Daily Archives: June 10, 2004

6 little words that made my day even better than before!

Community Cheerleading

Those 6 little words were “I have a blog now, too” from Cathi Gero.

So let me review. In less than 3 months some of the top women developers in our industry have started weblogs.

Prior to this recent rush, Susan Warren started a blog in November (right after PDC.)

Then spring comes with a flood of new blogs:

First Kate Gregory gets a blog.

Then Kathleen Dollard buckles and blogs.

Then Michele Leroux Bustamente starts up dasBlonde.

Earlier this week Kimberly Tripp amazed us with her new SQL blog.

And now Cathi Gero is blogging too.

For those of you who do not know Cathi, she is a serious pro with a lot of experience. Here is her bio, ripped from the DevTeach speaker page.

Cathi Gero, C.P.A., is founder and development director of Prenia Corporation, providing custom software applications, training, and architectural designing to businesses and developers. Cathi is a Microsoft C# MVP and is an active member of the .NET community. She has extensive experience developing applications using the .NET Framework, Visual FoxPro, SQL Server, and Crystal Reports as well as other technologies. She is a speaker at national conferences, author of white papers for Microsoft, and technical editor for the book ‘.NET For VFP Developers’. She also has a monthly column, “Cathi Gero’s .NET Tips” which appears in Universal Thread Magazine. Most of the year Cathi travels to various companies providing onsite training, mentoring, and development experience.

<me>grinning from ear to ear</me>

Hmmm, who’re we gonna work on next…?

asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice Awards

Community Cheerleading

So, I’m a little late to the party.

I was going thruogh the rest of my pile of mail from while I was at TechEd. I was afraid there might be some bills in there to pay!

There was the June 2004 issue of asp.netPro magazine with the Reader Awards (it took me 10 minutes to find the link to this article – that site has been in need of a major overhaul since it’s inception! and no links to the winner’s either!)

How fun to read through and see:

Scott Cate’s  and Dave Wanta’s kbAlertz get Best Community and Product of the Year

Scott Cate’s  myKB as Best Content Managment System.

Peter Blum’s Peter’s Polling Package as Best Polling Tool and his Date Package as the Best Scheduling/Calendar Tool.

Dave Wanta’s ASPNet Email as Best EMail Control

Andrew Putnam’s dotNetBB as Best Forum App

Mark Miller (and all the folks at Developer Express) ‘s CodeRush as best Add-In and numerous other products from them as well

I loved seeing these! There are other categories and other winners, but I know these guys (though I only met Mark just last week at TechEd and haven’t talked much with Andrew since our emails when dotNetBB was really taking off a few years ago). But Scott and Peter and Dave – cool, cool and cool. Congrats! 

Larry O’Brien is back with TabletPC Design Considerations

Tablet

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 had not personal experience as a user to draw on so everything came as a surprise to me. Peter Rysvay actually encapsulated my posts very well in one – so I can point you to that if you are curious.

Three types of Tablet PC Applications

Tablet

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 on the tablet pc developer center (This is the first of the articles Tablet PC 101 Column). Besides doing some quick tricks with the SDK, Frank talks at the end about the 3 levels of TabletPC Integration that ISVs can build into their applications.

The first is ISV Supported Applications

These are apps that are not specifically designed to leverage Tablets, but have some features that make it easier to use the app on a tablet

  • Install without a keyboard.
  • Run in both portrait and landscape display mode.
  • Behave normally, and, with the help of Input Panel, collect handwriting and transform it to text

    • Next is Pen-Centric Applications

    These apps again are not designed soley for Tablets, but have features in them that allow the user to leverage ink. So the developer may have added some special ink functionality (though it is still accessible via keyboard and mouse) like drawing, throughout the application. Pen-Centric apps will also take advantage of the new context-tagging feature so that it will be easier for the end-user go leverage context-tagging. Hmm there’s no article on that yet…but basically you can define the type of data that a particular field expects and then take advantage of filtering in the recognizers or a more flexible Tablet PC Input Panel. This is a feature of Lonestar and of TabletPC SDK 1.7 which is in beta right now. There is a tool you can use to define the context and then it is stored in an xml file which makes for some serious flexibility in programming and sharing the definitions. Very slick implementation.

  • Have incorporated ink into all or parts of your application.
  • Use the Tablet PC API to deliver support for ink and use of the pen.

    • Third and most TabletPC intense is Pen-Perfect Applications

    These are the apps that have been designed to make it a LOT better to use with the Pen than mouse & keyboard. These apps take advantage of gestures, symbols, pen pressure. They may even do things that you just wouldn’t or couldn’t do with a keyboard. Additionally, they are written using the Tablet PC Design Guidelines and as Frank says, these are the apps that are going to sell Tablets.

    Here’s Frank’s hit list:

    • Are optimized to run on the Tablet PC.
    • Fully support ink interoperability.
    • Use gestures as part of their user interaction model.
    • Adhere to our collection of Tablet PC Design Guidelines.

    Definitely check out this article for a more indepth look at these types of applications and links to examples.

    Replacing the nice readable computer font with your crappy handwriting

    Tablet

    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 – I get the personalization of it. But I can’t READ my handwriting. I can read Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc. 

    I guess if I had nice handwriting, but still can type faster, and wanted to send a more personal note to someone, I could use that font so it looked a little more like I took the time to site down and write something to them by hand.

    Nah – who’s going to fall for that?

    Okay …I guess I don’t understand the point of the personal font. What I do think is that it does point to some interesting potential (that I haven’t conceived yet myself) with tablet development and is just a cool little step on the way and a fun tool. I think kids would really dig it actually. It really is a fun idea. Just doesn’t happen to be practical for me. But then that points back to what I think is a very important quote from Evan Feldman:

    those who are evaluating Tablet’s today aren’t necessarily the target user and thus don’t see the value and promise in the platform, but instead are looking towards all the cool things that the technology could do rather than the simple and mundane tasks that it actually enhances.