SAP InSite Studio

Things have been stupid-busy at Stimulant — so much so that I haven’t gotten around to posting some recently completed projects.

Back in May, we shipped “SAP InSite Studio”, which was a proof-of-concept app for SAP’s big conference in Orlando. There were three instances of the application running on large HDTVs with multitouch overlays, all connected to a high-end Cisco videoconferencing system. The Stimulant blog has more details, and the video below.

This one was particularly challenging to me, as it was my first Windows 7 touch app, which isn’t quite the same as Surface. The Surface Touch Pack didn’t ship until the project was mostly done, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of it much. I also had to do lots of interop between managed and native code in order to get my app to control other arbitrary applications on the system — mostly IE and Office apps. It turns out that Windows doesn’t really want you to do that sort of thing, so various hacks and workarounds were applied that kept this from being more than a proof of concept. We learned a lot though, and could potentially make it “real” in the future.