We’ve had some laughs, shared some tears (some of you probably made some of us cry, at least), and posted thousands upon thousands of stories – 12,227 and counting, to be exact.

Thanks for making this a great year!

Here are the 100 most popular stories from 2008:

100. End of the world on Wednesday, take a half day today

99. BlackBerry Bold dated, priced for every carrier

98. OS X Leopard-iPhone banners appear at Moscone

97. Facebook partners with iTunes for music store

96. Confirmed- Microsoft cutting Jerry Seinfeld ads tomorrow

95. Amazing mini 3D-display cube developed in Japan

94. Adobe already has iPhone version of Flash running on emulator

93. Macworld 2008 Keynote- Watch it beginning to end, right here

92. MIT students demonstrate their Android applications

91. iPhone turned numeric keypad with Numberkey app

90. Review- Netflix Player by Roku

89. CrunchGear Live at the Apple Notebook Event

88. Review- BlackBerry Bold for AT&T

87. Bigfoot finding a hoax- Say it ain’t so! It is so, though

86. ‘Subtle but noticeable’: Toshiba XD-E500 upconverting DVD player

85. All About Linux 2008- Ten great live distros

84. Jailbreak software for 1.1.3 iPod Touches, iPhones released

83. Black Friday CrunchDeals- Sam’s Club Wii for $224 and it comes with a bunch of extras UPDATED

82. 10 gadgets to help you survive the coming economic apocalypse

81. Simply the best- My gadget picks for 2008

80. Actns-Swif.T virus affecting embedded YouTube vids?

79. T-Mobile @Home offers $10 per month unlimited VOIP

78. Best Buy intros ‘Premier Black’ Reward Zone program

77. 5 reasons damaging your MacBook is a worse idea now than ever before

76. Italian boy diagnosed with ‘PlayStation addiction’

75. Slew of upcoming Verizon phones leaked

74. Ancient computer knew more than just when the Olympiad was scheduled for

73. Leaked- Photos of the cast of the new G.I. Joe film in costume!

72. First Look- MSI Wind [UPDATED]

71. Google hearts the Konami code

70. Toilet aboard International Space Station is broken

69. Aerogel- Glass that is 99.8% air gets put through the paces

68. HP attempts to charge customer $1099 due to “liquid inside keyboard”

67. Tata Nano, the world’s least expensive car

66. Review- Samsung Instinct

65. The G1- Almost perfect

64. Microsoft’s Vista armor starting to fade

63. Live Blogging Apple’s iPhone SDK Event

62. Hack the MacBook to have multi-touch, win an iPod Touch

61. Meet the new Lara Croft, gymnast Alison Carroll

60. Making Galaxies fun again- An interview with the developers of the Star Wars Galaxies PreCU Emulation Project

59. Rumor- New MacBook Pros on St. Patrick’s Day?

58. Attack of the Clones- Garrison Carida of the 501st Stormtrooper Legion

57. Review- Samsung Glyde

56. iPhone 3G for $199 comes with 2-year contract

55. Video- Samsung Instinct

54. Review- BlackBerry Storm for Verizon Wireless

53. Xbox 360 red ring of death repair kit from Team Xecuter

52. PR and the fine art of not being crazy

51. My day with Bigfoot

50. How to add RAM to the Acer Aspire One netbook

49. Swoopo- “Entertainment Shopping” or Scam-

48. Macs getting Netflix “Watch Instantly” with Silverlight

47. New Apple exec Mark Papermaster ordered to stop working immediately

46. Review- T-Mobile G1

45. Review- iPod Touch 2G

44. Instinct vs. iPhone- FIGHT

43. All About Linux 2008- Penguins fly! An interview with Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America’s head of

