Category Archives: Tablet

More thoughts on TabletPC Killer App

Tablet

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 Deeper in .NET, I learned that my friend’s partner, a painting contractor who is extremely non-technical, has a TabletPC. [read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Combining ink controls and server controls on a web page

Tablet

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 an asp:dropdownlist, the page crashed. She said she got no error message.

I tried the same thing and received a big fat error saying “Control ‘dropdownlist1’ of type ‘dropdownlist’ must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server”.

Aha! In order to do most of the tricks I am performing with moving the ink control’s data from the client side to the server side require the form to not be a server-side form. Therefore “runat=server” does not exist in the form tag.

The solution is to have separate forms on the page for the ink control and the server side controls.

Kirk Allen Evans reminds us that only one server side form can be visible at a time, so you have to design your page around these limitations unfortunately. You don’t be able to have server controls in a form, then below that an ink control in another form and then below that more server controls in a third form.

The general html of the page would look like this:

 
<html>
<HEAD> …some stuff in here </HEAD>
 
<body>
<script> ..some scrpts here </script>
 
<!–this is the form that handes the inkable control. It does NOT have runat=server–>

  <form id=”inkForm” name=”inkForm” action=”Handler.ashx” method=”post”>

     <object id=”ComplexInkControl” classid=”InkControls.dll#InkControls.MyInkControl” style=”width: 100px;
     height: 100px” VIEWASTEXT></object>

  </form>
 
<!–this is the form that has server side controls–>

   <form id=”serversideFORM” runat=server>

        <asp:DropDownList ID=”DropDownList1″ runat=”server” AutoPostBack=”True”>
             <asp:ListItem>a</asp:ListItem>
             <asp:ListItem>b</asp:ListItem>
             <asp:ListItem>c</asp:ListItem>
             <asp:ListItem>d</asp:ListItem>
         </asp:DropDownList><br />

         <asp:Label ID=”Label1″ runat=”server” Text=”Label”></asp:Label><br />

     </form>

</body>

</html>

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Joel Spolsky’s Chicken and Egg Theory and TabletPCs

Tablet

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 (“make more software so people will want to buy our tablets!”). [read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Loren Heiny shows a great next step for Ink on the web

Tablet

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 in he google text box, then it will get recognized and converted to text. This is instead of using the TIP.

This is big U.I. problem that many tablet pc developers struggle with. We like the idea of users opening up forms and writing directly in them and having that get recognized. What we lose, though is the editing flexibility of the tip. So the conundrum is how to get these two things to merge!

Loren is using some magic to get his inkable edit boxes placed over the fields, which means that this needs to be predefined somehow for each page. But that doesn’t seem worriesome to me. It sounds like his tool might eventually enable anyone to create the definitions for any page and share them. Or the developers of those page could create the placement definitions for their own pages and let end users download them. Something like the how the context tagging works for tablet pcs. Or better yet, anyone could just hire Loren to create the mappings for their pages. 🙂

Anyway, check out Loren’s post and accompanying video demonstration. Neat stuff!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Eolas, ActiveX in I.E. and Ink on the Web

Tablet

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 that affects our websites. I also found a blog post by Steve Smith and another by Matt Watson with discusson on workarounds.

I installed the update this morning from Windows Update to see  how it affected my ink-enabled winforms controls that are hosted in a web page (eg the Doodling website). Without any of the scripting workarounds, the effect is not really bad at first. Just by placing the cursor over the control area, I get the popup that says “click to activate and use this control.” Click and I’m instantly inking. But it doesn’t remember! I have to do it every time I ope the page in a new i.e. session. This is with Disable Script Debugging checked. If I refresh the page, I get a different message, “press spacebar or enter to activate the control.” But just clicking still works. Odd.

Okay so that was testing on my non-tablet with a mouse. With the tablet and stylus, luckily I don’t really need to tap and THEN draw. Doing that gives me an inky dot where I tapped. But I can actually just ignore the message and start drawing and it works. But this means, I will have to explain this on my website. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to check into the scripting after all.

So the known issue is with this thing unchecked – as all good web developers have it set. I didn’t experience anything different. I’ll keep playing with it.

 



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Win a Mobile PC (or is that a Tablet PC?) at DevConnections

Tablet

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 one in the elevator to an attendee, he said “yeah, the Mobile PC team is giving them out and they are giving out a Mobile PC every day during the conference.” So it sounds like people are getting it now. A mobile pc has a lot of features that enable mobility and ink is only one of those features.

Posted from BLInk!

Confusion over “no TabletPC version” for Vista

Tablet

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 true at all. In fact, he knows that I am using Vista on a tablet, but thought that it was going to be removed.

TabletPC functionality is built into Vista and will not be separate. That’s all this means.

I wonder how many others will misinterpret that sentence?

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org