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Microsoft Windows 7 will have an Apple, Inc. iPhone-like touchscreen that can be used on multiple devices without a mouse. Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green demonstrated the Windows 7 technology at the D: All Things Digital conference by navigating an online map. Microsoft has named its touchscreen Surface.
If you like the way you can handle your iPhone by deft finger maneuvers, you’re going to love the future of Windows. The next version of Windows — currently named Windows 7 — will drive all kinds of devices with a similar technology.
“You are going to see this in all different sizes and shapes of computers,” she said.
The technology should be a natural for image editing and navigating online maps, Microsoft said. Larson-Green demonstrated manipulating an online map to find a nearby Starbucks.
In Touch with Surface
Microsoft actually demonstrated the technology at last year’s D conference as a way to deploy touch in tabletops and kiosk-like displays. In that context, Microsoft is calling the technology Surface. And while Larson-Green’s demo focused on manipulating a traditional PC, Microsoft envisions touchscreens implemented in all kinds of ways, Chris Flores, a Microsoft product director, wrote on the official Windows Vista blog.
“Surface harnesses touch and multi-touch capabilities to provide users with a natural way to interact directly with computing devices,” Flores wrote. “Expect to see the table-like Surface devices in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.”
Apple’s iPhone may be the most obvious mainstream device sporting multi-touch, but touch-based interfaces are everywhere, including laptop touch pads, cell phones, remote controls and GPS devices, Flores said. “What becomes even more compelling is when this experience is delivered to the PC — on a wide variety of Windows notebooks, in all-in-one PCs, as well as in external monitors. In working with our broad ecosystem of hardware and software manufactures, we’re excited to be showing some of the great work and investments we are working on in Windows 7,” he wrote.

toptechnews.com

Younger than Springtime: William Tabbert and Betta St. John played Marine Lt. Joseph Cable and his islander sweetheart Liat in the 1949 production; below, Matthew Morrison and Li Jun Li take on those parts in the Lincoln Center revival. Courtesy the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization
All Things Considered, April 3, 2008 · One of the most popular musicals of all time — Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific — gets its very first Broadway revival tonight. It’s been close to 60 years since the show opened, but the cast and creative team of the new production say they find South Pacific as resonant as ever.
And that’s a tall order: When South Pacific opened on April 7, 1949, its World War II story and setting had a torn-from-the- headlines feeling.
“Every single person that night in April knew someone who had been in World War II,” says musical-theater historian Larry Maslon. “Every second person must’ve known someone who was in the South Pacific in World War II — and I would imagine at least every fourth person knew someone who died in World War II. And that’s very potent, I think, for an audience.”
Of course South Pacific had more than topicality going for it. Inside a candy wrapper of romance, comedy and exoticism, the creators — composer Richard Rodgers, lyricist and co-author Oscar Hammerstein and director and co-author Joshua Logan — presented a story that questioned core American values, with an emphasis on issues of race and power.
“I was always moved by this group of American artists in the ’40s encountering this first major experience of American military power overseas and what it did to people,” says director Bartlett Sher, who’s in charge of the new Lincoln Center revival. “You know, what happens when somebody from Philadelphia and somebody from Arkansas get dropped into this new world, and they have to question everything about who they are and everything about who they think they were and what they believe.”

npr.org