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by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: So what about that Tablet PC ?
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Iâm a big fan of the tablet PC and have a category tablet PC on my blog. But havnât blogged that much on the Tablet recently. Iâve been writing a lot of ASP.NET production code and didnât have the time to care of my pet. Time for a little catchup.
On the hardware front things are moving in a steady pace towards main stream adaption. Many brands have tablet models, for instance Toshiba now has a tablet Tecra and even IBM is said to work on one. The main problem was always the extra price but the difference is getting less and less. So your next notebook might as well have tablet capabilities. But you should see a tablet PC as more than just a notebook with added pen capabilities. Bill Gatesâs pet, demonstrated at the WinHec keynote, is the Haiku. Which is smaller than a notebook and larger than a PDA. The main diffence between a PDA and a tablet are (at the moment) the screen and the OS. The PDA has a touch screen and the tablet a magnetic digitizer built into the screen. The PDA runs on Pocket PC and the tablet XP tablet PC edition (a superset of XP pro). These intermediate devices are no vaporware, at the moment you can install XP tablet edition on a Sony U750. That machine measures 17 by 11 cm (6.5â x 4.5â), does not meet all specs to be an official tablet, but it worked to full content of the owner.
So the hardware is making good progress, but what about the software ? Windows XP tablet PC edition is cool and very usefull. MS has realeased a tablet experience pack with some cool add-ons. It includes a number of tools which had the status of Power tool and now are making thier way into the standard feature set of a tablet. My favourites are:
A slightly souped up version of the award winning ArtRage app, now dubbed InkArt. This is the app to show when you demonstrate a tablet. Oohs and ahhs from everybody.
The energy blue theme realy improves the readability of your screen. The digitizer in a tablet screen significantly reduces that, the theme compensates pretty well.
Ink desktop. As you might recall you can scribble on anything which has a windows handle, the Ink desktop lets you scribble right upon the desktop.
A full review of the pack is on the windows supersite.
And whatâs there for the developers ? The easiets way to add inking to your apps is using the Infinotes suite. Very nice to include inkable notes to your applications, itâs MS journal on the toolbar of VS. But you cannot do things with the pen in combination with existing stuff in your apps. For that you need to explore the Microsoft.Ink namespace. This is a beautifull API, the basics are well described in the only real book on tablet programming. But itâs not the full story. A further step exploring the possibilities should have been the tablet game SDK, presented in the Arcs of Fire game. The beta was launched on the Windows Anywhere conference but since than their website seems to be in state of shellshock. The blog has been dead for months. There is really good stuff in there but you need to be familiar with the API basis to understand what they are trying to do.
The future for the tablet lies in Longhorn. Itâs not yet completely clear whether there will a separate tablet version of Longhorn or not. What is promised is that Ink Data will be a data type which every Longhorn installation can work with. Ink data is more than just the picture scribbeld; it does contain a lot of information how that picture was drawn: which pen strokes were drawn in what order, how do the strokes intersect, what is the local stroke thickness, etc. Under XP you can exchange ink data as ink or as a fortified GIF (and in xml). A fortified GIF is an image of the result and does also have all ink data in the image header. You can install the Microsoft.ink api on a non tablet PC after which you can read and manipulate the ink data on a non-tablet. You can even input ink on a non tablet using the mouse. Trying to do that is the best demonstration why a pen is such a lovely input device. The only thing which you cannot install on a non tablet is handwriting recognition. At the moment the tablet specific software part is quite modular. Fits Longhorn.
The current Microsoft.Ink is non managed code. Internally itâs a load of COM (and can be used form VB6), for VS thereâs a nice managed wrapper. I guess they are working on a native managed version for Longhorn ? Recently there has also been quit some talk on Longorn and a touch screen. At first sight using a pen or just your fingertips is pretty similar. For the hardware there is a big difference. You apply preasure on the screen with anything, for instance the nice goodie pen I got at the MS Windows Anywhere conference. Tablet PCâs use digitizers which respond to changes in the magnetic field caused by a special pen. In some of my previous posts I explored this world and found out that these pens are usually not interchangable. Using a magnetic pen you rest the palm of you hand on the tabletâs screen when writing. No problem. But a touchscreen will detect the palm of your hand and interpret it as a giant click. So there are some problems to bring these two worlds together.
MS research is also working on pen and fingered input devices. Thereâs Xnav, a device you operate with just your thumb. In case youâre interested the technology can be licensed. MS says they just donât have the time to work on this as well. Others research stiching, how to use pen gestures which span multiple displays.
The tablet hardware is becoming mainstream, tablet software has the potential to change the mainstream. These days a computer is considered incomplete without a mouse. A pen does what a mouse does, far more accurate and has far more possibilities. Trying to look in the crystal ball I wouldnât be surprised if the pen will take over. For the moment I just canât wait to find some time to dive deeper into the pen-gestures API.
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