Hi all,

I have added two features to the tool as requested by a number of people that are using it. You can now:

1. Show the byte numbers in the center of the tag
2. Show the page number on each page that is printed

Hopefully these little changes can help someone print ByteTags. Let me know should you require some other or more features. 

SurfaceTagPrinting_2.zip (1.30 mb)

Update (15/03/2009 - 16:09): I have fixed the "show bounding box" issue. Pleas download the new version below.

A Microsoft Surface unit comes with a limited amount of ByteTags that you can use to have the surface recognize objects. While testing some of the applications that we are developing ByteTags are used. I wanted to create a little tool that allows me to create the tags I need easily.

Therefore I decided last night I to create a small application that allows the creation of ByteTags. I haven't put to much time in creating this, but the following functionality should be available:

• Select the tags that you want to print
• Indicate how many times a certain tag needs to be included
• Limited layout option for printing your tags (page size, page margins, tag margins)
• Printing the tags. I have tested them on our surface unit and they seem to be recognized correctly.

One issue I haven't been able to solve yet is the 'Tag Bounding Box'. Currently the application always draws a bounding box around each tag. For some reason my databinding on the checkbox is not working :-(

I would like to add the generation of IdentityTags as well, but haven't found the specification for those. Please, drop me a line of you can help me out there. I will then add that functionality to the tool.

Feel free to play around with the tool. If you have any questions, remarks or feature requests: let me know! Also if you are interested in the source code of the project drop me a line. I'm currently not posting it publicly because it needs to be cleaned up first. 

Disclaimer: Read the instruction on printing byte tags in the SDK carefully. Not all printers produce the same results.

SurfaceTagPrinting_fix.zip (1.28 mb)

Having read most of the Surface SDK over the last couple of days, I started playing with the examples. I started changing one of the SDK examples in order to create an application that I had in my mind for a long time. That is coming along nicely. I'll blog about this application later.

Last night I was a little confused on what events are generated when touching the surface. The Visualization example does a good job at showing the data (what object is recognized, where is it positioned, what's the rotation, etc.) received in an application when the surface is touched. I wanted to know a little more about the chain of events received by a SurfaceControl.

Therefore I spent half an hour creating a small application that lists these events. The application itself will not teach you a lot, but it's interesting to play around with the events that are received. It can bring some extra understanding on how the contacts are being processed (especially for a beginning surface developer).

Please feel free to download the application and have a look at the results.

TouchIdentifierApplication.zip (181.06 kb)