Microsoft Demos Its Touch-Focused Office Suite For Windows | TechCrunch

TechCrunch reports: "This morning at its Build developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft showed off the coming touch-friendly build of its Office suite coming for the Windows platform. "

Synaptics going driverless

DailyTech - CES 2014: Synaptics Shows Off New Touch Tech:

"One of the biggest recent innovations has been the switch to driverless devices and advance being co-championed by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).  With its latest laptop touchpads a tiny onboard ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) handles all the responsibilities directly that drivers would have done.  The tiny chip even interfaces with connected networks via the motherboard bus to updates its internal firmware."

This is a bad news for researchers and developers like myself. That means that the gesture recognition algorithms will be even further removed from software and only ones implemented in firmware by the vendor will be able to access touch sensor raw data.

Microsoft Surface 2 ad about "Hands Free" gestures

New Microsoft Touch Cover features gestures

New Microsoft Touch Cover 2 was announced today along with Surface Pro 2. There are an early reports it has some touch gestures added:

Slide two fingers across the number key line, and the Touch Cover will highlight text. Release, and the selected text will be deleted. A spacebar gesture talks to Windows 8.1′s word recommendation system.

 We will report more on these once more information becomes available.