I've downloaded the guidelines, and found them to be very clear.

I have my TouchSmart wall mounted in my kitchen and see the potential for the TouchSmart application to be a daily dashboard for my family. Check weather before I go to work, check a shared family calendar, show updates from social networks and web based email programs, lookup recipes...

To that end, I've created a TouchCenter app that shows me the current Seattle area traffic, and I have ported the DigiTweet wpf twitter client so that I can pull twitter into the TouchCenter.

However, the TouchCenter is currently far from being that dashboard.

The way the Calendar app has to sync with a separately named "HP TouchSmart Calendar" for Google or Windows calendars and not a user's primary calendar makes this unusable.

The photo application has no method to specify the specific folders that you want to use, so it ends up showing unwanted pictures such as album art from the music folder or other photos from the desktop.

The music application can't pull music from a network location, such as my HP MediaSmart Home Server, where my music library lives.

The only compelling features about the TouchSmart applications currently are the Touch features (touch scrolling, fan view, etc), but since none of that functionality is wrapped up by HP in a reusable library/control that I can leverage, I have to rewrite all that logic (inertia, multi-touch, etc).

HP hasn't released the source for Calendar and Notes so I can't fix the issues I have with those applications. HP contracted out Music, Videos, and Photos to CyberLink, so there is probably no way that source would ever be released for those applications, and we will all be forced to wait for any fixes.

At this point, I am left wondering if developing a TouchCenter application is the best use of my time, or if I should write touch-enabled MediaCenter add-ons, side-bar gadgets, or standalone desktop applications instead, and take advantage of pre-existing calendar, music, photo, and video applications in MediaCenter or elsewhere that actually work for my needs.

Finally, I would much prefer the TouchCenter to shift to a plugin-based model. While I found it quite easy to use the developer guidelines to have my applications display messages in the message area, or open hyperlinks in the web browser, a WPF-only plugin-based model would be much more easy to develop for.

The benefits would be:

*The "shell" could tell my app when to resize, rather than me listen to window resize events.
*The "shell" could tell my app when to "hibernate" (i.e. when TouchCenter is minimized to stop any timers or memory intensive operations).
*My application could leverage common features in the "shell" (e.g. my app could send a music file to be played in the player).
*Plugins could communicate with each other (e.g. a "Twitter" plugin could post a tweet when a new song is played in the "music" plugin).

To get all of this, I would just have to implement an interface, add some dll references, and be done.

Thanks for listening HP. I see the potential, and hope things improve.

Interesting , well 2 fold @Home I have a couple IQ775's a TX2z and looking at a 600xt I hope to build an interactive Family network

Secondly as the IT Manager of a Public transportation agency I'm looking to build touch apps for kisoks both on the empployee side and public side.. our eP app for clock in/out could be handled by touch since I use Compaq 6005 (small Form) with Touchscreens I'm hopeing to deploy easily understood interfaces TouchSmart in our tests are easily recognized and understood by those that don't interface with systems much, on the public side an interactive route and information kiosk useing touchsmart allows me to only present a interactive interface without exposing the desktop as a Plus the TouchSmart app is regonized and again easily understood as a HP Shop (okay a few Dells but Very few) I much rather build in this platform if I can just get past the "TouchSmart Only" requirement