Windows 7 - Now with less UAC nagging

by theRobotGeek 22. January 2009 21:37
You may be one of the easy going people who doesn't mind the UAC being turned on in Vista and nagging you when you're trying to do most anything on your machine.  All the power to you and you must be a saint.  I, however, immediately turn off UAC because it annoys the hell out of me.  But now Windows 7 beta has the new feature for selecting the nag level of UAC. After a few days of running Win 7, I've had UAC set to the lowest setting and only a couple of UAC messages have popped up.  I believe that I may be able to live with this setting.  I understand the idea behind UAC and there certainly is some usefulness for the feature.  So for now, I will try using Win 7 with UAC actually turned on and see how it works.  So far, so good.

Multi-Touch Support

by theRobotGeek 17. January 2009 23:04
Windows 7 beta does not immediately give the user multi-touch demos which is what I was hoping for.  So I loaded up Visual Studio 2008 and started looking for examples out there for multi-touch support.  A few links that I've found so far are below.  Some have source code and some of them also have hardware as well. WPF Multi-Touch Framework Sparse UI - Multi-Touch API Cubit TouchKit - Okay this is just cool cuz they give you schematics and source code for your own hardware/software project Johnny Chung - Wiimote tracking your fingers Ken Moore Design - cool projects

Windows 7 Beta

by theRobotGeek 16. January 2009 22:30
I got Windows 7 beta and decided to try loading it onto a virtual machine.  I've been using VM Workstation which has been an excellent product for creating virtual machines for other operating systems.  However, when I tried installing Windows 7 beta x86 into a VM, the install locked up and I couldn't get it to continue.  Don't know what I'm doing wrong.  Now that my laptop is back from repair at HP, I decided to load Win 7 onto my HP TouchSmart panel.  Backed up the whole machine to my Win Home Server, wiped it clean and loaded Win 7 beta x64 directly onto the TouchSmart.  It worked like a charm.  No problems with the install.  After the install, Win 7 booted right up and downloaded updates.  I'm mostly interested in seeing what I can do with multi-touch support on the TouchSmart.  I've got Visual Studio 2008 loading right now.  I read online that it is possible to create multi-touch apps using .NET 3.5 sp1.  It isn't the full support that will be in WPF 4.0.  I will post my results as soon as I get something working.