The effort of 10 days materializes in a Microsoft Surface demo. And you can see it at MSDN Developer Kino every day during CeBIT.

At sones I am involved in a project that works with a piece of hardware I wanted to work with for about 3 years now: the Microsoft Surface Table.

I was able to play with some tables every now and then but I never had a “business case” which contained a Surface. Now that case just came to us: sones is at the CeBIT fair this year – we were invited by Microsoft Germany to join them and present our cool technology along with theirs.

Since we already had a graph visualisation tool the idea was to bring that tool to Surface and use the platform specific touch controls and gestures.

the VisualGraph application that gave the initial idea

The good news was that it’s easier than thought to develop an application for Surface and all parties are highly committed to the project. The bad news is that we were short on time right from the start: less than 10 days from concept to live presentation isn’t the definition of “comfortable time schedule”. And since we’re currently in the process of development it’s a continueing race.

Thankfully Microsoft is committed to a degree they even made it possible to have two great Surface and WPF ninjas who enable is to get up to speed with the project (thanks to Frank Fischer, Andrea Kohlbauer-Hug, Rainer Nasch and Denis Bauer, you guys rock!).

a Surface simulator

I was able to convice UID to jump in and contribute their designing and user interface knowledge to our little project (thanks to Franz Koller and Cristian Acevedo).

During the process of development I made some pictures which will be used here and there promoting the demonstration. To give you an idea of the progress we made here’s a before and after picture:

We started with a simple port of VisualGraph to the surface table…

…and had something better working and looking at the end of that day.

I think everyone did a great job so far and will continue to do so – a lot work to be done till CeBIT!

Source 1: http://www.sones.com
Source 2: http://www.microsoft.de
Source 3: http://www.uid.com/

Since we are developers we do need tools to note and draw what we think would solve the problems of this planet.

One way to draw a sequence of actions would be a sequence diagram. There are a nbumber of tools to draw them but now I came across a web service that would allow me to write my sequence diagram in a easy textual representation and then it draws the diagram for me. Great stuff!

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram
Source 2: http://websequencediagrams.com/

I am proud to anounce that there’s a video publicly available which shows parts and projects Microsoft Research is working on currently. It’s great to see theses projects, concepts and ideas become publicly available one by one:

“Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, presents “Rethinking Computing,” a look a how software and information technology can help solve the most pressing global challenges we face today. Part of UW’s Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Mundie demonstrates a number of current and future-looking technologies that show how computer science is changing scientific exploration and discovery in exciting ways. He discusses the role of new science in solving the global energy crisis, and answer questions from the audience.”

Source: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=30363&fID=6021

After a very very long wait finally Forza 3 arrived! The first panoramic view of a 1-series BMW in Forza 3:

Finally a game where I can drive that car!

Source: http://www.forzaclans.com

If you – like us – need a picture of a shiny product box of a soon-to-be-released product for your presentation you may want to consider buying several tools to create such shots. But you can also just use a small tool and Windows Presentation Foundation.

There’s a great article on CodeProject where a almost everything is pre-set-up for our needs. And everything is written in C# – great stuff!

In action it looks like this:

Source: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/BoxShot.aspx?display=Print

This is just beautiful:

Hey it’s great to see that Apple thinks some of the ideas of the new Windows 7 UI (like the new Task Bar). With iTunes 9 you get things like this:

Normally I am using a notebook and a 24” Widescreen TFT as a Dual-Monitor solution. In fact I am mostly using the 24” TFT for work and the notebook 14” TFT for all the things that don’t need to be in focus right now like Instant Messengers.

Now in those few cases when a video needs to be played I want it on the main monitor but I want it to take as little of space as possible. And I want it On Top of everything else… maybe sometimes I even want to control it’s opacity a bit…

Now there’s this cool tool called “OnTopReplica” – It’s available for free on Codeplex and works out of the box without installation.

After you start it you’ll end with a small glas window where you can right-click to get a menu. You choose a Window which needs to be replaces – for example the YouTube Browser Window. After that you can even control which region of this Window should be displayed. You can resize, move and of course control the opacity of this window.

It’s also great for presentations because it allows you to simply resize any window you like. It will resize it and while it does that the window always is “live” – so everything you’re doing in the original window will be displayed in the replica.

Source: http://ontopreplica.codeplex.com/

Today the new lens for our Canon DSLR arrived – just in time when we need it. Hopefully the polarizing filters will arrive also this week.

Behold the beauty of the first picture! *narf*… Awwww

I’ve seen the launch of PopFly two years ago. And now I am going to see the landing

“Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, your access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.”

