Kinect for Windows SDK beta Released

As it was earlier announced Microsoft Research had released the Kinect for Windows SDK last week. According to the Microsoft Research, “The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.”

“The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.”

The most interesting thing is the skeletal tracking API. The demonstrated Shape Game using this API is pretty awesome. Now I just need to get hold of a Kinect sensor.

Shape Game Demo

If you have a Kinect sensor you can download the SDK from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx

More information is available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

[Posted using Windows Live Writer 2011 on Windows 7 64bit]

Windows 7 RC goes public.

Follow up to the post [Drum Roll…] Here Comes Windows 7…

:-)

Microsoft has released the RC of Windows 7 which is the next version of Windows OS family to the public today. Furthermore Microsoft have removed the limitation of number of available copies under the RC program and downloads will be available trough June.

For more details,

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

[Posted using Windows Live Writer on Windows 7 Beta]

[Drum Roll…] Here Comes Windows 7…

:-)

On January 9th Microsoft has released Beta version of it’s next version of Windows operating system, Windows 7(formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna). In fact I did received the news a bit later and was lucky to download the ISO within 2~3 hours thanks to the high-speed link in LEARN ;-) and since the rush hour was gone…

Well the installation experience was similar to the Vista installation. (And of course ended up with around 8GB used for base OS installation just like in Vista)

New Features in Windows 7 (Build 7000)

A new feature in the productivity is the jump lists in frequently used programs. In this way it is easy to jump into the most recently open document straight away in a single click from the start menu.

Now it’s much easy to organize the windows by just a mouse gesture. (I suppose it would be much more initiative and fun on a touch sensitive screen as Windows 7 is multi touch enabled) Just drag your window to the top edge of the screen to maximize, drag down to restore, drag to the side corner to fill that half and drag from the bottom to maximize vertically.

The taskbar is also improved. Now it’s height is increased and only the window icon is displayed making it is possible to display more groups/programs opened. The It is also possible to temporally highlight a hidden window by hovering the mouse pointer over a full screen thumbnails in taskbar. This works for the minimized windows as well.

Note: It seems that the screen casts recorded with Windows Media Encoder 9 has poor quality though the recording was really easy.

It also seems the Sinhala Unicode works straight out of the box. (Of course Vista had only minor issues if there was any)

There are more features with the Windows 7. for more information you may read, What's new in Windows 7: Faster & easier

And this is my first experience with the Windows Live Writer it seems lot more easy and fun blogging with it. (In fact I prefer desktop applications to web applications. B-) ) Let’s see whether it works correctly with my blogger account.