Category: TabletPC

By chance I seem to have finally “solved” the annoying context menu lag on my TabletPC! :)

How was it done? I just installed the “Matroska Pack Full v1.1.1” (which contains many common audio and video codecs) and enabled its context menu extension. The most obvious (but not necessarily true) explanation is that installing Matroska’s context menu extension somehow fixed the context menu bug which was presumably introduced by upgrading my TabletPC to Windows XP SP2.

Now I’m really happy that my productivity is not restrained by this bug anymore :)

I’m currently trying to delete old system restore points in order to eventually solve the context menu sluggishness on my Toshiba Portégé M200.

Here’s a nice site summarizing the features of Windows XP system restore:

System Restore for Windows XP

The first of the many virtual desktop managers for Windows that really convinces me:

goScreen – Virtual Desktop Manager for Microsoft Windows

It’s stable, fast, scalable and full-featured. And it’s even TabletPC-aware :) Particularly nice for people with high-res screens (i.e. 1400×1050 and up) as virtual desktop maps can be displayed in a side-bar.

Smart Common Input Method platform

For Chinese character input, you need to type-in Pinyin.. at least I haven’t found any Chinese character handwriting recognition tool for Linux yet. There’s an outdated article about IBMCCR on Linux Today, but for unknown reasons I can’t access the IBMCCR page at Alphaworks ATM.. I will try later again. IBMCCR is for simplified Chinese only.

[Update 20040623 The IBMCCR page reads: “Chinese Handwriting for Linux has retired.”. Well, at least Chinese handwriting has not retired yet.. I guess there are roughly about 1’000’000’000 people worldwide exercising it every day ;)]

I’ve just installed Windows XP SP2 RC2 on my TabletPC :) Everything went flawlessly, I just had to download 106 MB through the new “Windows Update” web application. So far, I haven’t noticed any drawbacks. And I’m totally amazed how much better the handwriting recognition has become! It’s really a huge step forward (the videos didn’t quite show this as they seem to have used RC1). Both in English and in German the recognition rate has increased

remarkably (I’d say it’s a solid 95% now). Improvements in ergonomics are great too: Fewer hand-movements are required to input text (it can be entered right below a text-field for example), you can write multiple lines at once (automatically expanded), easily correct errors and easily switch between different languages. I haven’t noticed any issues with too short or too long delays either. There’s still space for improvements however (require fewer clicks, write right inside text-fields through some kind of zooming, display recognized words aligned below the according handwritten words instead of left-aligned, further improve the recognition rate etc.)

Recognition of Chinese characters is much better too. See this screenshot for example:

我孚习汉语 (“I study Chinese” ;)

Entering URLs is no longer a problem and I could even enter a password using handwriting.

I haven’t checked out the other new features and improvements of XP SP2 RC2 yet, but the afore mentioned improvements alone suggest a strong upgrade recommendation for any TabletPC user (note that this is still a beta version though – I’m not liable for any damages/losses whatsoever ;)!

(BTW This whole article has been handwritten – proof enough? ;)

(Addendum: IE finally displays the CSS layout of this blog correctly – an improvement I have been waiting for for a long time :)

finally, with the kind help of the guys at microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc, i made chinese handwriting recognition work on my tabletpc :) it wasn’t difficult at all, i just needed to install a chinese keyboard service in addition to chinese tabletpc services. it’s not an intuitive solution though (as i don’t have a chinese keyboard and i didn’t want anything but chinese handwriting recognition). ms should have mentioned this in the documentation or better, redesigned the user interface to be more intuitive and hence more user-friendly.

how well does it perform? the recognition rate isn’t particularly good – given the fact that my “chinese handwriting” rather resembles “print characters written by hand” than “true” chinese handwriting (i.e. chinese written by a chinese). quite obviously, recognizing “true” chinese handwriting is more difficult than recognizing chinese print characters (even for humans). nevertheless it’s at least better than if i had to type pinyin (ymmv, particularly if you’re chinese).

now i’d wish there were an automatic transcription of simplified (and/or traditional) chinese to pinyin (which was easy to do with “windows for pen computing” according to fritz switzer)

I start to like my TabletPC :)

I just found two great applications for drawing sketches using a TabletPC:

Ambient ArtRage 1.0. Freeware. Nice effects, intuitive GUI. Sometimes somewhat slow in response (there’s a noticeable lag).
Alias Sketchbook Pro 1.0.3. A commercial tool (free trial) with a very intuitive GUI and a very realistic look and feel (nice work, guys! Kudos!). Excellent, like real, but with the advantages of digital imaging :) That’s how I imagined to use my TabletPC! As a bonus feature, Alias offers useful background templates for free download (among them some cool story board templates :). Have a look at the insightful Penny Arcade SketchBookPro tutorial! For artists (painters, designers, ..) the TabletPC concept is really a “must-have-a-look-at”!

Further, I’ve installed the enhanced Wacom TabletPC driver which enables pen pressure level support for legacy applications.

In other news, I’ve posted a couple of messages to microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc.developer
I hope this will help me make Chinese handwriting recognition work.

[new category: TabletPC]

ok. i installed/enabled the eastern asian language pack on my tabletpc. for some (unknown) reason however, i couldn’t enable chinese handwriting recognition. i was only given a choice of “de” (german), “de_ch” (german for swiss) and “en” (u.s. english). bummer.

so i asked ben who first pointed me to a tabletpc mvp’s blog (which appeared having been abandoned as it only featured a single, out-dated entry), then to microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc. the thing i actually was looking for was some kind of synchronous real-time peer support the way it is common in oss communities (almost every oss project provides irc channels for its devs and users). as it turned out, there doesn’t seem to exist any such thing (a central real-time meeting point for devs and users, like irc.freenode.net) in the ms-sphere.

now here comes my free consulting for microsoft: get synchronous community communication up and running. i know there are efforts in this direction (e.g. www.codezone.ch or www.codezone.de) – but this is not enough. don’t implement community building from top-down. it’s too much services-like, with all the disadvantages i bet you can imagine. instead just provide infrastructure (think of irc.microsoft.com) for user groups to build a sustainable community from “bottom-up” themselves. and heck, if it’s a matter of money, divert some hundred million marketing dollars to initial grass-roots, bottom-up community building efforts. users will thank you (and stockholders as well).