Larry Larsen

For many, Natural User Interface (NUI) is a new term, but over the past few years it's become an incredibly important one to Microsoft. If you want to know what we're thinking when it comes to computing in the future, you have to know NUI. So we go right to the source speaking to Principle…

Today at the User Interface Software and Technology Conference, Microsoft will show five new mouse prototypes that combine normal mousing with multitouch controls. Here is a video that gives you a brief introduction to each of the controls. I'll be meeting with this team when they get back,…

Recently the Windows Home Server team announced the beta of their next version of Home Server, codenamed Vail. This release tightens up the way you interact with Home Server. Jonas Svensson, Program Manager on Home Server Vail stopped by to show us a peek at this new release. The big features…

You see it every day (or every few weeks for those of us who leave their computers on) now you can see the thinking behind the Windows 7 Startup Animation. Rolf Ebeling was new to Microsoft when he was handed the task of coming up with what you would see when your computer starts. Some significant…

You probably know this image as the default Windows 7 background, to Denise Trabona it is the Windows 7 Iconic Background. She joins us to walk us through the progression from concept to finished product. See what might have been a very different looking background and get a feel for what…

If you've poked around your fonts list in Windows 7, you might have come across a display font called Gabriola. What you may not have known is that this font is an important first step in some additions to Windows. Gabriola is an OpenType font that includes significant flourishes that push…

How many times have you tried to copy a huge number of files only to accidently hit space or escape cancelling the transfer and you don't want to re-start from scratch? Well there's a better way to sync files between directories and drives, SyncToy. You might remember this from the XP…

KNFB Reader CEO Ray Kurzweil joined me to talk about the state of e-reading and show us a demo of Blio. Blio is a WPF reading application and bookstore that reads XPS files. They've taken it a step beyond by creating a reader that can match a book to spoken text, play…

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Office 2010 will be opening up the tech preview to tens of thousands of people. This iteration of Office brings great collaboration tools and a web client that you'll be able to use simply by keeping your docs up on Skydrive. That means almost half a…

A new version of Robotics Developer Studio 2008 is out and includes some cool new enhancements like DSS Log Analyzer as well as a wrap up of bug fixes. Trevor Taylor, Stewart MacLeod, and Stathis Papaefstathiou came by to show us the latest version and walk through some of the features. You can…