Touch screen gloves are a quick solution to using touch screens in the cold. Whether it is your smartphone or a camcorder menu, gloves with conductive metal threaded into the tips will keep you and touch screens functional by warding off numbness. Ever find yourself shooting in the early morning light? Some of the best natural light comes only in the morning or evening and that coincides with some of the day’s lowest temperatures. Trying to adjust exposure or unlock your phone may be impossible with gloves on and easy to get wrong with frozen fingers. The gloves that I found on the shelves of a department store aren’t so thick that dexterity will be lost. These gloves don’t appear much different from ordinary gloves, except for the tips of each finger featuring shiny little lines. It’s these threaded points of conductive material that will allow touch screens to sense your fingers.

It sounds simple because it is, I found a do it yourself video that I’d love to try, but this is after I’d swiped my card for the pair of gloves last Saturday. The example uses silver-coated thread stitched into the tips of the glove, the best part of making your own will be to put conductive threading at more points than just the pads of the fingers. I know use the extreme points of my fingers to operate touch screens so I’d stitch material on the very tips. You may get as creative with your needle work as you can, it’s simply not my expertise. Or if you need a quick option, look for stores to have touch screen gloves around $20.

So now, you might add gloves to your list of gear to grab, with heat resistant gloves for adjusting lights in the studio and cold resistant gloves for those outside shoots with touch screen equipment. Touch screens continue to get better and more pervasive, so we can expect more accessories to go along with them.

Disclaimer: Compatibility with individual gloves and touch screens may vary.

First came Smell-o-Vision, then 3D, and now this. Senseg, a tech company that makes touch technology, recently showed off a new prototype tablet screen that actually allows you to feel textures that are displayed on screen. The new technology is made possible using an electrostatic-field-based system that allows different parts of the screen to produce varying degrees of friction. Since a variance in friction is a large part of what makes up our sense of touch (besides the presence or lack of heat), your brain is fooled into thinking that the image you’re seeing has texture. The technology is applied to the screen using “tixels” or tactile pixels. They’re basically an ultra-thin (10 micrometers) coating that are sandwiched between two nonconductive layers which transmit an electro-vibration stimulus. Much like a pixel, the more tixels you have on an image, the more detailed the texture sensation can be which should make it easy for consumers to know when they have a well-made texture emitting device.

As you’ve probably already realized, this is a definite improvement over the typical mechanical vibration or piezo solutions that other touchscreen devices offer. Not only does it let you “feel” the surface of a screen, it also does so without shaking your phone since it has no moving parts and without using much energy (typically just 1% of a phone’s battery). With the applications of this technology being so vast and with tech companies constantly looking for new technology which can help them sell more phones, it seems inevitable that we will soon be seeing this technology on phones, tablets, and touchscreen computers everywhere. For example, this technology could be used in a 3D program to help someone “feel” the texture of a 3D object or in Photoshop as a way to “feel” the surface of the paper you’re painting on. Of course, it has huge potential for filmmakers as well. Just think of how much more interactive movies could be if you could feel some of the things that are important to the story.

It’ll take time before we see everything come to fruition with this technology but I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what this technology can do.

Windows 8 will go where no Windows program has gone easily before – to the tablet market.

If you’re thinking of buying a tablet in the future, you might have to wait just a wee bit longer, because Windows 8 promises to be a better interface for the tablet user but won’t be out until probably next spring.

Windows 8 will work with a touchscreen operation and includes a Facebook-like sharing sidebar called “Share Charm”.  At last year’s Consumer Electronics Show [CES], Microsoft announced that Windows 8 was in the works, this week at the Build developers conference in Anaheim, Microsoft announced ’8′ be coming soon to a tablet near you. Developers say the cloud-based use will be better and easier and there will be 300 new features for cloud and business management.

According to the technical site, ars technica, Windows 8 will have a “genuine, uncompromised tablet operating system”, in other words – tablet use won’t be an afterthought, and users of non-Apple tablets should be able to enjoy the tablet experience that iPad users revel in.  Instead of a program made for keyboard and mouse use being fitted into a tablet user’s world, the new program will have an easier touchpad experience, with better icons and text, literally from startup –  with a touchscreen interface. You can “pick up” tiles, or icons, and move them around, swipe left, right or from the top, and pinch-zoom.

Once the iPad hit the market, the tablet genie was out of the bottle, and manufacturers and product developers  have been trying to take a nibble from that exclusive pie ever since.

IT World got the first exclusive look, and discusses its many new features.  According to reports, Windows 8 won’t be on tablets on store shelves until April or May of 2012. We have several different models of tablets here at Videomaker to experiment with their use and workablility, so we can’t wait to see Windows 8 in action. We’ll keep you updated on how these amazing little devices will work for you in your video-producing world.

Windows 7 -  Hero? or Foe?

When Windows 7 launched in October 2009, many people read about some of the problems and concerns that early adopters were dealing with and decided to wait. But, oh! Along came Adobe CS5 first, with it’s 64-bit processing mandates, and then many other editing programs that all demanded an upgrade to Windows if you were going to use their programs.

Windows 7 IS faster, feels more stable, and has more GPU feature support in the 64-bit world.  We’ve all recovered, and like the Y2K scare that never happened, the editing world as we knew it didn’t come crashing down.

I, for one, hesitated about upgrading to Windows 7 because, unlike previous Windows upgrades, moving to Windows 7 meant a complete rewrite on my system, one in which I had to reinstall every single program I used, including my email server; which, in reality meant having to organize all my shortcuts, bookmarks, desktop links and C-drive; and then I had to store them on a special file to reload later. But I was upgrading to CS5 and Avid Media Composer 5, and needed a beefier system, so now seemed the time to bite the bullet and organize. It was a hassle, but it was worth it. Windows 8 might do for tablets what Windows 7 did for desktops – we’ll let you know as soon as we know!