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 data through the pipe, from the client side to the server back to the client was vewwwy twicky. Also, thanks to a bunch of ASPInsiders and then Jeff Prosise who laid the final blow to get me to modify my application to use HTTPHandlers. They always sound so scary, so “for plumbers only”…. but actually they are EASY and will get even easier in VS2005.

The article is on the home page of the tablet dev center under the “Recent Articles” section.

Note the article by Dr. Neil right below it, on leveraging the Network Location Awareness API for managed code. I sure wish I had had *that* darned API when I wrote my first few mobile apps. I came up with my own way of detecting “am I on the local network?” “am I on the web?” “am I totally disconnected?”.

http://www.AcehAid.org

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.

Two thoughts popped into my head while reading Loren’s thoughts.

1) Journal can search on ink – so obviously the inkdata combined with sdk functionality allows for that. One of my favorite things to demo to developers in Journal is to write a sentence in a circle and then have Journal search for one of the words that is sideways and curved.l

2) The ink data is likely being stored in that GIF (fortified GIF persistance format also persists the ink data). But how on earth can google find it? We need an API that exposes the ink data. That is, of course, assuming that all of the writing is recognized properly.

I’ll have to look into the project that Layne is working on that Loren mentions in his post.

http://www.AcehAid.org

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!

http://www.AcehAid.org

(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 what you are learning in the Tablet SDK. I know that when I first did the Hands on Labs and they were in C# (now there are VB versions), I actually thought that the delegate I set up to create an event handler for one of the ink events was (gulp) part of the tablet API code! (I know better now 😉 – but that’s what happens when you pile learning curves one on top of another…)

A little digging around (why was this necessary?) points all of this back to Stein & Associates and there are real people’s names on that site: Dan and Kimberley. It would be nice if they were a little more transparent on the VBInk site so we know who it is that is actually doing this site. That’s the whole point of having community… so that we can have personal relationships with each other. (hint hint :-))

http://www.AcehAid.org

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 and existing applications. Simply drag the control from the toolbox and begin adding digital ink to your application immediately! You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can develop ink note-taking features in your .NET application. InfiNotes Standard Edition is available free from http://www.infinotes.com and should be installed on your development environment along with the Tablet PC SDK, available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc. (You do not need a Tablet PC to develop Tablet apps, this can be done right from your existing Windows development environment).

http://www.AcehAid.org

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 of them – and this is just the solution we talked about. The other, of course, is to enable this same machine to act as a cell phone also. It has wireless, can easily have gps, has all of your phone numbers in it. Leave it closed, leave it off even (though we have the auxiliary power and display to help us)! But plug in a headset and using voice commands dial up someone in your outlook contacts. No this is not supposed to be the replacement for a phone. But just one more feature to make the laptop be the perfect mobile device!

http://www.AcehAid.org

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 amazing things with ArtRage.

Hey Rob, there are two more Vermont bloggers that you can add to your list. Dave Burke,  Roman Rehak (both geeks) and Andrea Learned (not a geek). We lost Joy to law school in Pennsylvania last year, boo hoo.

Evan Feldman notes that the 1millionth tablet pc was sold sometime in February…

http://www.AcehAid.org

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 the Tablet PC O/S. Oh well. I am still waiting for the perfect device….

http://www.AcehAid.org