Now somebody please tell the world that the code of popfly will be released in some way so that other people can learn and work with it. That would be great. Oh if we just wouldn’t have that many lawyers on this planet.

Source 1: http://popflyteam.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!51018025071FD37F!336.entry
Source 2: http://www.popfly.com/

Watching the daily dose of news television could become the start of a rant.

Found in the german “heute journal” show from the 14th of May 2009. So guys – 526 is bigger than 527 at last!

So it’s been some days with the new Mediacenter Setup. And all I can say is: Oh boy that is some serious cool setup. I wouldn’t want to chance anything beside adding a new Sound System (>5.1 FTW!).

The Display itself is thinner than thought:

I strongly recommend the Mac + Plex + Full HD display setup. Even if you don’t get any HD content from your cable provider you can live-stream or download HD content through the different provider plugins inside Plex. The plugin infrastructure with the built-in “App Store” is just great.

Since Plex is a XBMC based Mediacenter software you have tons of information scrapers regarding series and movies. So you’re eventually huge collection gets indexed and presented in a way you would not get from any other Mediacenter. You get pictures, movie posters, descriptions and many more just by automatic indexing your collection.

MST3k FTW!

Needless to say that HD content is something different. I only had some HD content on normal computer displays in the last years – having it now huge and sharp is different – better.

BTW: It’s on the floor right now because my wife couldn’t decide until now which tv-stand would suffice…

Source 1: http://av.samsung.de/produkte/detail2_main.aspx?guid=b6c1306c-f57d-4ce7-a944-56cc7346ed2e
Source 2: http://www.apple.com/macmini/
Source 3: http://plexapp.com/

Finally we got a TV set. Since Samsung announced new LED based sets we ordered a 46 inch tv. It was delivered today (yesterday the Mac mini which will drive the mediacenter arrived). I only had a short test-run scanning for cable stations… so more of that in the following days – especially more of the mediacenter configuration.

Source: Samsung UE46B6000

Finally after more than two months of hard work of our marketing department the new sones.de website is online. Hurray! It looks better and it’s way more informative than the old one was.

What if someone sends you six 17 inch Widescreen TFT displays with 1440×900 each. What would you do?

Not many new toys come with this: A justification to buy even more shiny new toys. In this case the 450d was the cause to buy a tripod + head.

It’s dark in here but I wanted to make a picture of it:

Finally a DSLR landed at our premises: the Canon EOS 450D is as of now in our toy park – perfectly timed for the holidays and christmas.

(made with the “old” SX100 IS)

I got these two quite old Windows Mobile Professional phones (with touchscreen and everything) and beside the fact that they are my phones I am using them just to display my calendar entries on my desk. Now I thought it would be a great thing if those two QVGA devices would display personal pictures in a slideshow.

And it would be even better if they would get their pictures from the internet. And even better if there would be an application that would allow me or my wife to upload/delete pictures from the slideshow playing on all devices.

Thought said, and done. I did a little afterwork project today, taking me approx. 3 hours with everything from scratch.

So I made these parts:

1. a webservice to upload, delete and retrieve the pictures

   This really is just a webservice very similar to the one I used in my DropBox application. It’s hosted on one of my machines and makes the pictures also available to the mobile clients.

2. an upload tool to upload, delete the pictures comfortably

   I took the DropBox Application and customized it – it now resizes the pictures automatically before uploading and it can display a preview in the file browser.

   

   

3. a small application running on my phones that displays this pictures using the webservice

   This one was made from scratch and consumes the webservice from above. It asks for the next picture URL, downloads this picture and displays it… and so on.

   

Since it’s already up and running and looking great on my desk I wanted to share it with you. Don’t expect everything to work out-of-the-box but it’s a start for everyone who wants to have something like this. Oh – of course your windows mobile device needs to have internet access…

So as usual here’s the sourcecode of the whole package for your pleasure. Use it where ever and in what ever whay you want as long as you’re crediting.

PhotoFrame.zip (639,87 KB)

P.S: There’s a fun fact I did not know: I accidently double-clicked the windows mobile application on my Vista machine and guess what: It just runs! Yes, manage Windows Mobile Application running natively on Windows Vista:

Source 1: PhotoFrame.zip (639,87 KB)
Source 2: DropBox

If you ever asked yourself how many visualization methods are there und how do they look like you may want to take a look at this cool website:

Source: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Turns out that a new snapshot (unofficial) version of my favourite DVD to iPod Converter is available. With the new version came new features like the one that allows me now to convert almost anything to wonderful iPod compatible movie files.

“HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.”

I tried anything in my library, including some matroska movie files. Just everything worked – amazing!

Source: http://handbrake.fr/?article=snapshot

And another great software release of last week was the new GIMP version. GIMP is a free open-source image manipulation program that offers 99% of the functionality you’ll ever need.

P.S.: This is my wife’s eye…

Source: http://www.gimp.org

Today I received a mysterious box with a SONY HDR-SR12E camera in it. I was expecting a camera but not one in HD (1080i) and with a humongous hard disk (120GB).

Since it’s for several projects I am working on so stay tuned for HD stuff. Thank god there’s soapbox and vimeo.

Oh that is just a fantastic idea. One of the hobbies of my wife is photography and this cup would be just great as a christmas present:

Unfortunatly it’s not in production…just a concept.

Source: zedomax

In unserer kleinen Firma sind wir zur Zeit auch auf der Suche nach einem brauchbaren Content Management System und da kommt natürlich so ein Artikel wie gerufen: Eine Übersicht über einige der großen CMSe. Im moment favorisiert der Verantwortliche für die Webseite das Typo3 – das hab ich dann auch mal per VM zur Verfügung gestellt – aber wirklich überzeugt hat es zumindest mich nicht – nungut, ich muss damit ja auch nicht klar kommen.

“Wenigstens bin ich nicht der einzige! Und neu ist meine Problematik auch nicht: Bereits Anfang 2004 war der große Dave Shea auf der Suche nach einem geeigneten CMS, das seine (wirklich nicht besonders exotischen) Forderungen erfüllt. So ähnlich fühle ich mich auch gerade, jedoch fast 5 Jahre später. Und wie es scheint, hat sich gar nicht soviel verändert ”

Source: http://praegnanz.de/weblog/subjektiver-cms-einkaufsfuehrer

There was the Digital Image Suite and several other tools like Hugin and Cool360 which I used over the last years to create panoramic images. Now there’s a new tool available in 32 and 64 bit (for really really huge images!) from Microsoft Research. It’s free at this point and if you’re on Windows it’s definitely worth the try.

“Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.”

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html

Uhh… I ususally don’t do that stuff but in this case I just was curious how it would work for me. Quite well I think:

Source: http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77

Nach ein paar Wochen ist es nun Zeit für eine weitere Version des FFN Switchers. Dank der mühevollen Tests vieler fleissiger Helfer des Freien Funknetzes gibt es eine bugfreiere Version inklusive neuer GUI.

Den Sourcecode und alles zugehörige gibt es wie immer auf dem Subversion Server.

Download: FFN Switcher Release 3

Source: FFN Switcher Release 3

Steffi and I made our own version of earth some years ago using 3D Studio and NASA Images – we even made an animation. But this guy does a way better job – creating a photorealistic earth:

“For some time now, I’ve been studying how to build Earth in Blender. I’ve read quite a few tutorials, studied NASA’s Blue Marble images, and received critique from other Blender enthusiasts. I now have some satisfactory results, which I’d be happy to share.

I’ve put together a 21-page tutorial which explains how I achieved my Earth renders. I know there are already a lot of Earth tutorials out there – but none that I found helped me get quite the effect that I wanted. My tutorial combines what I gleaned from all the other tutorials, with what I learned on my own through hours of experimenting. I’m sure it’s not perfect – but I think it will be helpful for anyone interested in the subject.

The tutorial focuses on three different models of Earth – a photographic-style Earth, a Blue-Marble-style Earth, and a night Earth. It demonstrates how to render details such as proper specular shading and ray-traced cloud shadows.”

There’s a free pdf tutorial available that shows how to create these 3D renderings with blender.

Source 1: http://chamberlinproductions.110mb.com/mappedearth.html
Source 2: “what’s the size of the earth compared to”
Source 3: http://web.olp.net/wildernesslodge/Earth%20Tutorial.pdf

A new version of the great XAMLpadX is available. It’s an editor with many features you want to have in Visual Studio and Blend but you don’t get them.

Source: XamlPadX 4.0

As you may or may not know I am working on a gateway tool for citizen band radio. For this tool I was asked if it would be possible to build a tone detection, maybe more, into my software. And on the way of finding out how to accomplish this I stumbles across several very interesting things.

Like this peakmeter control which uses a software digital signal processing or a software dsp library – everything written entirely in managed code (C#) and both open source. Both examples show that you can use digital signal processing for audio and image content… and for more.

