Last Sunday's NY Times contained an article about multi-touch displays. " Turning Point for Touch Screens ", which talks about iPhones, Dells' new Latitude and interviews the CEO of WACOM, who put the tablet in tabletpc. But the only mention of Microsoft was when talking about the lack of software: That...

I remember seeing WPF/E, the early version of what was to become Silverlight, at Microsoft a few years ago, then running over to the building where the TabletPC team lives and asking if the WPF inking features were going to be in Silverlight. As you may or may not know by now, the answer was yes and...

Dell started selling their own TabletPC recently. Since it looks comparable to my Lenovo Thinkpad, I took a closer look the specs and compared them. And the results are....[ read more ] [A New DevLife post]...

In the TabletPC SDKs and in WPF it's very easy to take an ink image and save it to an image format - BMP, JPG, etc. Then came Silverlight and the InkPresenter and naturally I wanted to do the same. But it wasn't so easy. Silverlight itself isn't bogged down with that functionality. So you first need...

Yet another Flash driven advertisement ( here are some others i've blogged about in the past ) that uses annotation. Below is a screencast of me playing with this Notes ad (with a mouse, not a stylus). You can do this in Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 with the InkPresenter. I'll be giving a session on Annotating...

Loren Heiny has been working on a cool Silverlight annotation app to user Silverlight and a stylus to do Google and Technorati searches. It's called SearchTip and is live on TabletPC Post . There is a lot that is really interesting about this. (And it's visually appealing too!) First of all, he has a...

Last year, there was lots of buzz about a possible iTablet, for example, ZDNet's Matthew Miller is piecing together some various things he'd been reading. I never really paid much attention to it but now the iPhone has been making me wonder if the technology that has gone into the iPhone is headed for...

The Mobile team is at it again. They have written a converter to take Journal notes and convert them into an interactive Silverlight page. You can read about it on the Mobile dev center and download the converter application. There are two live demos of it here on my own website where I have hosted their...

I keep seeing all of these flash ads that have a pen that you can move around with your mouse and draw - similar to all of the inky stuff I've been doing except I wanted that pen, too! I finally figured out how to pull it off. Read more here... [A New DevLife post]...

Inspired by the Scribbler app (part of the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery), written by Daniel Cook & Pete Blois (with some inspiration from Laurence Moroney ) I decided to spiff up my own drawing application . Why is it that a black background seems to be the way to make apps look cool? I even finally opened...

The battery on my 3 month old Lenovo X60 is dead and I am getting the dreaded notice in the power manager "Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with the new one." In addition to the message in the Power manager, I have the following symptoms: Battery Indicator light...

There are a few silverlight demos that use the InkPresenter, though two of them don't refer to Ink at all...: The page turning demo has it. You can annotate the pages and that gets remembered during your session. As you flip the pages back and forth, the annotations are incorporated into the effects...

I've been heads down since MIX07 playing with the new ink object in silverlight. I have posted a sample with my tests and some of the code. Read more here . [A New DevLife post]...

Silverlight does INK! Yay. I've been asking about it for a while thinking it was the next natural step. I actually have played with it a bit and have a little app that I wrote that I need to deploy with the GoLive license. This is with the 1.0 version of Silverlight so it is all javascript against the...

I have had my new Lenovo ThinkPad X60 for over a month now and the Touch Screen is my favorite. Read more (and also a bonus tale (confession?) about me absentmindedly leaving my laptop behind (open and running) at the Sofia, Bulgaria airport - oops) [A New DevLife post]...

Once I got writing, I guess I couldn't stop. First there was the just published INKED! in aspnetPRO earlier this month. Now I have the latest CoDe Focus Mobile PC Development (special focus issue published by CoDe Magazine) where along with a lot of cool articles on WPF and Ink (thanks Billy , it was...

Tablet PC/Ink related sessions & HOLs I see on the MIX site: SESSION: Ink for Designers and Developers Speaker(s): Sam Geroge - Microsoft Audience(s): Designer, Developer Imagine if your users could add handwritten annotations over online photos, greeting cards or video (including live playback of...

My latest asp.netPRO article is about ink-enabling web sites and is aimed at web developers who are new to the ink APIs for TabletPC development. I LOVE the cover they did for this issue. Coooooool, huh?...

Think Mobile apps are cool? Wanna win a UMPC (now that's cool, too!) From the mobility folks: Today’s apps must work in an increasingly mobile environment and must allow new means of input: ink, touch, and more. Build a great application that encompasses these needs, write an article about what you’ve...

Here's a picture of a guy from FEMA going door to door in Oklahoma checking on residents who have been out of power from the ice storms. He's carrying a clipboard with lots of papers. Surely what he writes will then get typed into a computer. Wouldn't it make more sense to use a Tablet and do the data...

Last night I took one of my demos that I have used in past articles ( Persisting Ink on the Web for MSDN online and Ink on the Web for CoDe Mag) and that will be in my session at Mobile Connections in November (Las Vegas) and redid it in a page using Atlas. Anyone attending my session will be the first...

Although many are using the new OnClientClick property to ask "are you sure?" before letting users delete records, I have discovered that it can completely change (for the better, for the way better) how I have been constructing code for handling ink on the web. [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post]...

This is definitely something that's on my mind a lot. I'm not marketing person and it's not something I've been tasked with by a marketing person or the TabletPC team. It's just something that keeps popping up and is very interesting to me. This weekend while visiting friends outside of Madison, WI after...

