animation of hiding a card from view