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 programs and downloaded it and let Alexa use it. She was so excited to work with this application. She actually loves math and her grannies get her lots of math workbooksfor kids her age which entertain her enormously. But the worksbooks don’t give her a little smiley face when she has answered correctly or highlight a number in red if it’s incorrect. So this program just gave her a new, interesting and entertaining way to learn math. Her grannies were really thrilled. She is looking forward to trying out some of the other programs on the tabletpc they have at home. MathPractice is another one of Loren Heiny’s programs that go beyond just using ink to replace a keyboard.

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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 in action. You can get to it from here. I have already forwarded it to a friend who is the associate dean of UVM’s Engineering School (who has handy access to a tablet).

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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.

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Loren gives some inside scoop on being a participant in this $100,000 contest. He also links to all of the winning apps..

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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,….

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and Code Magazine‘s Rod Paddock gets the scoop!

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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. So I described the application and I also learned that someone in the chat room kept typing ‘it’s XTHINK!’, but I wasn’t watching the chat room.

I’ve written about othe program before. (almost exactly one year ago!) It’s really cool.

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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.

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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 at the show. The most interesting thing they did was set up a hands on lab in the exhibition hall with 30 tablets, a few people from the team and happily for me, Lora Heiny and Loren Heiny. The hands on lab is the same one I did at TechEd and is really a fantastic walk through demonstrating to programmers how easily they can tap in to the inking functionality of the tablet as well as how deep the API really goes. The lab definitely needs a VB version. I was there helping some VB programmers out who, though trying to learn about the tablet api, were struggling with things like casing and other syntax problems that prevent C# from compiling. I think that will get done soon (I even offered to do it, but I think it will happen from within the team). The lab had a lot of people in it throughout the show, though, considering there were about 1500 attendees, the sessions themselves were not heavily attended. My session had some last minute changes since there were the extra sessions added in and I basically had to cut it in half. And those that did attend my session, where I walked through some of the tougher issues to deal with when writing an ink-enabled web application (using my online Doodle app as the my demo), had been attending many of the tablet sessions so they were light on questions.

It was fun to go to the famous Aureole restaurant that was right in the casino – famous to us, because it has a beautiufl tablet application to help clients sort through their thousands of bottles of wine. I think I blogged about it once and might dig up that link when I’m on line again. I went with Arin, Mark, Elliot and Mason from the tablet team as well as Kathleen who has a new M200! Thanks for the vino guys.

Most fun for me was to hang out a bit with Lora and Loren, though they weren’t around in th eevenings.

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!

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