Siu Lun

Multitouch.

A word that has been echoing in our ears for the past two years. Made ever popular by the real world application Apple has shown in it’s iPhone and iPod touch product line ups. Manufacturers are scrambling to get multi-touch devices into mainstream market.

Finally, Windows 7, which will become the world’s most used operating system in the next 5-10 years. Fully supports multi-touch technology.

Today’s consumer hardware development is driven by the gaming industry, faster processors, bigger rams, faster GPUs. They’re all there to create entertainment.

What’s inevitably on the horizon now is that the gaming industry is getting into 3D vision and multi-touch technologies. Mobile phone applications and games are the experiments on UI and ‘introduction’ to the full-blown PC games.

The first of these new generations of games is already coming: Take a look at R.U.S.E

However, possibly due to the financial downturn that we’re still trying to clear. These technologies maybe delay, products that supports full multi-touch screens are far and few between. So are products that supports 3D vision. There is no doubt these two technology is the future, but currently no products on the market supports both. Just how far are we till we see such products on the market? And more importantly, how much would they cost?

Only time will tell.

Old news now. But you can already try and get a running version of Google Chrome OS booting from your USB stick.

You should try it out. Admire, and plan for the eventuality that Google Chrome OS will power lots of low-end and borderline between mobile and laptop devices.

Go Go Go!

The USB booting Google OS image is brought to you by: Hexxeh

I’ve been dealing with some development work lately that surrounds Flash and languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

One thing I’ve had to think about and attempt to tackle is the fact that to embed chinese or japanese fonts. It means embedding a 5mb+ file into Flash.

Even if internet speed is being ramped up by the second, this is still a burden to your average user. It would most likely mean waiting around for 2 minutes or more just to get the fonts downloaded.

So what can be done about this?

We must have a solution one day.

At the moment scouring through the internet yields no result.

There are work-arounds. Like embedding all textual data as images, but it’s not ideal, and it’ll only work to some extent as images are still data intensive. In a site that contains a lot of textual data, this isn’t going to work either.