Tablet PC Development

I've been too busy to post lately ... I was out of the office at the O'Reilly conference for almost a week, and then returned to an office that was crazy with activity. I spent the week catching up on e-mail, working with sales on a slew of new deals, and coming up to speed on our Infinotes controls and upcoming GoBinder SDK.

I'm now moving into doing some Tablet PC development with C#, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been wanting to find an excuse to learn C#, and I'm reallying looking forward to exploring what the Tablet PC can do ....

I'll be posting more ...

O'Reilly Conference and Tablet PCs

I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference this week, and have to admit that I am surprised that Tablet PCs are recognized by so few people. In one of the presentations on "Tangible Computing", given by Nokia, they actually mentioned that they see Tablet PCs as one of the high-growth areas.

At the same time, it is wild to see how many people here are all continuing to use laptops ... and Apple iBooks at that! I'm not against either of these, however it seems that in such a leading-edge crowd I would have seen more Tablet PCs being used. There is a lot of utility that can be gained.

I have to admit that I came here with my own expectations of what I would see at the conference. I expected to see a lot of Linux laptops ... and I am coming away seeing very few! It seems that there are all of the users who still use Windows, and then the always growing crowd that are now using the iBook.

It now appears to me that there are two key steps in the continued growth of the utility of "tablet computing." The first step will be the Linux community fully supporting the Tablet PC hardware and mimicing/extending the feature set of Windows XP for Tablet PCs. The second will be when Apple introduces its own "iTablet" ... the Apple version of the Tablet PC.

In all ... I have to say that I can only see growth of this segment and utility ...

Joe, Sam and the Tablet PC

I brought home a Tablet PC over the weekend, and let my two boys play with it. There is a cool application called the Physics Illustrator from the Microsoft Tablet PC PowerToys website that Joe was playing with, and he was having fun creating a wide variety of physics experiments. It was cool to see just how quickly he was able to assemble some working physics experiments. Yeah ... some were just experimenting with "gravity" and smashing things into things ... but that is the point!

It was also cool to see Sam playing with one of the painting/drawing applications. I forget the name, but I got it running for him, and he was quickly scribbling all over the screen. One of the coolest things was to watch him when he "accidentally" opened the color picker. He quickly figured out that he could tap on the color wheel, and then draw in a different color! He had a blast with it.

So far, I am enjoying the Tablet PC ... I found that I really like reading .pdf files on it ... the pen is well integrated to allow for quick scrolling through the pages. More later!

Blogging, Wikis, Tablet PCs and Ink

As I am new to the Tablet PC, and it's current state, I am quickly finding there are a lot of very cool projects brewing for Tablet PCs. Core to these projects is the "Ink-enabling" of them ... which is one area that my company - Agilix - is very interested in. The other area is "mobilized applications", which are also being referred to as "Smart Clients."

As an avid blogger (I actually have 20+ blogs that I post to!) , I immediately thought about creating an Ink-enabled blogging tool. Something that would allow me to quickly open a window, write my post in ink, select the destination blog(s), and hit post. Done. Well, I now found that the folks over at TabletDev.com (a cool Tablet PC site!) are working on the same thing. They are referring to an "ink-enabled blogging client" that they are creating. I can't wait to see what they come up with ... and hope they release the source code. I'd love to integrate our Infinotes control, and add to the features and functions.

I also came across a good article on "A Wiki for the Tablet PC" ... it has some very good ideas and a lot of good code examples. One of the links was to another great article on "Programming the Tablet PC - Get Up To Speed Quickly" which included the source of a "SimpleInkBlogger" that will provide me with some good insights into how to capture ink. I'm actually familiar with the Blogger API and XML-RPC ... this is going to be fun!

Tablet PC Sample Code

I've been out of the office on vacation for a week, and so now I'm back in the office and working on Tablets again. I just checked my order for the new HP tc4200 ... it's not here yet, and I don't have a delivery date yet. Bummer. In the mean time, I grabbed the old Acer that our sales exec was using ... he just got his new Toshiba.

I've been playing with Visual Studio .NET, and starting to write some sample apps with our Infinotes product. I have to put together some Camtasia demos for our developers. While looking for other Tablet PC sample source code, I found some great Tablet PC code examples from one of our partners - abletFactory.

I've got an idea that I want to get completed in the next few weeks ... I'm going to create some sample applications that even I would use.