With Microsoft opening up the computers to more developers, more useful applications are likely to appear, although surely not by people who develop for fun. Developers at the PDC conference are being offered a package that includes a Surface, five licenses and developer support for the "discounted" price of US$13,500, Microsoft said.

In the meantime, Microsoft has already worked with a couple of design studios that have been developing some fun projects.

For example, designers at Vectorform have built a : People can "carve" a jack-o'-lantern on the Surface by using their fingers to trace a design in an image of a pumpkin. Vectorform's development of a trivia game and the Chinese game Go should also please some of the people I talked to at the Sheraton. Designers are also working on a Flickr viewer so users can see their own photos.

In addition to Vectorform's apps, a couple of internal Microsoft developers are out to solve the tough problems with Surface.

"One of the most important questions in the hospitality industry is when to offer a refill," said Paul Dietz, a Microsoft research and development program manager, in a describing SurfaceWare, an application he helped develop that could be used in bars and restaurants.