A reader of my recent Ink on the Web article in CoDe Magazine (samples available here ) emailed me with an odd problem that I had to see in action before I realized what was going on. The problem was this. She had a web form with an ink-enabled winforms control on it that worked fine. But when she added...

Joel Spolsky's May 2000 article on the Chicken and the Egg Problem seems like a good place to look for solving the adoption problems of the Tablet PC (remember "Mobile PC" now) which is discussed endessly by Tablet PC developer ("make tablets easier to buy so people will buy our software!") and the manufacturers...

Earlier this week I wrote about how I got glass onto my M4 with the 5308 build of Windows Vista. Yesterday I installed the latest CTP of Vista (5342). [ read more... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

While I have merely enabled ink in my own controls on my own web pages , Loren Heiny is working n something really cool !! A way to place inkable edit controls over existing text boxes on web pages. For example, in his Camtasia video demonstrating his tests, he opens up Google and can write directly...

Lori McKinney sent me an email in response to my Winforms hosted in i.e. post, pointing out the I.E. update that caters to the EOLAS lawsuit.This hadn't caught my eye before. The update forces users to "activate" ActiveX controls (such as Flash) hosted on a web page. Here is the official article on how...

Two years ago, I blogged about the "Mobile PC" division at Microsoft which encompasses all of the mobility technology - Tablet PCs, handhelds etc. Today, for the first time, I noticed that this is finally catching on. There are lots of people walking around with bright orange hats. When I commented on...

My husband read the CNN article this morning about the Windows Vista delay. Reading " Unlike the current Windows XP, there will be no versions designed specifically for advanced 64-bit computing, multimedia computers or Tablet PCs " he interpreted that as no TabletPC capability for Vista, which is not...

I replaced one of my 512MB modules with a 1GB module in October. Time to get the old one off my desk. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6848791085&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1 Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Because I didn't realize there was something really cool about this! I finally just happened upon it accidentally. One one of the times I rebooted, I noticed the pretty little icons for cds, thumb drives and more below the toshiba logo at startup. Pressing the left and right arrow keys highlighted the...

I didn't realize it was done yet as I hadn't gotten the print copy. (Update: it arrived within a few hours of posting this!!) But the jam packed special issue of CoDe Mag, filled solely with Tablet and Mobile PC Articles, is online here ! There are articles by Markus Egger, Billy Hollis, Larry O'Brien...

nothing like a little Vermont snow to welcome him with... Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I have a 512MB memory chip for a Toshiba Portege M200. They are on sale right now at Crucial for $50 so if anyone wants to buy mine, I'll sell it for a little less than Crucial. I bought this a little less than a year ago and the M200 is not my daily use machine. You know, only driven by a little old...

I murdered my TabletPC functionality on my Vista laptop when I hacked the glass onto it. So I can't play with all of the awesome new TabletPC features. Very disappointing and I am looking forward to a remedy. In the meantime, I can oggle the 123 screenshots that Peter Rysavy did showing off the Tablet...

The improvements to usability for ink in the Vista UI are wonderful. I wrote about them here. However, as many tablet geeks know, the Toshiba M4 drivers don't support glass too well. I did hack glass onto my machine but it totally wrecked most of my tabletpc functionality. Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

CoDe Magazine will soon be putting out a special focus issue on Tablet PC and Mobile PC Development. There will be articles on a wide range of Tablet PC and Mobile topics by Billy Hollis, Dr. Neil Roodyn, Carl Franklin, Markus Egger, Larry O'Brien, myself and others. This is one of their " CoDe Focus...

This summer, I spent some time working through a host of scenarios to move ink data around when you have collected it on a web page. Because the ink data is only available on the client side, there are a number of hoops to jump through and pitfalls to avoid. " Persisting Ink on the Web " walks through...

Okay - this paragraph at the end of a review of the new Acer C200 is annoying In summary, the C200 is a welcome breath of fresh air in a category which was supposed to be all about innovation - yet has become woefully stagnant due to the lack of software fully exploiting pen based input capabilities...

Loren Heiny points to Gateways newest 14" widescreen TabletPC which apparently weighs in at over 6 pounds. Loren says I'm not so sure what I'll think of the wider and heavier Tablet design, which suggests to me more that it's a "notebook" than a "Tablet." Loren, it's still a Tablet, maybe just not so...

Rob Bushway is doing an excellent poll and the responses are educational. If there are 1,000,000,00 tablet pcs out there, there is a potential for Rob's comments to get a little long!! by way of Loren Heiny www.acehaid.org...

I noticed this on the Tablet PC home page, but finally checked it out when I saw a link to a Channel 9 video on Loren Heiny's site.In it Emily Rimas, a PM on the Tablet PC Team demo's the (free) product for Robert. It has features from Agilix' GoBinder Lite in there and definitely looks like bits of...

I just came across this utility that looks like something great for professors using their tablet to ink via projector. It's called Lecture Pen and actually displays an image of a pen at the mouse cursor so that the ink doesn't look to be like ghost writing. I haven't tried it out. www.acehaid.org...

Avonelle Lovhaug has been waiting for her Lenovo for a long time! And she's not alone. But this is not stopping people from glomming on to the tablet that will finally make the mark for TabletPCs on the end user market. According to this eweek article: “The ThinkPad Tablet has sold so fast since its...

Hilton Locke, a member of the Tablet team at Microsoft, is listing issues (and solutions) with installing and running the beta on a Tablet. Cautions Device Driver problems Application Compatibility There will probably be more, so check back for new posts on his blog. www.acehaid.org...

