Windows 7 catching developers' eyes

While we've heard a lot about Windows 7, we haven't heard too much about the software and hardware that will take advantage of the new operating system.

That's starting to change.

This week, touch screen maker N-trig is showing off a variety of third-party software programs that take advantage of the multitouch features of Windows 7. Meanwhile, Microsoft's hardware unit said it is also building support for Windows 7's new taskbar and thumbnail previews into its line of keyboards and mice.

Microsoft said beta versions of the drivers for its products are available now, with final versions set for release at the end of next month.

On the software front, N-trig is showing off a number of multitouch Windows 7 applications at a display conference in San Antonio this week. Microsoft has also announced its own package of free touch programs for Windows 7, including three casual games and three programs ported over from Microsoft's Surface tabletop computer.

"There's lots of stuff going on," N-trig Vice President Lenny Engelhardt said in a telephone interview. Among the applications N-trig is showing is a photo browser from FingerTapps and a multitouch 3-D design program from SpaceClaim. Corel also said it will have multi-touch enabled programs later this year, but didn't give specifics.

"Windows 7 and Windows Touch are giving Corel's software designers an incredible opportunity to enhance how consumers experience creative software," executive vice president Joe Roberts said in a statement.

Getting compelling software is key to transforming multitouch from a curiosity into something that consumers are willing to pay for. Adding a touch screen adds on the order of $100 or more to the cost of a system, depending on screen size.

"In this current economic climate, to get people to buy new hardware is going to take some real nice, compelling applications," Engelhardt said.

HP and Dell have started shipping multitouch machines ahead of Windows 7, but Engelhardt said he expects all the major hardware and software makers to support touch at some level once the new operating system hits the market in October.

"None of these guys wants to be left out," Engelhardt said.

Although touch will remain a small part of the total PC market, Engelhardt said he sees it expanding from where it is today, with a few desktop models as well as a handful of convertible tablet laptops.

"A lot of those notebooks are going to be larger than what you have seen," he said. "There will be computers with 14 and 17 inch screens."

Multi-touch will also reach the Netbook sector, though that market is harder to predict, he said.

Engelhardt said that multitouch has the opportunity to do the same thing for Windows PCs that the iPhone did for mobile phones--take a task that everyone was already doing and make it fun.

A video from N-trig shows some other possibilities for where touch can go in Windows 7. In the video (embedded below), N-trig shows a number of gaming scenarios, including the ability to play Guitar Hero using several fingers touching the screen. Although the makers of Guitar Hero haven't announced such plans, Engelhardt said that the option is entirely technically feasible, with his engineering team having created a working demo.

Engelhardt said that, thus far, the consumer area appears to be ahead of the enterprise software market, but said that, over time, he expects more touch-enabled business applications as well.

For its part, Microsoft said it is happy with the level of touch support it is seeing from developers.

"We are pleased to see how quickly our partners are developing multi-touch applications on Windows 7," principal group program manager Ian LeGrow said in a statement.

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Norton can't block Bing porn

As follow up to my post from Tuesday about the ability for someone to view porn from within Bing, I just heard from a Symantec spokesperson that the company's Internet monitoring and filtering service, OnlineFamily.Norton, can't yet prevent Bling users from searching sexually explicit terms for websites or videos. The company plans to add Bing to its protected search engines in the next release. Other major search engines, including Google, are covered by the software's SafeSearch feature.

In the mean time, Symantec recommends that parents use OnlineFamily.Norton to block access to all of Bing -- which isn't particularly good for Microsoft.

OnlineFamily is a free Windows and Mac application that can be used to block sites and monitor a child's online behavior. Unlike some Internet monitoring programs, it doesn't operate in stealth mode so, if parents use that feature, kids know that they're web activities are being watched.

Because Bing plays videos within its own site and doesn't require the user to click through, checking the browser history or using monitoring programs like OnlineFamily, would only show that they visited Bing.com, not what videos they watched from within the site.

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Cloud services to get super charged

When it comes to backing up, it's probably safest and most convenient to use a cloud storage service where you store data at remote location via the Internet. However, there's a big obstacle: bandwidth. With most existing broadband services, it can take a couple of hours to upload a few gigabyte of information.

This might change in the near future.

Asankya, a network service company, announced Wednesday that it has improved its parallel networking technology to deliver up to 40 times throughput improvement for Internet-based applications. This, if true, would solve the biggest challenge that hinders the growth and global scale of cloud- and SaaS-based services.

Asankya's new networking technology is a set of patented parallel networking algorithms that significantly increase bi-directional Internet Protocol performance and accelerate encrypted traffic delivery for both ICP- and UDP-based applications. It aggregates throughput across the Internet by using multiple available pathways and removes duplicate packet transmission. The breakthrough algorithms were first funded through grants by the National Science Foundation.

The technology has been deployed by the U.S. government for real-time, interactive video applications delivered over wired and wireless IP networks. It now has been commercialized that means soon you will be able to take advantage of it.

This is exciting news as cloud computing has been on the raise in the last few years. According to the research firm IDC, the cloud computing industry is going to be a $42 billion business by 2012.

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WWDC banners are up: Let the guessing game begin

The WWDC banner hanging inside Moscone Center in San Francisco.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Apple has started decorating San Francisco's Moscone Center in anticipation of the Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens Monday morning.

And as has become tradition, when the banners go up, the seemingly round-the-clock guessing game of what Apple will announce intensifies. This year, the banners say "WWDC: One year later. Light-years ahead." Now the objective for many is parsing that phrase and poring over every image on the banner to extract some sort of meaning.

The phrase itself, plus all the application icons on the banners, indicate the centerpiece of the conference will be the App Store and the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0. Apple said as much in its announcement of the conference keynote address, which is on Monday at 10 a.m. PDT. We know there will be discussion of the updated mobile operating system as well as more details on OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard. And of course, there have been previous indications that a new iPhone is on the way.

