A scratch built computer system's first "production" version crosses its first hurdle in hardware construction.

What is Swype & how does it work? Putting it simply Swype allow users to trace their way between different letter on a touch screen (by actually dragging their hands on the screen) instead of tapping each letter one by one. Essentially the aim of Swype is to increase the typing speed by making touch typing more intuitive. Now, here comes the real interesting stuff. Today TechCrunch leaked a video that (attached with the post) shows the comparison between the typing speed on an iPhone and Samsung Omnia II. Both the phones are placed side by side and by now you won’t be surprised to learn that Samsung (using Swype) beats the iPhone. In fact the typist using Samsung finishes way before his iPhone counterpart. I am not saying that this is gonna be another iPhone killer. Ofcourse not. I have not used Swype personally so I can’t comment on its speed. But from outside I find it very impressive and this could be the direction in which touch technology might evolve.

Webpages to Render Faster

Need to know how big the caches are on your processor? You could wade through the copious documentation on Intel or AMD’s web sites. It turns out this is no fun at all. I did this last week and still didn’t have the answer after skimming several white papers. Turns out there’s a useful little Sysinternals tool for figuring this out; Coreinfo.

So, by now you should have heard that Silverlight 4 Beta was released at PDC 2009. One of the most interesting and fun features included in the release is the ability for you to access a users webcam and microphone. Even a fellow ElegantCoder wrote a short post on it. But I wanted to go into a little more detail. So I am going to show you have to access a list of webcams and microphones, capture video, and then take pictures and show them to the user. But, before I can show you how to use them, you have to have the Silverlight 4 Beta framework installed.