Monthly Archives: June 2004

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.

    INETA general inbox

    Ineta

    I am [by choice] somewhat of a filter for the many general emails that come into INETA. It’s actually fun because I see so much that is going on and connect with a lot of people. Most times I need to just make sure the email gets to the person with the right knowledge to respond to whatever the email was about.

    Today there was an email from a startup user group in Moscow (the one in Russia, not the little town outside of Stowe, Vermont). The leader is a university student who was part of one of the Imagine Cup teams that competed in the final rounds in Russia this year. I just needed to get that mail forwarded to Christian Nagel, but as I did I also cc’d a few other guys in Russia, Andrei Filev who is very involved with INETA and Mike Yasnev, yet another student u.g. leader from Moscow who I have chatted with a bunch of times. This way, the new user group leader could be sure to get connected to some other people who already have a experience with INETA and especially because Andrei is a great resource in Russia for .NET.

    There are a ton of things that I do with INETA that give me great pleasure. This is definitely one of them.

    VS Team System and Whitehorse – catering to both sides of the fence?

    Just Rambling

    With the ongoing debate between UML-types and XP-types, does anybody think, as I do, that by introducing Whitehorse which (from my limited experience with modelling – so I could be misinterpreting it) embeds modelling into Visual Studio and introducing Team System which (from my limited experience with XP since I work alone) embeds XP practices into Visual Studio, that Microsoft is now catering to both types of programmers? Which of course is the safe and smart thing to do, rather than tout one practice over the other.

    Microsoft Locker Room etiquette 101

    Just Rambling

    So you’re in the locker room (let’s say you’re a guy and it’s the men’s locker room). There’s sweaty Steve Ballmer standing 6 feet away getting ready to take a shower. You are the only two guys in the locker room.

    What do you do?

    Ignore him?
    Say “hey, pretty impressive lifting I saw you doing out there, dude”? (well, you might want to skip the “dude“ part…)
    Ask him why the hell there are so many different image editing applications from MS?
    Tell him you think it’s time you got a g*-d* raise?

    Luckily a quandry I’ll never be in. But if you’re Duncan Mackenzie (or some other MS employee working out at the corporate gym), you definitely have to worry about stuff like this. Read what Duncan has to say on the topic.

    Evan Feldman from the Mobile PC Team talks about Microsoft and Tablet PCs

    Tablet

    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:

    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.

    I think I’m going to add that quote to my deck for my tablet pc talk at DevTeach.

    Evan, by the way, is now a user research manager for the Mobile PC Team  but he started the user research group for Tablet PC and says that his “charter is to understand the needs, usefulness and usability.“