There have been a few open letters to Microsoft after last week's small Windows 7 disclosure at All Things Digital. Last week Rob Bushway wrote, "Mr. Gates, The Tablet PC Community needs to talk with you," after concerns about users giving up on features because of mobility issues (power, wireless, battery issues). Today, James Kendrick wrote an open letter to Microsoft about Windows' needing to attend to the ways the majority of people use PCs today -- relying on battery power and portability. "...the days of bloated system code are over," James wrote, as he too described power management issues like sleep / resume are too oriented toward stationary PCs and need to be more focused on mobility.

There have been others too. All thoughtful in their own way. Mobile PCs are the accepted standard and it looks like the community is willing to help prioritize features.

Are you ready to let your fingers dance across your computer monitor, display, or interactive whiteboard? When Microsoft announced that it is including multi-touch support in Windows 7, there was plenty of groaning about dirty fingers.

"...I really don't want users pinching and dragging their dirty mits around the new LCD monitors," writes Slashdot user binaryspiral.

"I know I'm not the most tolerant person in the world, but when someone comes to my desk, points at something on the screen and leaves a big smeary finger print, violent thoughts flash through my mind," comments TheTruthIsOutThere on ZDnet.

Channel9 user, YearOfTheLinuxDesktop, expresses, "look: I can fill my display with dirty fingerprints!"

Do you agree with these folks? Is touching something bad? Or is it a fear you can get over?

Perhaps you are hyper-clean. Nothing wrong with that. If that's the case, when you scrub your desk and keyboard each day - before and after you snack - just take a quick wipe of the display too.

Perhaps you are a free spirit who rarely cleans and are slightly worried that this is one more place that people will notice you haven't cleaned. Trust me, they know it already. If salt from potato chips scratching your display worries you, then there are great inventions like hand-towels and napkins to help you out.

Microsoft released a little information about Windows 7 today, which fans of natural and direct input on PCs will appreciate: multitouch supported in the OS. Videos demonstrating the new PC feature were shown at All Things Digital earlier today. Here's one of the videos from the Windows Vista Team Blog (Note: This blog is written by the Windows marketing team and even though it is "Windows Vista Team Blog" the feature the post is about is actually a future version of Windows, not Windows Vista.):

Multi-Touch in Windows 7

After adding a few things to the new DIY Multitouch PC forum, I thought it would be good to point you to an historical multitouch document: Andrew Wilson of Microsoft Research published TouchLight: An Imaging Touch Screen and Display for Gesture-Based Interaction and presented a few years ago. Good reminder.

As Microsoft's Chairman, Bill Gates paints a vision of technology today and how those advancements can improve tomorrow and is a trusted advisor on how we can achieve these goals.

This week Bill Gates testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology on the celebration of the 50th of the Committee. He answered questions ranging from the knowledge gap with students, fundamental problems with teacher professional development, the next big thing in technology, to inspiring kids to learn. Gates' message is consistent with prior speeches, but reviewing is worthwhile. "It starts with education," he stated.

Also this week, Bill Gates addressed the Northern Virginia Technology Council (March 13, 2008). In this he gave more specific examples about technology available to students today, including the WW Telescope project from MSR and Tablet PCs.

So if you put it on your computer and say hey, I’d like to see that for myself – you just connect up your telescope and boom, there you are. You can acquire information, add that to your database. So software touching all the sciences in a pretty deep way. So with these platforms there will be a huge variation in how creative governments are in applying software to their task, how creative businesses are to apply it to their task, how schools can take this and do new things.

Are you one of the lucky designers or developers attending Mix '08? Mix is more than a "web conference." It's been a great place for people to talk about interactive design.

This is the first year that I won't be attending Mix. That said, I couldn't stay away from peeking at the sessions list. In addition to the keynote, which I hope I can view online later, these two sessions would make my session list.

Lanac Technology is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Chicago that offers training for business solutions. This month they are offering a course on configuring Windows Vista, including:

Module 4: Configuring Mobile Computers

The RTM of Microsoft Silverlight Ink SDK is available on MSDN.

Microsoft and its partners' visions of how technology can be used by teachers and students are highlighted at Schools of the Future. At the Philadelphia SOF students, teachers and staff have been using Gateway Tablet PCs or Samsung UMPCs in one PC per student learning environment.

Silverlight.net links to Loren's Search TIP. Cool.