42. Nokia World 2008- Nokia N97

41. Review- Mio Knight Rider GPS

40. It’s official- Blu-ray wins

39. GTA IV ads pulled from Chicago buses under pressure from Fox News

38. WWDC 2008 Keynote Live – Recap

37. 10+ alternative OSes that may provide next year’s innovations

36. Augmented Reality- The Tuttuki Bako box needs your finger to play with virtual characters

35. Breaking- Apple to launch iChat for Windows on Monday!-

34. A Swiss man just flew over the English Channel with a jet pack

33. Why is Hulu more valued by advertisers than YouTube-

32. Toyota to sell solar panel-equipped Prius next year

31. Microsoft TouchWall can inexpensively turn any flat surface into a multi-touch display

30. Man builds Batman’s Tumbler in his garage

29. MacBook AirHead- why Apple’s new laptop is basically useless

28. All About Linux 2008- Should Microsoft be afraid of Linux-

27. A rumor- Apple to release multitouch keyboard for Apple TV

26. Bierstick- Two beers in under two seconds

25. iPhone 1.1.3 firmware downgrade complete, still unbricks you, SDK docs leaked

24. Blackberry Storm to kill iPhone

23. Morons film selves smoking up, return camera to store, are discovered by all of us

22. IBM creates super-fast memory

21. Review- iPhone 3G

20. Mythbusters’ GPU vs. CPU demo- 1100 paintballs make the Mona Lisa in 275ms

19. Three iPhones, three different screens

18. Old watch-like navigation gadget from 1920

17. Exclusive- iJailBreak Mobile released- upgrade your Jailbroken iPod Touch, iPhone over the air!

16. Locking down laptops from the TSACustoms

15. ‘HiPhone’ looks mighty familiar, almost iPhone-like

14. Sprint Instinct- Could this thing beat the iPhone-

13. Yes, that is a BIONIC EYE

12. Feast your eyes on the the world’s lightest phone- Modu

11. Real Bigfoot carcass to be shown this Friday…or not

10. Overclock world record- Q6600 2.4GHz run at 5.1GHz

9. New Apple notebook spotted, we told you so

8. Cool sunglasses give you super vision

7. Man builds rad trimaran sailboat in yard, now it’s stuck there

6. Exclusive- Star Wars- The Force Unleashed for iPhone

5. Inside Darth Vader’s helmet

4. Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008

3. Windows 7 screen grabs look better than they sound

2. How come nobody told me about the Dallas airport?

1. Breaking- Exclusive leaked pics of the iPhone 2! Thinner design- Check! Different colors- Check!

So there you have it. If you can think of any memorable posts from the past year that didn’t make the list, leave ‘em in the comments section and we’ll all reminisce in unison.

And he’s probably right. With multitouch going everywhere, and devices like the touchwall and Surface are about to explode into the mainstream.

Computers will still have use for mouses, though. Gamers in particular are fans, some spending real money for precision mouses for precision sniping in their virtual worlds. For the rest of us, though, you might start seeing them disappear sooner than you’d think.

Microsoft seems to think the future of the computer doesn’t lie in traditional keyboards but in gesture-based controls, such as those used on the iPhone and its own Surface device. And the next version of Windows, for now just called Windows 7 or Vienna, will have much touchscreen and gesture support built in.

While we’re still a few years away from all having Surfaces in our homes, Microsoft recently showed off a new, cheaper application of gesture control that could be integrated into monitors or laptops fairly easily. Is this what Microsoft wants to do? You bet. Microsoft knows that gesture-based input is hot, as iPhone’s popularity shows, and the surface and touch wall devices, when coupled with Windows 7, could change the way we use computers. If it works.

This, the ATTIGO TT, is one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and I really mean that. Most of the time, meh. But this! It’s a touchscreen turntable created by one Scott Hobbs, a student at Dundee University. About the size of a regular turntable, this one is more Surface than Technics.

