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.

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