From: Steven Frank (stevenf_at_panic.com)
Date: Thu Sep 08 2005 - 15:30:46 PDT
A few weeks ago, I was overcome by curiosity and bought an HP TC1100
Tablet PC off eBay. So, I can kind of give a bit of insight on the
Tablet PC from a Newton perspective.
First the OS is Windows XP Tablet Edition. This is plain ol' Windows
XP with a couple extras:
1. The Tablet Input Panel (or TIP). This is little floating palette
that docks either to the top or bottom of the screen, or can be
summoned up in-place when your pen is over a text field. This is
where your text input happens. It has three modes: handwriting,
letter-by-letter, and virtual keyboard.
In handwriting and letter-by-letter mode, you enter as much of a line
of text as you want (or can fit) then hit an "Insert" button which
effectively pastes the recognized text into whichever application has
the keyboard focus. The OS proper is definitely not in any way
optimized for pen use beyond that.
You can also put it into a mode where the "writable" area covers the
entire screen, minus a little margin for access to desktop icons, but
it's still just a hack.
That said, the handwriting recognition is REALLY GOOD. I would say
better than the Newton's. (I print, by the way.) It does use
dictionary lookups in handwriting mode, and it has nailed words that
even I've had trouble reading after the fact.
The TIP also has trainable speech recognition, which is a bit hit-and-
miss. You can train certain commands ("Open Excel") or put it into a
general dictation mode (You Talk, It Types). When dictation works,
it's mind-blowing -- you're talking and the words are popping up on
the screen. When it doesn't work... well... it's not very useful. I
haven't done much training, but my success rate with dictation was
only about 50/50.
2. Windows Journal. This is basically a souped up NotePad that also
accepts ink (drawings or deferred recognition) as well as text. It
has a nifty "lasso" selection tool, but it is still not as easy to
move things around as the Newton's notepad.
Microsoft has some other downloadables that are of interest to Tablet
PC users:
The "Experience Pack" includes a handful of fun apps, free for the
taking. "Ink Art" is simply the ArtRage drawing program renamed by
Microsoft. This is a very cool natural media paint program. "Ink
Desktop", as you might guess, lets you draw on the Windows desktop.
Another little applet lets you "lasso" a screen capture, annotate it,
then email it / put it on the clipboard / etc.
There are some interesting apps for serious note-takers. EverNote
<http://www.evernote.com/> takes text and ink notes on an infinitely
long "noteroll" (sound familiar to anyone?). It comes in a free and
"Plus" version. Microsoft's OneNote is fairly robust, letting you
mix text, ink, images, sound recordings, etc, then organize things
into color-coded sections and folders. It even has some pretty cool
ideas such as a mode where you can record, say, a lecture, while
taking notes, and then the notes link back to the time in the
recording when they were made. However, even OneNote I fumble around
in, trying to drag-and-drop, copy, and move things, and the Newton
elegance is just simply not there. If you've ever used the notes
application on a PocketPC, well, they borrowed liberally from there,
and it's not a good thing.
Despite that, it's still really fun to use. I don't know what it is
about pen-driven interfaces... Even an OS like Windows XP that's not
inherently designed for pen use -- you set a tablet in your lap and
interact with a pen and it suddenly becomes "fun". It makes
something click in my brain like "I'm really dragging this scrollbar"
instead of "I'm virtually dragging this representation of a
scrollbar". OK, I'll stop now before I start to sound like a
complete nut.
I'm a Mac user first and foremost though, so this is unlikely to
become my primary computer. I can see it being handy for those times
when I want to get away from the desk, and just sit on the couch web-
surfing, or when I only have capacity for a really light (3 lb.)
laptop to take on the road.
Anyway, I'm happy to (try to) field any Tablet PC questions from the
Newton crowd, so fire away!
Steven
http://panic.com/
http://stevenf.com/
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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