If you have done any work with the TabletPC SDK, you are probably aware that there is a COM API and a managed API, but that the managed API is really just a wrapper to the COM API. You are also probably aware that the Tablet API is VERY tightly bound to the windows API. Everything that you do is through...

Loren Heiny asked "if you have $10million to promote TabletPCs, how would you do it." Robert Scoble suggests buying 5 tabletpcs for every airline so people can play with them while they are flying. Oddly enough, Don Kiely emailed me the other day to tell me that Lenovo (the makers of the new ThinkPad...

Hmmm - “this just in” in the Microsoft Downloads Notifications: Microsoft Agent 2.0 and Tablet PCs Learn how to use Microsoft Agent 2.0 in a Tablet PC application. Code examples are ... [ read more ] [A DevLife post] www.acehaid.org...

Tablet / Mobile PC Webcast Series 2005 Tune in as presenters from the Tablet/Mobile PC team share our most popular sessions: showcasing introductory and advanced Tablet PC topics, Mobile PC development considerations, and network awareness and data access strategies. The series of 7 webcasts starts July...

Loren is a developer who definitely is a "big brain" when it comes to thinking about WHAT we can do with ink, not just how to use it. I can't point to this post of his without quoting him: I've heard it said many times: "I'm a developer. I type code. Why do I need a Tablet PC or even ink?" Check out...

Markus left a groovy little doodle in the gallery of my Doodle Website . Markus is a big tablet user and explorer. As a developer (and I think also an astute business person) he is always thinking about how to make it better - the actual machine or coming up with some good UI standards for ink applications...

I'v been heads down this morning with major IIS problems on my web server. Something about a windows 2003 server patch, Application Pools mucked up, Service Unavailable on everything. Anyway, I uninstalled and reinstalled IIS and am now updating windows 2003 SP1 again, and had a minute to look at blogs...

"The Scoop on Wi-Fi" article in Fortune Small Business this month is all about how businesses are levering wi-fi and becoming REALLY mobile. Tablet PC's are a highlight of every one of the businesses that were featured in the article. The issues (July/August) isn't online yet, but last month's issue...

So - for me, the hottest coolest new thing I saw at TechEd was the TabletPC Thinkpad by Lenovo . I kept telling Arin Goldberg that I'd be MORE than happy to trade my Toshiba M200 with 1GB for it. Oh well. But now I see Avonelle's got one on the way . Thatta girl!!! Posted from BLInk!...

I wrote an article for MSDN's Tablet PC Developer Center about how I wrote the Doodle application that lets you ink on the web. The trickiest part of that app was redisplaying the ink image for the user without saving it somewhere. If they want to save it, the also have that option. But moving the ink...

Loren talks about the great response to the inkable comments on Channel 9 and some of the feedback on slashdot from it. Besides the obvious illegible handwriting, the other issue is being able to search the text. That's a biggie becuase those ink comments are probably just GIFs by the time they get posted...

casey chesnut, the e.e. cummings of our developer community, has written a cool article on converting windows journal notes to xml, svg and onenote . that is pretty handy sh*t to be able to do. since I have never used svg and one note, i think it's time I looked into this. and who better to learn from...

(by way of Loren Heiny ) VBInk (with links, a blog and forums) - focuses on doing tabletpc development with VB. I'm not sure if I personally think it's necessary to get so granular - since the concepts are all the same, but it does make it easier if you are more experienced in VB and want to focus on...

Friday, March 18th at 10 AM PST This session focuses on the InfiNotes Note Taking Framework built by Agilix Labs Inc. as an extension to the Tablet PC SDK and Visual Studio .Net Development environment. Agilix InfiNotes is a collection of .NET controls that add rich ink note-taking functionality to new...

Markus Egger writes about something that we had a fantastic talk about this summer at the TabletPC DevLab - auxiliary displays . We had a brainstorming session on "what would make a perfect mobile device?" Getting access to some key information without having to boot up the whole darned laptop was one...

Rob Rohr , who is lucky enough to work for a big Tablet PC Enthusiast has a tablet pc. He is also fortunate enough to go to events like TechEd where I'm always trying to introduce him to people. Well I just discovered that he's been blogging for about a year (yippee) and I see he has been doing some...

I've been wanting to get my hands on one of these just to check it out. Mike Hall has one to play with and seems to have addressed many of the things one would want to now about this very small portable pc (not pocket pc). And from what I gather talking to a few experts, it isn't really compatible with...

update: However, for the purpose of testing out some basic ink functionality when developing ink-enabled apps, without having to go out and purchase a tablet pc, this might do the trick. I don't think (from my one minute of testing - let's be clear about that) that this will be good if you are testing...

I don't use my tablet on an everyday basis and I am hardly a tablet power user. I am a programmer who is curious about the tablet as a way to extend my user's relationship with their applications.* However, for mass market ink appeal, I don't understand why Josh Einstein's extension to Outlook isn't...

Off to Seattle for an all day INETA working group meeting that is tomorrow and then to SF on Monday for VSLive / WindowsAnywhere . (I live in the NorthEast - so "off to seattle" is an all day affair.) Really looking forward to seeing some new toys while at WindowsAnywhere !! http://www.AcehAid.org...

Not so fast there buddy. Do you know that you cannot boot from the USB DVD drive? (the one I just got yesterday....). I had a chat with Markus Egger last night who discovered this in the middle of his repave. Oops. A little googling found a workaround in the www.tabletpcbuzz.com forums that was so good...

