HP Opens Up TouchSmart To Third-Party Developers

TheTieGuy writes "HP recently released their TouchSmart Application Development Guidelines to third party developers, allowing anyone to port and create touch-friendly applications that integrate and run within the TouchSmart Software suite on their popular TouchSmart PC. As part of the release, HP has gotten behind Capable Networks' Touchsmart Community website and forum to distribute the guidelines to developers while providing an environment for TouchSmart developers to interact. Also on the site is a download hub that allows TouchSmart developers to upload and share their creations with TouchSmart owners in a central location. To kick off the new development initiative, the TouchSmart Community is running a promotion that will send one developer (travel expenses paid) to demo their software in the HP booth at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, along with a free TouchSmart PC, HP MediaSmart Server, and a month of promotion in the community."

Comments

TouchSmart

[Tubal-Cain]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

HP software scares me

[El Royo]

I cringe at the thought of HP software guidelines. I can hardly think of worse software in general use than the stuff HP comes up with. Inconsistent interfaces that don't conform to the operating system standards, strange behaviors and defaults and who knows what else. They make good printers but I just hate to use the software included with them.

Re:HP software scares me

[Hes Nikke]

you should see the UI on their high end equipment. When you're using it every day, you get used to it, but it's definitely not like any other program i've used before.

Re:HP software scares me

[Fumus]

This is just an example for the scanner/printer I have, but are you aware that HP does come with bare-bones driver-only packages?
Like this?

I absolutely hated the scanning interface, but then I installed this and use Irfanview to invoke the other non-twain interface which is quite decent compared to the other one.

Agreed

[CdBee]

Building apps to run well in a touchscreen environment is probably a good idea - but will an app that plays well with an HP Touchsmart also run on say, XP Tablet Edition?

If this is a programming environment that relies on HPs proprietary libraries being present it hardly seems a compelling prospect

A coworker once asked me

[falcon5768]

2 months ago when we where going to start having touchscreens all over. And I said to him, never, at least not in the foreseeable future. He asked me why and I listed the reasons, no software that really takes advantage of it, no one wants a screen with smudges all over it, and its impossible for us to fix cheaply when the interface breaks which we know it WILL break. A new screen is a couple hundred dollars, a new keyboard and mouse isnt even 50 for us.