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by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: Any Tablet PC sessions at PDC 2005 ?
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The PDC 2005 frenzy is heating up, on Codebetter you'll find poetic as well as total geeky starters. The content of the PDC is also starting to materialize. I skimmed all session and tracks for "Tablet PC" but did not find a thing. So what's next ? Convert my Tablet to a beer coaster and stuff myself with conference snacks ?
To be serious: there will be a lot of tablet stuff on the PDC but you will not find it under the name Tablet PC. Recently I was wandering what direction the tablet is going to take. Some answers to that were already there on the PDC 2003. In the keynote of the PDC 2001 the tablet PC SDK was announced, tablet PC's themselves were available in 2002, about a year after that. The 2003 PDC was all about Longhorn and its presentation layer Avalon. Some bullet highlights from a 2003 presentation slide deck :
Avalon support for Pen Input and Ink:
Stylus is a 1st Class Input Device
System Controls are pen-aware
Any Avalon element can support ink
Improved Ink Recognition
Personalization
Ink Analysis
Support for more languages
Native Avalon Input Device
Tightly Integrated into Avalon Input Manager and Events system
Rich Stylus Events
Unified input stream for Stylus and Mouse
Stylus emulates mouse
Containment for promoted events in Avalon apps
Ink will be a 1st class citizen of the WinFx framework:
The presentation is almost two years old but still very worthwhile to study. You will recognize many parts of the tablet API as well as WinFx and the Longhorn programming model.
This year, on the Windows HEC conference there was another interesting presentation. Longhorn plans go further than pen and ink, fingertip touch will be added. To quote some bullets:
In Longhorn we are planning to add Touch as a new mode for Navigation and Control
Great complement to Pen and Speech Input
All navigation with Pen also works with Touch but is more efficient and intuitive - no pen required
Mouse operations: Tap and Double tap with finger
Advanced gestures: Finger flicks
Longhorn plans to enable easy precision targeting with finger
Stylus still preferred for ink input
To use touch requires a resistive digitizer type, to use a pen requires an ElectroMagnetic digitizer. Dual mode digitizers exist. From OS perspective there are two drivers; for the API touch is an extension on the Tablet's Ink API. The presentation has some great ideas how to overcome the problems of combined digitizers. Imagine resting your hand on the screen while writing with the pen. The first would fire of the resistive digitizer, the second the EM-digitizer.
This is to be continued on the PDC 2005. If you're looking for tablet presentations, search for Avalon or straight for the functionality you're looking for. I.e. handwriting recognition. It's all becoming mainstream. Last february, Shawn van Ness, author the MS column mobile inkjots, has joined Microsoft as a PM to integrate the tablet API into Avalon to make it happen. I just wished he would blog a little more. As an MS employee he can't take part in bloggin' my way to the PDC. But I would read his scribbling anyway.
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