I finally finished outfitting my Toshiba M200 tablet. I bought memory in November so it has 1GB and just bought an extra battery (on ebay, no less!), a USB CD/DVD drive and the cool little portfolio that was designed for it so I can use the tablet without even taking it out! http://www.AcehAid.org...

I can't believe I wasted SO much time designing a drawing UI in both BLInk! and on my [ink on the web] Doodle app. I just dropped an Agilix InfiNotes Note control into an asp.net web page and poof! Actually, I didn't "drop" it, it's a windows forms control, so I embedded it via an Object tag. You can...

Can someone tell me what is special about this screenshot of my ink on the web application running from within Visual Studio? You can click on it to see a full size image. http://www.AcehAid.org...

Lora reports that there are 4 tablet pc's being given away at the Windows Anywhere conference, which is co-located with VSLive in SF Feb 7-10. The first tablet will be given away at the pre-con. The second at the end of the first day of sessions (Tuesday) The thrid at the end of the 2nd day of sessions...

www.microsoftwindowsanywhere.com co hosted with VSLive from VSLive: Like us, you're undoubtedly buried in email but don't forget this Wednesday, January 5th is the deadline to register for VSLive! and earn your Early Bird discount of $200 . We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco, Feb 6-10. There...

Roman Rehak bought himself an Averatec tablet pc and lost it pretty quickly to his 5 year old daughter Mishka. Maybe I can use my tablet to convince him to drop her off here for a few days. Both of his daughters are phenomenal kids. Here is Mishka with her New Year inked greeting . http://www.idepfoundation...

One very bright spot this past week was visiting with my own "nieces", actually the daughters of my cousin, Amy and Andrea. Their older brother has a fully outfitted Toshiba M200 - docking station and all, but they have never been allowed to touch it. So they were astonished that I let them use mine...

Larry O'Brien points out that Office has been updated with improved ink recognition . I haven't played with it yet - I still don't use my tablet for this type of stuff. (she said, sitting in front of her big desktop, 19" monitor and typing away at the keyboard - but still using BLInk! to write the post...

Wow, according to FrankGo's blog , I am in some company! Charles , Dr. Neil , Billy Hollis , Markus Egger , Shawn van Ness , Sean Campbell ! All of us and some other tablet whizes you may not know yet like Bernd Helzer from Agilix are speaking at Windows Anywhere in February! Posted from BLInk!...

Sean Campbell and Casey Chesnut are more adept at what I was attempting to express in this blog post . This is where the tablets are going. Researchers investigating #s of and placement of microphones on tablets, improving ink and speech recognition, improving connectivity, etc etc... This is really...

This seems to happen to Scoble every time he flies also. Frank Gocinski lost his tablet to his seat mate for the entire flight from Seattle to San Francisco. Seems that the seat mate is now a TabletPC convert! Posted from BLInk!...

Geeze Mike, don't you read my blog? Ahh I'm kidding. I know you do. But, dude, when you yawn about tablets because all you are seeing is Drawing programs Programs that let you annotate existing content in other file formats Programs that let you fill in forms ...it makes me wonder if you have seen my...

Richard Sprague pulls an interesting quote from a recent Fast Co. mag interview with Bill Gates. Many people think of the TabletPC as a laptop with inking capabilities, but there is so much more to it. The speech technology is really advanced and I learned a lot about what has gone into it and where...

We had some friends over for dinner along with their 7 yr old granddaughter, Alexa, who is a bright and engaging little girl. I gave her my tablet to draw on and then after a while thought of MathPractice . I had never played with this app before, but I went to TabletPCPost , browsed to the Education...

Loren Heiny is a developer who totally get's tablets! His circuit drawing application wow's me in the same way that XThink does. It helps me think out of the box of data entry applications. Loren has a short powerpoint deck, but one of the slides actually has an animated demo where you can see this thing...

I know that people have asked me in the past about being able to annotate PDF's with ink. Was it Scott ? Anyway, I see from here , that one of the top 10 apps in the Think in Ink contest does just that. GRAHL PDF Annotator . Check it out. Posted from BLInk!...

yeah - Peter Rysavy's blogging again with his rapid fire posts and great insights. He's happy to see Tablet PC ISV Business Development lead Frank Gocinski blogging (as all of us tablet geeks are!), thrilled with the promise of the Tablet PC Gaming SDK and more. He even has a new domain " Peter on Tech...

And rightfully so. Their application, Art Rage , is amazing even though I can't even begin to take advantage of it. I'm a smiley face artist. It is used by real artists. Hearty congrats to them!!! (saw the news by way of Tablet PC Talk ) Posted from BLInk!...

Larry O'Brien puts his finger right on it! Casey Chesnut, who’s my favorite Tablet PC programmer because he does all this stuff apparently without realizing that it’s supposed to be hard,.... Posted from BLInk!...

Last night on DotNetRocks we were all over the map and when we were talking about the tablet, I wanted to mention how he XThink Calculator had really helped me think out of the box for tablet applications. But my mind just couldn't find that name, which was buried deeply under all the other muck in there...

I don't think I had seen this site before and I have to say I am completely astonished. Scoble pointed (probably not the first time) to Larry Larsen's blog . I am having a hard time believing this, but these are "painted" using ArtRage on a tablet pc. Posted from BLInk!...

In addition to some of the Microsoft Tablet team being at the DevConnections because they were doing a full day pre-con and also decided at the last minute (or I only found out at the last minute) to do talks during the regular sessions as well, there was a definite, though concentrated, tablet buzz...

