Boy, first it was “write a tablet pc app and win a tablet pc”, then the “Does your code think in ink? Win $15,000” contest. Now Microsoft has really raised the bar with the “Does Your Mobile Application Think in Ink? Win $100,000” contest for ISV’s (found via Brian Keller’s weblog). While Tablet PC manufacturer’s continue to have to lower the prices of the tablet pc’s to encourage people to buy them, Microsoft is being pressured by these vendors to give people more reasons to want a tablet – apps with mass market appeal.

Something is just not right here.

Peter (Tabula PC) drops a hint about upcoming Tablet PC goodies…but says don’t get too excited, it’s not a big deal. Funny, but regardless of his caveat, I’m still awfully curious!

Rory Blyth thinks his tablet pc needs wings.

Not true – it just needs Lonestar.

I can now write in www.thedatafarm.com and get just that not www . thedatafarm . com like before. Same with email addresses – no problem with blah@blahblah.com

Sorry dude, but when I hear “it’s got wings!” I can’t help but think of this.

I have the alpha of next version of the Tablet PC O/S on my little Acer – it’s called Lonestar.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it but did a bit more yesterday when I was testing the deployment of my client app.

There are two things that I want to ooh aah about.

First is the handwriting recognition. It’s completely amazing. Not only does it recognize total chicken scrawl (this will be good for the healthcare market, eh?) but the fact that there is inference built in just blows me away. Plus it has a lot of cool new features. Example: recognizing one word at a time as you write. If it is confused it will show you options based on it’s best guess and then you select that word. And I believe it then stores that choice in a dictionary, much like a lexicon when you use voice recognition software. I did a TON of voice related stuff (text to voice, actually) a few years ago and boy was that challenging.

The other thing that I found interesting is a new use of the TIP (that’s the Tablet PC Input Panel – where you write and it recognizes). Infragistics was out of the gate VERY early with this (and has added a lot more functionality), but the TIP now pops up automatically when I select a text input box – even in my grid. Because I am using the Infragistics Ink enabled tools, I am not sure at this point what Lonestar is doing on it’s own or what is being done by the Infragistics tools. I’ll have to play with that.

I haven’t touched the new SDK yet, but first thing I’ll be playing with when I do is the ink-enabled web controls!! www.inklog.com (an experiment by Arin Goldberg on the tablet team which I think he whipped together in one day) uses this. But you can only see the output, not how they are doing the input.

No need to be jealous – Microsoft IS looking for more commercial tablet application developers to join the alpha program! Check Tabula PC’s blog here for more info (and follow his link to the lonestar FAQ that Chris deHerrera is doing…)

Robert Scoble pointed out the TabletPC Tour that is bringing a hands on tablet pc experience to 7 cities around the country in late February and early March. It’s not a developer event as it is targetted at IT Decision makers — i.e. come see why you need your company to use tablet pc’s. Anyway, still a good way to get a hands on educational experience with Tablets if you are interested or trying to get your client or boss to get interested so you can start having fun writing ink-enabled applications!!

I had the good fortune of chatting with Arin Goldberg today, the ISV Architect from the Tablet PC Group and the guy who designed the Tablet SDK and wrote many of the samples. He had fun telling me that he’s the guy who wrote the InkLog application that I wrote about in my blog and his interpretation that I was saying how horrible I thought it was! Egads. Now Arin, I didn’t say it was horrible, I just thought “very cool, now add in some legible hand writing and some links and the program is golden“. And I was VERY inspired by it. I spent days thinking about what I might want to see in an ink blog and how it might be implemented. And finally started messing around with it with BLInk!

Well, now that I felt like a total heel :-), Arin told me something about the inner workings of the application that basically astounded me. It’s a web application. Get it? Inking on a web page! Hello. Now that is VERY cool. How did he do it? A cute little trick called embedding a windows inking control into a webform. (Yes I am referring to the commont technique used with ActiveX controls and Windows Forms User Controls) Not that I’m gonna try this at home (not this afternoon at least). However, Lonestar (next version of the TabletPC OS which is a FREE upgrade coming out later this year) apparently addresses this and we’ll all have some more tools for doing something (maybe not full interaction yet, but closer than we are now) along those same lines with the new sdk. I look forward to checking out Lonestar and seeing more for myself.

Now why didn’t I think of this? (The question itself is just a joke of course).

[Yes I have found it necessary to create an entirely new category on my blog.]

I had dinner (oh wait, ala Scoble, a lovely dinner, a memorable dinner…) with a friend who is the Dean of the Business School at University of Vermont. She now uses a Tablet PC exclusively and loves it. Although I wouldn’t call it “standardizing“ , she indicated that they are going to get a number of tablets in the near future. I was fascinated by this, of course.

I asked her WHY??? Why do you love using the tablet so much? Her response was that she is much more used to writing by hand than typing. An interesting slant for someone like me who types – who knows… 100 words a minute or something insane like that and can’t write for beans anymore with a pen or pencil. I asked her what software she would like to see for the tablet. She pointed to Word, Outlook and Excel, then to the Pen Input Panel. “What more do I need than this?”

This just makes me laugh! I sure hope the marketing people over in the Tablet area read this!

She also sent me home with one of the best loaves of homemade bread I have had in a long time (that she had made). A woman who definitely uses many sides of her brain.