The peakmeter control:

“DSP processing is very interesting subject to learn and work with. This block receives digital samples from the source. It approximates the original waveform and finds its peak magnitudes.
Since I would not be able to go in details about how FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) works in this article, I recommend the interested reader to visit some of the links in the reference section to increase his/her knowledge about this process.”

The software DSP library:

“A C# open source library that provides fully featured (1) single and double precision complex number data types, (2) complex number math library, (3) 1D, 2D and 3D complex and real symmetric fast Fourier transforms, and (4) highly accurate statistical routines. The library is optimized for both speed and numerical accuracy. The reason that this library is called a “Digital Signal Processing” library is because complex numbers, FFTs and statistical functions form the basis of any DSP library — although it is the hope that this library will continue to evolve to a more full fledged DSP library.”

Source 1: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/PeakMeterCS.aspx
Source 2: http://www.exocortex.org/dsp/

…if you do have a decent printer and if you haven’t got any graph paper – you could print it yourself.

thx to Kristian.

Source: http://www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/plain/

If you searching a tool for Windows, Linux, OSX and your windows mobile device…you may want to take a look at this:

“SpaceTime 3.0 by SpaceTime Mathematics is a revolution in mathematics software with 2D, 3D, and time graphing with MobileCAS® for algebra and calculus. With features only available in Mathematica and MATLAB, SpaceTime is the most powerful cross-platform mathematics software ever developed for computers and mobile devices.“

Source: http://www.spacetime.us/

“Bakumatsu were the final years of the Edo period in Japan. It was a turning point in Japanese history as it was the end of the period of isolation in Japan. The feudal way of governing was coming to an end, and the start of the Meiji government, which would later take Japan to the world power status.”

This is a very cool picture effect free to use which turns this:

into this:

Source: http://labs.wanokoto.jp/olds

This is a very impressive overview of new user interface ideas. It’s a fact that we need new userinterfaces for all kinds of use cases – and as it turns out there are unbelievable cool things going on in the UI research.

“Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.

And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.”

Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/17/10-futuristic-user-interfaces/

Photosynth is publicly available and it’s time to give it a try and play with the technology. Before starting you should be aware of some facts about the public photosynth technology-preview:

1. all synths are uploaded and only available online (broadband needed)
2. all synths are public, everyone can access them
3. the synther tool runs only on Windows
4. you’ll need a Live ID

When everything is checked you can go and upload up to 20 Gbytes of image data – my test synth takes up 200 Mbytes of the available space – so you have plenty of space to play with.

To start just install the photosynth application to view – and click “create” on the website. After the obligatory login you immediately can upload your pictures. Give it a name, ssome tags and a license and select your pictures.

Your pictures should show the same scene from different perspectives – photosynth is all about matching perspectives. After clicking on “Synth” the process starts.

And after a surprisingly short period of time your synth is done. Click on “View Synth” and you’re taken back to the website and you can browse your synth. That’s it – easy!

Source 1: my first photosynth
Source 2: Photosynth is open for the public
Source 3: create a synth

Believe it or not – it’s been 2 years since I first wrote about Photosynth technology. Today Microsoft made it available to the public. It’s not a tool (yet) – like I wanted – right now but it’s built into this website – so you have to upload your pictures, they are processed and then you can browse on this website… well it’s a start for a really great technology.

“We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.”

It’s not going to work on anything different than Windows. So stick to the movies if you’re on anything else. But as far as I know it’ll run o

Source 1: http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx
Source 2: http://www.schrankmonster.de/PermaLink,guid,fdc3d1fb-4966-418b-83ea-1e0c12aae833.aspx

There’s a new free tool available from officelabs:

“pptPlex is a plug-in that explores an alternate method for presenting a PowerPoint slide deck. Using pptPlex, you can present your slides as a tour through a zoomable canvas instead of a series of linear slides.”

Source: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

…almost everything else. You’ll have to print it, fold it, glue it… and then it’ll eventually become:

“WALL-E Paper Model. WALL -E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) is programmed to clean up the planet, one trash cube at a time. However, after 700 years he’s developed one little glitch, a personality. He’s extremly curious, highly inquisitive and a little lonely.

• Solar Powered Regeneration Unit
• Size 33 All Terain Modular Treads
• Twin Hydraulic Arm Shovels
• Digital Audio Recording/Playback Module
• Low Convergence Head Mounted Laser”

Source: http://paper-replika.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=54&Itemid=30

Google Streetview is bad. It’s just unbelievable what you can see and since the StreetView Vans are currently here in germany I don’t think I want to get captured…

In this case they captured…well…:

Source: Google StreetView