Of desktops and coffee tables: What's your favorite surface?
Are you ready for the next major operating-system metaphor? Scott Carlson in his "Wired Campus" column for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Kate Marek in a guest post for "Tame the Web" point to demonstration videos—a couple from Microsoft and one from Popular Mechanics—for Microsoft's new "surface computing." Marek speculates that surface computing will amount to a major paradigm shift, and the visually compelling demos left me feeling that she might be right. But what is the paradigm and what is the shift?