Surface SDK SP1

Wow! The new visual stuff in SP1 looks really really good!

• An update to the application Water has finally removed the little light in the middle of the pond. Many users tried to touch the light and was expecting for something to happen. Now Water makes a sound when touching and upon first touch the menu assessors in the corners appears. I think this is a really good thing since many users had problems knowing what to do with Water.

• One of the things from the design guidelines that many applications don’t follow is that you should always get feedback from touching the surface. Even if nothing is expected to happen you should get feedback so that you don’t think something is wrong. I have solved it in some applications by using pixel shaders but it is a lot of work behind it. Now it is added to the core functionality of the table. So now, every time you place your finger on the surface you will get feedback. The feedback consists of a little blur effect and a small trail behind your finger as you move it.

• Another thing that confuses a lot of users is resizing. Some controls can’t be resized and some can only be resized to a particular size. Now, in SP1, when you try to resize a control to a size larger than maximum size you will get small rubber bands between your fingers and the control. So you can clearly see that there is a limitation to the size of the control.

• A new menu control that I haven’t played with yet called the Element Menu is now available. This adds a menu on top of an element that works kind of like a context menu for an element. It looks really useful so I’m looking forward to play with that.

Apart from the visual stuff, which there’s more than the once mentioned here, we also get support for Windows Update and some nice tools to support management and testing. The testing tool “Surface Stress” looks cool. It is a command line tool that lets you run a lot of users at the same time just bashing the table. Fingers, blobs and tagged objects flying around trying to mess up your application. Hopefully this will help you find bugs in a lab environment before going into production.

Now we also get an Identity Tag Printing Tool. This can, not surprisingly, be used to print identity tags for Surface.

The Microsoft Surface SDK 1.0 SP1, Workstation Edition is now almost double in size compared to the 1.0 version. It has gone from 73 MB to 143 MB. Unfortunately you can’t run both 1.0 and 1.0 SP1 side by side. The setup wizard will detect if you have version 1.0 installed and will upgrade.

I also see support for Windows 7 since it isn’t necessary for my little tweak to bypass the OS-version check.

I will be getting back on this topic as I find more interesting stuff!

Love at first sight (at least attraction)

A very important new concept with Microsoft Surface is "Attract applications". These types of applications are screen-saver like, and are designed to entice people to the table. A good (and by all means fun) attract application should welcome people to touch and use the Surface table.

Water
The standard attract application that is shipped with Surface is called “Water”. Water might seem a a bit laggy when it’s run through the simulator, but on the table itself it’s beautiful and runs smoothly. The Water application can be customized a tad by using the Water configuration tool that comes with the Surface SDK.


Water Configuration Tool

Custom attract applications
It's pretty challenging to create your own attract applications with the Microsoft Surface Interaction Design Guidelines in mind. However, if you go for it strive for an application with very high interactivity and 360 degrees usability. You have to be able to entice people from all sides of the table - and keeping them there. To create a custom attract application, follow these steps:

1. Develop a Surface application.
2. Modify the application’s description file. (This XML file most likely has the same title as your project, at least if you’ve created the project by using the Visual Studio templates that comes with the Surface SDK). Change the file to look something like this:


Description file for an attract application. (Note: “ExcecutableFile” is the path to your build Surface application).

Another option is to just comment out the "application" section in the description XML file and un-comment the "attractapplication" section.

3. Deploy the XML file to "%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Surface\Programs". %ProgramData% is a pre-defined path.
4. The next step involves creating a registry key, so if you’re not familiar with handling the Windows registry make sure you create a back-up of the registry before moving on.
5. Add the following registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Surface\v1.0\AttractMode"
6. Create a new String value to the key AttractMode (from step 5), and call it "CurrentAttractApplication". Set the value to your new attract application’s xml file name, without the file extension. I.e. the above “MyFirstAttractApplication.exe” would be the value “MyFirstAttractApplication”.

When you restart the Surface shell or Surface simulator your new attract application should load right way. Don’t worry if it doesn’t. If the registry key points to the wrong file, or you're having any other hard-to-guess error, the default application is loaded (normally “Water”).

Note: The Surface SDK tells you to “Open the registry and navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Surface\v1.0\ModeProfiles\Xxxx\AttractMode key (where Xxxx is the appropriate mode profile).” I can't get this to work, and also Dr. Neil talked about this at the Surface training I attended. Below you got an example of the suggested SDK (wrong) way, and one that works.


Doesn't work


Works