Multi-touch from Microsoft

The research team from Microsoft has come up with a really interesting way of communicating with your computer, using only a nice piece of software and a regular webcam. This application can sense what the background and the foreground of the video is allowing the use of gestures for a completely natural user interface.

This is really cool because if this software will be developed even further and released to the public you won’t have to buy a new computer or a new screen with touch or multi touch built in it, you’ll only need a webcam that most of us already have on our computers.

This is one of the so many products Microsoft is working on right now for the way we’ll see UIs in the near future, the only thing i can think of right now is what kind of products hide behind the research team from Apple, and how long do we have to wait to see something like this for personal use.

Here is the video:

Today Apple launched it’s new line of iMacs, with a gorgeous new look and some new features, along with enhanced Suites for iLife and iWork.

The new iMac is hotter than ever, made out of aluminum and glass, with a slick design, even thinner than it’s older brother. Elegant, slim and very trendy the new iMac comes in 4 basic versions:

• 20 inch, 2.0GHz with 1GB memory, 250GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB memory graphical board for just $1,199.00
• 20 inch, 2.4GHz with 1GB memory,320GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for  $1,499.00
• 24 inch, 2.4GHz with 1GB memory,320GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for $1,799.00
• 24 inch, 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme with 2GB memory, 500GB hard drive  and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for $2,299.00

The new look is amazing, it comes with the new keyboard that is much thinner, made out of aluminum as well with two USB ports built in and a few new keys for the media apps.

Now let’s talk about the apps. Jobs presented the new iLife and iWork ‘08 that come with some upgrades for some of the apps in them and for some completely redesigned new apps.

iLife:

iPhoto – lets you organize your photos in a new way using Events, it gives you a new feature to hide the pictures that you don’t want to delete but still don’t want to have them show up in your face every time you want to look at the pictures from an Event, advanced editing tools to make your photos look even better, super fast and easy upload to your .mac gallery for other visitours to upload or download pictures.

iMovie – the new iMovie is not updated on enhanced, it’s a completely new application designed to help you make great movies with just a few clicks and less time, and it’s great!

GarageBand – create and play with a virtual band using Magic GarageBand,organize sections of your songs with Arrangements, capture the perfect performance with multiple-take recording, use Visual EQ to graphically shape your sound, create high-fidelity recordings with 24-bit audio support, print sheet music with simple notation printing.

iWeb – creating cool websites complete with photo, movies and widgets with a few clicks and a few drags, cool new templates and features.

iDVD – For those that still want to burn DVDs, iDVD  comes with new templates for Hollywood style menus, pro level encoding and higher quality DVDs.

it costs $79 and it comes free with every new iMac.

iWork:

Keynote ‘08Create stunning, cinema-quality presentations more easily than ever with Keynote ’08. Use new animation tools to move and scale images along a path. Or rotate them on the face of a cube or on a turntable. Add dazzling text effects and slide transitions. Even record and deliver narrated presentations.

Pages ‘08

Writing comes naturally when you’re using Pages ’08. Start with one of over 140 templates to write beautiful letters, resumes, reports, business plans, and more. And create media-rich newsletters, brochures, and flyers with point-and-click ease.

and the new app for iWork, a spread sheet that’s innovative, cool and easy to use that lets you organize your data the way you want it and keeps those hard complicated formulas away from you.

Numbers ‘08

• More than 150 functions
• Intelligent tables
• 2D and 3D charts
• Interactive print view
• Apple-designed templates for home, education, and business
• Import from and export to Microsoft Excel and other formats

1 – Redirect Visitors While You Update Your Site

Update and test your site while visitors are redirected to the page of your choice:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.123.123.123

ErrorDocument 403 /page.html

<Files page.html>
allow from all
</Files>

Replace 123.123.123.123 with your IP address. Also replace page.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

2 – Display a Custom 404 Error Page

Your server displays a “404 File Not Found” error page whenever a visitor tries to access a page on your site that doesn’t exist.

You can replace the server’s default error page with one of your own that explains the error in plain language and links visitors to your home page. Here’s how to use your own page:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Replace 404.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

3 – Handle Moved or Renamed Pages

You’ve moved or renamed a page on your site and you want visitors automatically sent to the new page when they try to access the old one. Use a 301 redirect:

Redirect 301 /old.html http://yoursite.com/new.html

Using a 301 redirect also ensures the page doesn’t lose its search engine ranking.

4 – Prevent Directory Browsing

When there’s no index page in a directory, visitors can look and see what’s inside. Some servers are configured to prevent directory browsing like this. If yours isn’t, here’s how to set it up:

Options All -Indexes

5 – Create User Friendly URLs

Which of the two URLs below looks friendlier?

http://yoursite.com/about
http://yoursite.com/pages/about.html

When it comes to URLs, as long as the meaning is clear, shorter is always better.

With htaccess and an Apache module called mod_rewrite, you can set up URLs however you want. Your server can show the contents of “/pages/about.html” whenever anyone visits “http://yoursite.com/about”. Here are a few examples:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^about/$    /pages/about.html [L]
RewriteRule ^features/$ /features.php [L]
RewriteRule ^buy/$      /buy.html [L]
RewriteRule ^contact/$  /pages/contact.htm [L]

There’s a lot more to mod_rewrite and htaccess. Check out the links below for more details and tricks.