I got a few people at DevConnections to doodle on my web inking application here: www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx . Go to the gallery to see what they did. Add your own if you want! Posted from BLInk!...

This is not the first case of worn-out TabletPC enthusiasm I have seen. I really do envision a future where tablets are the norm...where they *are* the laptops. Where a laptop is a tablet and a tablet is a laptop and it's all mobile computing and there is no distinction any more. But the problem for...

Shawn van Ness has written a very important and informative article for anyone interested in writing tablet applications. He talks about some of the things that we have struggled with the most with our tablet apps - not how to recognize ink or things like that, but dealing with threads, security, resources...

Michael Gerfen and Andy Gray have started the www.TabletDev.com website which contains a [community] blog, forum and resources. It is targetted to TabletPC development. There are not a whole lot of people writing about TabletPC development yet. Loren Heiny and Casey Chesnut are probably the most prolific...

Really, it's the only way to get people to grok Tablets. Robert Scoble let a stranger on a plane (hopefully nothing like Strangers on a Train ) play with his tablet and got the usual “wow”. I LOVE to let my friends kids play with my tablet. First of all they are astonished that I am letting...

I was surprised to see this as the front page story in Monday's Burlington Free Press. It is about the requirement of laptops in local colleges and also focused on the fact that the UVM Business School is requiring Tablet PC's (which they referred to as “laptops on steroids”). The article...

by way of the Microsoft Tablet Team: Nine Tablet PC MVPs spent a week at Microsoft evaluating over one-hundred entries for the first round of the Microsoft Tablet PC Developer Contest, “ Does your App Think In Ink?” Microsoft and the judges are very pleased with the number of new high-quality...

Thanks to Mike G for an email about the coolest app we saw at PDC last year - the physics illustrator that was demo'd by Microsoft Research. Now anyone can get it (well anyone with a tablet...) here . I downloaded it and played with the existing demos and look forward to more play time but back to WSE...

Programmatic access to the real time stylus is one of the real OOOH AAAAH features of the Tablet PC SDK 1.7. Larry O'Brien, who is a real tablet developer guru, has written an article on DevX that really digs into this wondrous API . This is not something that you would use in a typical data entry application...

If I wasn't going on vacation tomorrow, I'd be playing with this new beta product that was released today from Agilix , who is on the forefront of broad market tablet app development with their widely used GoBinder application. Drag & Drop note taking functionality in your tablet app. Cool. I already...

Please, don' t make me use menus in my tablet applications. One of the big revamps I did while dogfooding my blogging application was in the place where you can draw and change things like colors, pen width, ink or erase, etc I made everything available to just click on right on the screen. I got sick...

Shawn rocks . He just explained something to me in the newsgroups that I think is really cool which is an internal windows thing. A little background. The TabletSDK has clipboard functionality. You can use it to copy ink data from one ink object to another. You can also use it for a few other formats...

Since the power was out (again! uggh) for a few hours this morning, I used the time to snuggle up to my Toshiba M200 and see if we couldn't become better friends. Poor Toshiba, still having to live in the shadow of the Acer. I discovered a lot of interesting features (lots of really handy utilities)...

by way of whatisnew.com In time, this once skeptical reviewer will be but one of the many users converted to the platform. --Paul Thurrott August 30, 2004 His entire review is just one big rave! read more...

Shawn van Ness has another article on Tablet PC development (will soon be on the MSDN Tablet PC Developer Center page) This one is on ink enabled web apps . oh NOW they publish it. AFTER I had to figure it out all myself. :-) (Umm with some help from Shawn and Casey and Stefan on the side ...) The end...

Geeze, I added a gallery to my doodle page so that you can save your web ink doodles and show the world. There is only one so far that wasn't either a test by me or the result of me begging my husband to do one....

On whatisnew.com, Lora points out a (reprinted) InfoWorld article by Tom Yager on VS2005. In it he says: "While testing remote debugging, I learned how well a Tablet PC works as a debugging console” but he does not elaborate. I wonder what he means? I don't have these bits on my tablet, as I am...

Josh Einstein( Einstein Technologies ) has an Outlook add-in called Tablet Enhancements for Outlook that allows you to ink directly into the contact, appointment or task forms and then recognize when you are done. I am going to check this out (there is a demo, and the product is only $20. Here's a review...

As I explore the technicalities of building and deploying an ink-enabled web app , there is still the question - “okay, so now what?” It's fun and cool and new, but... I do have lots of silly ideas - for example, use someone's picture as a background for the doodle. I'm curious what people...

1) Make sure that you using the RTM (release) version of the Tablet PC SDK 1.7 when you are compiling your component if you want your control to work on the final bits of Windows XP SP2. The SDK is v1.7.2600.2180 and can be downloaded at msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc or www.tabletpcpost.com . 2) Link the...

Did you know that John Robbins is a Tablet PC geek? Here is his latest article on Tablet PC Development in the MSDN Tablet PC Developer Center: Optimizing Applications for Tablet PC...

Kent Tengels just got an Acer C100 . I wonder if I influenced that one? :-) Kent, to answer your 3 questions: ... SDK1.7 is not supported with the whidbey beta... and I haven't tried it yet to see what happens ... you can persist the ink data and stuff it into your database . Then rehydrate it at a later...