The video says all that needs to be said. But, if you’ve got a manufacturing hookup, Hobbs is looking to bring the ATTIGO TT to the mass market.

via PSFK

Today’s Top Posts:

• Android vs. LiMo: What’s the difference?
• From all of us at CG…
• Samsung F400 music phone: It’s good because it’s Bang & Olufsen
• T-Mobile officially adds text message blocking
• Daily Crunch: Flight of the Touchwall Edition
• Atari to sell Wii Fit clone
• Hackers will track conference attendees’ movements using RFID
• CrunchGear’s handy iPhone rumor confirmator
• Fujitsu U2010 Atom-based UMPC will cost $1,300
• OCZ offers DIY gaming notebooks, some assembly required

It’s safe to say we’re approaching the top of the technology tree when it comes to mice and keyboards. As apps get richer and interactive devices become more intuitive and ubiquitous, the mouse/keyboard combo is becoming more and more a niche control scheme. It’s like upgrading your zerglings: you can do it as much as you want, but times change and a couple Wraiths can take out the whole lot. Maybe it’s not like that.

Anyway, Gates sees this and suggests that things like the Touchwall (above) are the future of interfaces, and although he has been a proponent of including real support for alternative inputs in things like Windows 7, there’s nothing solid yet.

Of course, the ideas are not new, but Gates and Microsoft have a habit of taking these things to the mainstream, rather by force than anything else.

Rocketman jumps from plane with jet-pack wings
Michael Arrington gets a full hands on with the Touchwall
Robot overlords taking to classical music
Atair’s EXO-Wing and AeroSuit on display at The Met
British town to run fiber-optic cables through sewers

In this exclusive and actually very cool video, Michael gets up close and personal with the Microsoft Touchwall. The smoothness is uncanny and the double taps work just like another well known UI — if this is the future, freeze me now and wake me up in about ten years.

Check out more Touchwall coverage here.

TouchWall refers to the touch screen hardware setup itself; the corresponding software to run TouchWall, which is built on a standard version of Vista, is called Plex.

TouchWall and Plex are superficially similar to Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch table computer that was introduced in 2007 and which recently became commercially available in select AT&T stores.

In a demo yesterday, though, Microsoft Office Labs GM Chris Pratley and Director of Envisioning Ian Sands said that the two products are completely different. Surface is a multi-touch and vision system that uses cameras to sense what is on the table, where it is and what it is doing. It can determine, for example, if a cell phone is on the table and then interact with the phone in a variety of ways, such as pulling photos off of it (see video here).

TouchWall is a fundamentally simpler mechanical system, and is also significantly cheaper to produce. While Surface retails at around $10,000, the hardware to “turn almost anything into a multi-touch interface” for TouchWall is just “hundreds of dollars” says Sands.

TouchWall consists of three infrared lasers that scan a surface. A camera notes when something breaks through the laser line and feeds that information back to the Plex software. Early prototypes, say Pratley and Sands, were made, simply, on a cardboard screen. A projector was used to show the Plex interface on the cardboard, and a the system worked fine (I’m trying to get Microsoft to release photos of the cardboard prototype, no luck so far).

The TouchWall system I was able to test yesterday consisted of a PC running Vista and Plex, a 4×6 foot plexiglass screen, a rear projector, a infrared camera and the three infrared lasers. As you can see in the video, it worked, and well:

Sands showed a number of activities in the video – scrolling though mixed media on a desktop with his hands, infinite zooming in and our, playing media, and even using a drawing tool to turn the entire screen into a whiteboard.

Microsoft is quick to say that they have no current plans to productize and sell TouchWall. But the potential of the system is obvious – Prately spoke animatedly about a future where the computing experience is less monitor/keyboard/mouse and more like an architect’s desk, with user input primarily directly on the screen and via voice commands, with keyboard/mouse type input used more for data entry or office type editing tasks.

TouchWall certainly isn’t the first multi-touch product we’ve seen (see iPhone). In addition to Surface, of course, there are a number of early prototypes emerging in this space. But what Microsoft has done with a few hundred dollars worth of readily available hardware is stunning.

It’s also clear that the only real limit on the screen size is the projector, meaning that entire walls can easily be turned into a multi touch user interface. Scrap those white boards in the office, and make every flat surface into a touch display instead. You might even save some money.

More pictures below: