Microsoft and Wow haven’t gone hand in hand in a long time. Until now! Since, being first means everything, Microsoft’s latest offering surfaced today as the first step towards ubiquitous computing. With touch and drag technology, there are tons of potential for this. If you have ever used an ATM machine or been to uWink you’ve see similar ideas being put to use. Microsoft Surface is a commercial product for use by partners such as casinos, and will require device manufacturers to release compatible products. It has many features that are similar to that of Apple’s touchscreen computing technology, some of which will be seen in the iPhone. Here are the videos for these products.
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From the User Experience documentation for Apple Developers:

You should not use a brushed metal window if your application: * Is a multi-window application for example, Interface Builder * Is a document-based application - for example, TextEdit Use the brushed metal window look for the primary application window and other windows that meet the above criteria - for example, the Equalizer window in iTunes. Don’t use it for supporting windows, such as preferences and other dialogs. It is acceptable to have a mix of standard Aqua windows and brushed metal windows within an application, as the Finder does.

Now I know why my mac doesn’t have a way to change the skin of all apps globally. XP has this figured out pretty well and gives itself a uniform look across. In OSX I have to deal with each app and each window in each app having it’s own set of skins, brushed metal, round corners, square corners, and burnt metal now with the new iTunes. Sure I guess It’s great that I can tell mail from safari by seeing a different skin. But really I hope to see per application skin support built natively into all tiger apps going forward, as there is currently for language support. Can you imagine if each app was forced to a specific language?

This is a list of the Free OSX Tiger software I use that kick major booty. No down payment, no monthly payment, No BS! Don’t leave your mac without ‘em.

1. Adium iChat is good, Adium rox, IMHO, they just added Google Talk support
2. Quicksilver mouse? what’s that? have you tried these?
3. Cyberduck FTP software that does what it needs to, without scaring you
4. CronniX GUI for crontabs
5. Iterm Terminal for OSX with tabs and bookmarks
6. JellyfiSSH SSH GUI for OSX, kinda like Putty for Windows
7. CocoaMySQL manage MySQL db, local or remote, nice!
8. MenuMeters now i can finally see what my mac is doing
9. TextWrangler If you don’t have the bux for BBEdit this one is almost as good
10. VoodooPad Amazing, its a wiki based notepad
11. Tofu reading just got a whole lot easier thanks to horizontal scrolling
12. PTHPasteboard keeps a log of your copy/past buffers
13. Eclipse one of the best IDEs, the Mac OS X implementation has been significantly extended and improved
14. Sidenote Just a lil notepad, usefull when you dont have a pen
15. NetNewsWire Lite Free RSS/Atom reader
16. SeeSS funny title, shows you CSS info in a widget, very handy
17. Free Ruler Do you measure your pixels? I do
18. HexColorPicker, QuickPicker color pickers galore
19. Paparazzi Simple app to get screenshots of webpages, real handy
20. FinkCommander After you get Fink, you will make your life much easier with this toy
21. TinkerTool Kinda like TweakUI for XP, loads of good stuff
22. Diablotin an admin panel like msconfig in XP, shows what you’ve added to your Library folder
23. Yasu ok last administration tool, very simple, mostly cleans your mac
24. Synergy Sharing is caring
25. Widgets Preference Pane tweak your Dashboard
26. Picture Namer simple is good, just rename photos before they go into a black hole called iPhoto
27. Recent Tunes wanna see what you just heard on iTunes? goes in the menu bar and can FTP too
28. VideoLAN Play media without worries
29. Cocoalicious If you are a deliciousaholic, this is a must
30. delimport runs in the bg and imports your delicious into spotlight
31. Khronos time tracking app, shows your earnings in real time
32. Check Off keep track of tasks so you dont end up kicking yourself in the head later
33. Dash Blog Simple yet usefull, a dashboard widget that post to Blogs using XMLRPC

OK now for some not so free and experimental apps to poke around with BluePhoneElite let your Tiger pick up the phone, doesn’t work with my Treo 650 yet, I’m waiting…. TextMate New age text editor with some unique features CandyBar icon changer thingy, i haven’t played with this thing yet TrailBlazer view your history as images, kinda cool but not too practical 3DOSX Great proof of concept, a Virtual 3D desktop! Apple should hire these guys for OS11