[Giagnocavo]Michael::Write() - Vista Tablet PC Enhancements

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Vista Tablet PC Enhancements

Here's one thing I love: Vista Tablet capabilities :). The tablet input area is always visible as a ~5 pixel deep tab, and it throws a drop shadow on windows in the foreground:

Pointing at it makes it slide out so you can click to open:

I prefer that to the hovering icon that appears on textboxes. Of course, it has nice animations and so on, showing it sliding in and out, and you can drag it around the screen.

Another thing that looks promising: Personalized handwriting recognition. My handwriting is very bad (22 years on a PC and counting!) -- and XP Tablet messes up a lot when trying to read it. Now, via a "Speech Recognition Training"-style UI, you can train it for your own handwriting by writing in 50 different sample sentences. Oh yea, and it's localized too (train for other scripts).

Also, a small, but profoundly useful enhancement: Different pointers and click effects when using a stylus. When you target using a stylus, you get a small diamond cursor. Clicking makes tiny ripples. It looks really superb, and it's great to get that kind of feedback. Although, at first it scared me, cause I thought my screen was damaged, and the rippling was from pressign on the LCD too hard ;).

Along with pen-mode feedback: holding down the pen button ("right click") adds a circle around the diamond pen cursor. Right clicking makes the circle do a beautiful blue "energy" glow. The cursors don't show up in my screenshots, but here's the right-click energy circle thing:

Finally, a "Pen Flicks" feature makes navigating and so on by pen easier. If you, well, flick the pen up/down/left/right, you can scroll or move that way. Perfect for web browsing, reading, etc., even though my Toshiba R10 has a directional button on the display. There's also an edit mode so you can do things like undo, etc.

Now I just need to install Office 2007 (OneNote in particular) on my tablet to see if there's some awesome integration and so on...

Misc. Technology

Wednesday, May 24, 2006 8:32:30 PM UTC

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Monday, June 05, 2006 3:05:26 PM UTC

Michael - what type of tablet are you running this on? I got a pretty powerful toshiba and have been contemplating moving over to Vista - was wondering if I can just 'upgrade' or if I have to do a reinstall. I really want to get it done though - any tips?

Bill | WilliamRyanAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

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