The iPhone Blog points out that the App Store did launch in July, not in early June at WWDC last year, so it hasn'ttechnically been "one year later." Gizmodo thinks "light-years ahead" is a snarky reference to the jumble of competing smartphones debuting soon--particularly the Palm Pre, which launches two days before WWDC opens.

TUAW took out its copy editor's pen, noting that "a year is a measure of time while a light year is a measure of distance." Of course, anyone who remembers "Think Different" knows Apple slogans haven't always been bound by the traditional rules of grammar.

In any case, all the mysteries will be solved by the end of Monday's keynote speech, which we'll be live-blogging. Until then, check out the gallery of photos below that we snapped Wednesday morning.

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Twitter co-founder: We'll have made it when you shut up about us

NEW YORK--Twitter executive Jack Dorsey says he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company he co-founded.

"I think Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity," said Dorsey, who was on a "Future of Media" panel here Wednesday as part of Internet Week New York. "It fades into the background, something that's just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device. So, e-mail, SMS, phone. That's where we want to be."

From Jack Dorsey's Twitter feed.

(Credit: Twitter)

For those who stepped in late, Twitter blew up from a cult following of geeks and news junkies into a full-out phenomenon earlier this year, when actor Ashton Kutcher kicked off a challenge with CNN to be the first account to hit one million followers and Oprah Winfrey gave Twitter her seal of approval on the air.

But Dorsey, who served as the company's CEO until he stepped down last October (retaining his chairman post), did say he isn't tired of people asking him what Twitter's business model will ultimately be--a persistent nag among pundits who are skeptical of how fast it's risen without a clear way of making money. He said that the reason why Twitter hasn't come up with a business model yet is because the company needed to let users and developers shape it first.

"I like that question because it speaks to how Twitter came to be," Dorsey said. Many features of Twitter were "behavior(s) that we did not invent. That was usage that we saw, that we made easier. The hash tags that you're seeing today, same thing. The search engine was something that was outside the company."

It's sort of a Catch-22, if Dorsey is to be believed: Had Twitter rushed in with a moneymaking strategy early on, it could have hampered the company's growth. "We took VC money so that we can be patient in that endeavor, and we're going to be patient, we're going to do it right," he insisted. "We're not going to put something on top of it that doesn't fit."

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Can lasers save the incandescent light bulb?

A new breakthrough this week may change the attitude that the incandescent light bulb has had it's day.

Compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) have unquestionably gained popularity for their energy efficiency when compared to the traditional incandescent light bulb. Millions of people around the world have been encouraged bypoliticians, governments, energy utilities, and even light bulb companies themselves to phase out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of CFLs (or even LEDs) to save electricity in the home.

But now researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have found a way to make an incandescent light bulb more efficient.

Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester.

(Credit: University of Rochester)

A group led by Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, has been testing the effects of ultra-fast lasers on the properties of metals and decided to try a tungsten filament (the tiny wire you see in the average light bulb).

The group blasted the tungsten filament with an ultra-fast short-pulse laser for a femtosecond. A femtosecond is to a second "what a second is to about 32 million years," according to the researchers.

The blast changed the properties of the surface metal on the filament so that it formed nanostructures and microstructures that enabled it to shine significantly more brightly while still using the same amount of electricity.

"We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb's energy usage," Guo said in a statement.

The change in the filament has enabled the incandescent light bulb to shine as bright as an average 100-watt bulb, but consume less electricity than the average 60-watt bulb.

Full details of the project, which was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, will be published in the next issue of "Physical Review Letters."

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Audio Slideshow: Livermore Labs unveils super laser

LIVERMORE, Calif.--The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a blast--literally.

I was lucky enough to join the few thousand people who were allowed Saturday to tour the world's largest laser system, which is located in this bucolic valley about an hour's drive from San Francisco.

The $3.5 billion facility was dedicated Friday by a host of dignitaries, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But family members and friends of lab employees were allowed to tour the NIF on Saturday, many of whom started lining up early and waited more than an hour in a serpentine, Disneyland-like line to get into the 10-story facility.

The NIF sports 192 lasers whose beams start out about the size of a 1-gallon gas can and are then filtered and amplified through optics and mirrors and simultaneously fired at a small beryllium sphere filled with hydrogen isotopes. The hydrogen atoms then fuse into helium, releasing thermonuclear energy equivalent to temperatures at the core of stars, or about 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

The lab said that in about three billionths of a second, the lasers create a pulse of ultraviolet light energy of 1.8 million joules. At its peak, it generates 500 trillion watts, roughly 1,000 times the electricity produced by the U.S. power grid.

The tour took us through the entire apparatus, including a peek at the firing target chamber at the system's core.

Unfortunately, the taking of individual photographs was verboten. Cameras and cell phones were prohibited from the grounds, and I wasn't going to even think about messing with the rules. Anyone who has ever been near this place knows its reputation for security--ask Martin Sheen; he is intimately familiar with the lab's security.

However, my colleague James Martin attended the dedication and took the photographs featured in the audio slideshow below.

During my tour, I overheard a gentleman tell his son that this is the kind of place Hollywood comes to get its ideas. Despite comparisons to something you might expect to find at the core of the Death Star and comments about phase congigate target tracking systems, this mega-tool has generated a lot less fear and paranoia than the Large Hadron Collider.

While much of the NIF attention is focused on expanding the nature of the universe and the origin of stars, the stated primary mission is keeping tabs on the country's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The NIF is also expected to create clean energy based on the heavy isotopes of hydrogen, a virtually inexhaustible resource on Earth. If it succeeds, the lab expects to be able to take one gallon of seawater and create the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline.________________________________________________________________