Jeff Richter has the same sentiment about his tablets as I do . Like me, he has the Acer C110 and the Toshiba M200. He seems to prefer the Acer for it's size and has designated it as his travel machine, but prefers the power of the M200 which he will use when not travelling....

I dunno - the picture seems to be named “Tablet Dudes” - hey! I'm even wearing PINK for goodness sake. Three of the folks in the pic are from the Tablet Team, the rest are us students. I had never met Neil Roodyn (aka Dr. Neil) before the DevLab. A super nice (and oh my god smart) guy. Here...

I just happened to come across this post from Michael Gartenberg from November 2003! “Julia Lerman's notes from the PDC written on her Tablet PC. There's no way I could have linked to her yellow pad. Such is the power of pen based computing.”...

Well - now I have a Toshiba M200 and will soon ahve to give up my sweet little baby AcerC110. :'( I am actually fantasizing about asking my client if they want the Toshiba in exchange. But maybe I won't. I definitely don't have the same emotional draw to the Toshiba. Though it's a way faster processor...

The .NET Rocks! Tablet PC Listener Giveaway! http://www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks/ Watch Chris squirm over here....

Not for lack of submissions, but I think just a little confusion about the actual ending date. So you have another month to dig in to the TabletPC SDK and submit a Tablet App to this $100,000 contest . This is not a utility contest - but a real live app ...the more mass appeal, the better. If you go...

My husband was reading more about the FIeld2Base's ConstructConnect application that he pointed out to me about a month ago . He is really fascinated by this technology. In addition to the fact that you can use the tablet pc on a construction site to redline blue prints and send them back to anyone who...

Scott Watermasysk was asking around about the hefty Gateway Tablet PC. He said he just wanted it for email etc. I nearly whacked him upside the head (not really --he lives far away and my arm's not long enough to reach all the way up there) and asked why on earth he wanted such a mammoth to do email...

This is not even new news. But it's new to me. And the best is that Jon Box's company, Quilogy , is the one that wrote the software. Here is a page with a description of the project and a great video about it . Most notable is that the Zoo was honored with a 2003 InfoWorld 100 Award, as well as a Microsoft...

Peter Rysavy loves tablets more than anyone I have ever met. He is sad that people don't just love them like he does. I think Robert Scoble understands that when Peter is unhappy about this, it is just as (or maybe more) valuable to those who are trying to market the whole concept of ink as when he coos...

When I was at DevTeach, Rob Windsor who is the user group leader for the Toronto Visual Basic User Group , was very happy to show me his new Acer C110 tablet. This is the same as the one that I have and love. He told me he bought it because I am always talking/writing about how much I love mine....

Because I subsribe to the blogs of a number of tablet pc people, I am seeing this a lot and then realized that I can still share it with people who do not subscribe to those same blogs ( www.whatisnew.com , www.kstati.com/tabulapc , www.tabletpctalk.com , http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch ). This is...

Just as an FYI, when you are referencing the Microsoft.Ink assemblies in your applications, there are a few you need to use. The Microsoft.Ink assembly is the 1.0 version which has most of what you will need in it. The Microsoft.Ink.1.5 has the PenInputPanel and InkDivider Objects in it and the 1.7 has...

I have not had to work with the part of the tabletpc api that deals with hand writing recognition. I only have used the results of other's labor - in other applications. As I am digging deeper into this part of the sdk in preparation for my upcoming DevTeach presentation I am amazed at how complex the...

http://www.devx.com/TabletPC/Article/21302 Larry addresses the harshest things that come up with Tablet PC App design that, believe me you would NEVER think of, until you have tried to do some of this stuff. I wrote about a number of these while I was going through my first tablet pc app design process...

I sometimes find it useful to go back to introductory info on a topic after I have been using the technology for a while. This works because my focus will have changed dramatically since the first read-through. That is the case with Frank Gocinksi's Getting Started with Tablet PC Development article...

People are uploading their personal handwriting fonts to www.TabletPCPost.com for others to download. Peter Rysavy (and Chris Coulter in his comments) are voting against the idea. I, for one, with the crappiest handwriting in the world, am not grokking the point of the font program as a whole. Okay ...

Evan Feldman just started a blog and already jumps into the deep end to address a big question we all have about TabletPC's - who the heck is their target market. He has an explanation of what they are thinking over there in the TabletPC hallways of Microsoft and sums it up with this interesting statement...

When I initially proposed a Design Considerations for Tablet PC Development talk for DevTeach, I did not realize that it would be the only TabletPC talk for the whole conference. But since it is, I have shifted the focus to more coding against the TabletPC SDK. I will still spend some time talking about...

This is a half day free seminar from the Microsoft Tablet Team and the Leszynski Group that is targetted to developers. It hits Boston this Wednesday, June 9th. The sessions focus on core features of the Tablet SDK and will be code and API intensive. Date: Wednesday, June 9 2004, Start Time : 1:45 PM...

The proper method of erasing ink with the Tablet PC SDK is to set the pen to delete or Eraser mode. There are two methods of erasing: stroke, which deletes whatever stroke you touch on (ink collection is a collection of strokes) or point by point. The point by point method works like an eraser. As you...

This is probably the most common question that I hear from developers: “Why do I need to program with the SDK if the tablet already does handwriting recognition? I can just put my existing data entry forms on a tablet pc without having to change a thing and they will work, so what's the point of...

It just figures! He's a star -- get used to it! He spent 15 minutes writing a tool and came in 3rd place! Here's the article on the announcement from PCMag this morning. (thanks to TabletPCTalk for pointing that out.) Peter Rysavy has a nice write up on the 3 winning powertoys . There is still the full...

