When the Origami / Ultra Mobile PC was announced in March 2006, one of driving messages was that of a Lifestyle device - one that you wouldn't want to leave home without. Well, Lifestyle devices are great, but if there are not any Lifestyle applications to run on it, the UMPC will likely stay home.

Lifestyle applications are those, as defined by Microsoft's Todd Landstad, as being task driven, add value when away from the desk, and are optimized forinternet connectivity. Well, Microsoft has developed a series of sample Lifestyle applications to help developers identify some needs, and also give them some building blocks to create their own Lifestyle applications. These applications and sample code will soon be available on msdn.com/mobilepc and include a UMPC friendly media player app, an inkable photo tagging library app, inkable Virtual Earth app, and more. My favorite is the inkable photo tagging library which allows you to ink on top of a picture, which then makes the ink on that picture searchable by the application, Windows Desktop Search, and searchable by the folks you send that picture to.

In this Software InkShow, I sit down with Microsoft's Todd Landstad at the Mobile Connections conference as he demonstrates the New York Times Reader ( http://firstlook.nytimes.com/index.php?cat=4 ), the inkable photo tagging library application, and the inkable Virtual Earth application. Please excuse the extra noise as we were shooting this video in the hallways of the conference. Of interesting note in these demos is the use of gestures for navigating, zooming, etc. Until this week, I had not placed a great of importance on gestures; but from a touch perspective, I come to really appreciate the importance that gestures to the UMPC owner. Developers tailoring their applications to the UMPC really need to consider gesture support.

I will update this article and post another article when the sample code and applications are available for download from msdn.com/mobilepc

• Watch the video ( 11:06 minutes, 59mb, Windows Media streaming or direct download).
• Visit the MobilePC MSDN website

Enjoy!

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