After his trials & tribulations with his stylus at TechEd, Scott went home with 3 styluses (ok - 6 years of Latin in high school tells me that should be stylii or something like that but remember, high school was a looooooong time ago). After I had whipped out a few test posts in Blink! and was more...

We had a lot of INETA meetings last week and even more additional meetings for the User Group Relations Committee which we are expanding to help handle the growing number of User Group members in North America. A few months ago I had created a power point map to visualize the distribution of states among...

Tablet Day Tablet Sessions Yes, I did many tablet related things at TechEd. There were really only 3 tablet related developer sessions for the entire TechEd and the scheduling gods were not smiling on the tablet team. They had two back to back sessions - 8:30 am and 10:15 am on Thursday and then one...

At the Tablet PC BOF at TechEd, Kent Tengels asked about CAD apps and TabletPCs for redlining blue prints on the construction site. Coincidentally, last night my husband, a carpenter, was doing some research on the website for the Journal of Light Construction and came across the program Field2Base which...

Thanks to Regional Director Barry Gervin (and now the lucky employer of Marcie Robillard and John Lam ) here are the links to the hands on labs from TechEd . I was trolling around for them so I could point to the awesome TabletPC hands on Lab that I did on Tuesday but didn't find them. So thanks not...

I've been waiting to hear what is going on at the TabletPC Developer events as the make their way around the country and around the world! Check teh schedule (U.S. and international) and register here. Lora Heiny attended teh training in San Jose, CA yesterday and reports on what developers were asking...

So you have already seen Peter Loforte showing off the cool UI stuff in Lonestar right? Well I was just checking out Channel 9 to link to that and saw all of thsi new stuff popped on there: Robert Williams talking about the question of “ will people give up the keyboard ?” Burt Parker talks...

The TabletPC BOF that I am leading on Tuesday at 6:30 pm is about Design Considerations. I wrote a lot about this a while back and Peter Rysavy encapsulated that so nicely in this post here if you want to get some ideas about what some of my own experiences were. Much of this will change with Lonestar...

Wait 'til they see the new TIP ...heh heh heh. We will win them over! See his crappy handwriting? Just like mine. Reco is pretty damned good and where it can't recognize, we still have our ways! Ummm - do you think the context tagging might impress those luddites? Peter Loforte - great job! Thank you...

I am so sick of trying to explain WHICH version of vs.NEXT I am using. It is tooo long. Just because they removed “.NET“ from the name, doesn't help. Visual Studio 2005 Community Edition March Preview or something like that Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview March 2004 Can't...

Holy Cow. So MANY MANY tablet posts today - Robert Scoble (and many yesterday , too), Peter Rysavy , Loren , Layne and Lora Heiny . It's all because eweek said the tablet is dead. Go read read read. And if you are going to TechEd and are curious why we all think tablets are so great, I am leading a Birds...

This did not come in through the RSS feed, so thanks to Robert Scoble for pointing it out. Mary Jo Foley lists the many problems/points of confusion with the message Microsoft is sending about TabletPCs and wonders what the future holds (and what we think). Robert says that if the Tablet Team was blogging...

On WhatIsNew Lora relays important date changes to the Tablet PC Campus Tour . "Attention people planning to attend University of Washington Microsoft Tablet PC Campus Demo Tour , the event is actually Friday, May 14th NOT May 6th as the website listed. The team apologizes for any inconvenience this...

Don't forget the TabletPC Tour is starting up! Today in Denver, tomorrow in S.F. Full schedule and registration are here www.tabletpctraining.com.microsoft (see time & location below) This free course provides an overview of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition features for developers, architects, systems...

Peter is absolutely right in describing my affection for my Acer. Perhaps this might be a smart thing to think about when marketing it. Perhaps it might be a good idea to ensure that the manufacturers continue to design them with these form factors. Unfortunately, that's probably also going to mean “...

Loren Heiny , who is a developer first and a tablet pc (MVP and) expert second (that ranking is my own personal opinion), (and even an author ) -- spent some time using his new Toshiba M200 as a development machine to answer the question many developers have asked - “but can I use a tablet as my...

Oh no! Someone “leaked” the decks from the MDC talks on developing applications for TabletPC with the TabletPCSDK. This is terrible. Now anyone will be able to write tabletpc applications! So please, don't show anyone these links ! Found by way of whatisnew.com and tabulapc , too. Naughty...

Wow lots of tablet events sweeping the country in the next few months. Grabbed ths list from Loren and am adding my own comments. Mobility Road Show http://www.chrysalisevents.com/tabletroadshow/ About 20+ cities. 8:30am to noon Targetted at end users Tablet PC Demo Days http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp...

Peter Rysavy ponders his blog schtick as he notes a one year anniversary. I think Peter does a great job of keeping everyone honest and asking questions about Tablets and is really instrumental in pushing developers. I have learned a lot and been totally inspired thanks to Peter's writing. Now if only...

Okay, another one out of the closet. Heh heh. Not really. Jay's been doing pen based computing for 10 years and has a hot new Toshiba M200. And here is the power of a developer who is “one with the tablet” - his company is rolling out 7,000 tablets (early 2005). So from a guy who knows what...

Oh, and whadya know. I am also going to host a TabletPC BOF at TechEd ! Want to come drool on my TabletPC? Ummm - I'll bring the protector sleeve. Want to see how easy it is to ink-enable your existing apps? Want to see what you can do beyond what the tablet already does by itself? Want to talk about...

okay all you tablet experts - help this poor man ! :-) Rather than me trying to list so many awesome sites for you, Linda Epstein ( www.tabletpc2.com ) has probably all of the links you need right here !...

See what she thinks about the new box ... I actually prefer the small form factor of the C100 line (I currently ahve a C110). But will also soon getting a larger tablet that I can be more productive on. Why is it that I still LOVE my little itty bitty cute tablet when I can't program on it?...

I guess that IPAQ Server farm idea didn't work out too well. So CodeProject has found a great way to dump all of those little buggers on a host of unsuspecting developers. A .NET CF coding competition. So when you've finished with that, go grab the TabletPC SDK and get onto the $100,000 Tablet PC App...

Sorry - I just couldn't bring myself to register for yet another web site community so I am posting my question on my blog instead of over here where we are supposed to . I really hope hope hope that you SHOW the tablet pc in use. So many people haven't seen them. Show it doing that flippy thing if you...

The poor Microsoft Tablet Team is already battling confusion over the renaming of Lonestar/Tablet PC Edition 2004 to Tablet PC Edition 2005 . Okay - their explanation makes sense to me. Even though this Tablet PC version will be coming out in mid-2004, it will probably be the basic version for a bunch...

Lonestar, umm I mean Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 , umm, wait no, I mean Tablet PC Edition 2005 - or as Peter sadly suggests , maybe just “that tablet feature in Windows XP”. Maybe we should have just have one O/S: Windows XPT and people using their legacy (non-digitized, non-speech...

If you are trying to market TabletPC's or you are trying to write TabletPC apps, definitely go read Ian's comments about why he is not interested in tablets . Hopefully the future will bring enough improvements on these fronts that they won't be issues anymore....

This is a joint venture of the Leszynksi Group and Microsoft see more and register at www.tabletpctraining.com/microsoft Tablet PC Tour for Developers - 2004 The Tablet PC is a personal computer powered by Microsoft® Windows® XP that is geared for ink-, pen-, and speech-enabled applications...

Markus has an editorial in Code Magazine with a lot of great points. He addresses the “why do I want one“ question, starting off with “ Tablet PCs have many uses, but it seems that only a few of them are obvious to developers. I think this may have to do with the fact that most developers...

I was actually thinking of email Robert to suggest getting some TabletPC Team folks onto Channel 9 . What better way to SHOW people what you can do with a Tablet? Channel 9 video. But I just saved myself the postage, since he's already planning to do it ! That will be fun to see....

Reading Lora's post on the TabletPC in the MASS marketplace, I realized that the answer to everyone's “WHY TabletPC?” question is really “WHY NOT?!”. Think about it. Lora points out that the TabletPC o/s is a superset of Windows XP. A tablet is a laptop with a LOT of other bells...

I had two great excuses to go into Bristol this morning which meant I called up my fellow programmer and friend Jean for a quick “bakery date” as well. While we sipped our coffee and nibbled on our treats (that's a lie - I'm not quite that dainty!), I noticed the man sitting at the table...

There were 30 people at our user group meeting last night. I brought my little Acer C110 tablet and offered it up for people to play with. Maybe it was because of the pizza they were eating, but I was stunned that nobody jumped at the opportunity. Okay I did say “when you finish your greasy pizza...

Well, I think that we pushed Arin Goldberg over the edge at the MVP Summit because today he started a blog! Yippee. Arin is the architect of the TabletPC SDK as well as the Technical Evangelist. I had a bunch of fun crashing his TabletPC MVP dinner at the Rainier club (in my jeans and Tevas - oops) and...

well THAT was embarrassing. I have been parading around for months showing off Lonestar on my Tablet only to discover tonight that - egads - I had the OCTOBER 2003 bits! No wonder I kept having my wifi wig out and getting a BSOD. It was a known issue that has been fixed. So what I have is XP with the...

I had an opportunity to go to MDC as a speaker (Tablet) and struggled with a decision because it was quickly followed by my upcoming trip to Seattle for the MVP Summit and a likely trip to TechEd. Three trips out west in such a short period would have just been too too much for me, so I unhappily said...

From my previous post : Microsoft and Tablet PC manufacturers have a hard road ahead of them. Who should they be targetting? Developers? (yes) Consumers? (iffy) Corporations? (yes yes yes). IF IF they want the consumer market, that will be the rockiest road. I had a long talk with a friend who is a passionate...

Boy, first it was “write a tablet pc app and win a tablet pc”, then the “Does your code think in ink? Win $15,000” contest. Now Microsoft has really raised the bar with the “Does Your Mobile Application Think in Ink? Win $100,000” contest for ISV's (found via Brian...

Rory Blyth thinks his tablet pc needs wings . Not true - it just needs Lonestar. I can now write in www.thedatafarm.com and get just that not www . thedatafarm . com like before. Same with email addresses - no problem with blah@blahblah.com Sorry dude, but when I hear “it's got wings!” I...

I have the alpha of next version of the Tablet PC O/S on my little Acer - it's called Lonestar. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it but did a bit more yesterday when I was testing the deployment of my client app. There are two things that I want to ooh aah about. First is the handwriting recognition...

I had the good fortune of chatting with Arin Goldberg today, the ISV Architect from the Tablet PC Group and the guy who designed the Tablet SDK and wrote many of the samples. He had fun telling me that he's the guy who wrote the InkLog application that I wrote about in my blog and his interpretation...