One wonders what the rationale is for changing the names of programmer-level layers from fairly memorable brands to utterly forgettable TLAs.

Well, there's a nice coincidence -- a brand-new (well, used, but not by me) M1400 and the Longhorn / Vista beta. In the words of the immortal James Doohan, “How do they mix? I'll let you know...”

Update: Microsoftian Hilton Locke warns “many of the user interface items (read: Tablet PC Input Panel, Journal, et al) are not in this release. We will be making an interim version of the Input Panel available for installation on Vista Beta 1, but I do not have final details on that just yet.”

Update: I chickened out. I need the M1400 to be fully functional for a project I'm starting on the 1st.

Loren speaks of hardware driving the success of the Tablet PC, and Iggy agrees, going so far as to say that “computing with a pen is unnatural.”

“Computing with a pen is unnatural.” Okay, I can agree with the words, but only to the extent that it's tied to “computing with a keyboard is unnatural,” “computing with a mouse is unnatural,” “computing with a 4-function calculator is unnatural.”

The very idea of “natural” computing is off-base; the computers that we have today are quite unlike any natural form: they are neither static objects nor responsive animals. They have internal state, they react, they generally transfer data to us in high-level abstractions (words, images), but they lack even fundamental awareness of their environment, much less the reactive capacity of any work animal (much less human). Someday, certainly, we'll be able to interact with computers in a “natural” way -- computers will watch and listen to us and their environment and intuit our intent for them. Several breakthroughs will be required before that day.

Iggy's sentiment, though, is not “computing today is in its infancy,” but rather “computing with a pen is less intuitive than computing with mouse and keyboard.” With this sentiment I whole-heartedly disagree. I hammered on the preliminary nature of computing today precisely because the view that a keyboard and mouse is “natural” is incredibly myopic. In the late 80s, I bought a mouse, from Microsoft, for use with my spanking new 286 running DOS. You could use it with Microsoft Word and a small set of DOS-based windowing tools. The mouse was $99 and was no bargain. Word was inferior to WordPerfect and when programs did use windows (the Turbo IDEs, for instance), it was always faster to use the keyboard (and function keys. Does anyone remember function keys? You know, they're still on the keyboards...).

So in 1989 (say), it would have been totally parallel to say “look, you have to pay a premium for a DOS mouse, it's slow for input, there's no software... Computing with a mouse is unnatural.” And, believe me, there were plenty of people who expressed such sentiments, even with the Macintosh sitting there and telling the story:

To be useful, a hardware innovation (mouse) must be coupled with software innovation (bitmapped windows)

And then along came Desqview 386 (software innovation to exploit the hardware innovation of the 386 and the mouse) and Windows 3.0 & 3.1 and here we are 15 years later with a software ecosystem that has co-evolved with the mouse and keyboard. It is true that it is hard to use a non-mouse pointing device with existing software, even with drawing software where the pen is fundamentally easier to control than a mouse.

It's not that the pen is unnatural, it's that the software has evolved with a bias towards mouse and keyboard

It's true that new form factors, longer battery life, better screens, perhaps more ruggedness -- all of those affect the “the change of scale or pace or pattern" that [the Tablet] "introduces into human affairs" and thus are important to the medium. But there must be software specifically created for the Tablet PC's hardware innovations. Just as applications evolved to exploit the mouse and keybard, so too can they evolve to exploit the pen. And such software will feel natural.

Case in point: Arcs of Fire. While a game with a single-screen and a static background is hardly going to take sales from Half Life 2, there has never been a game that “feels” more like the act of throwing, which is a behavior that's hard-wired into our genes to be pleasurable. Arcs of Fire “feels natural” for that type of game, much more “natural” than the old DOS-based games where you typed in muzzle velocity and angle, or mouse-based games requiring a diagonal motion that's hard to do accurately with a mouse.

The success of the Tablet, at this point, is much, much more reliant on software than hardware.

I can't find any sign of this on Yahoo's Website, but a press release from the Computer Games Development Conference Europe speaks of “Yahoo! Poker, a multiplayer cross platform title, which lets mobile phone gamers play against those on their PCs.” Man, there's gotta' be some way to cash in on the poker craze...

You know, you don't make money chasing gold, you make money selling to people chasing gold (Levi's, Wells Fargo). Maybe a Texas Hold 'Em trainer: instead of actually playing out the hands, test the ability to evaluate the odds based on position and pot odds. That's easy to calculate (for a computer) until you get to the challenge of evaluating another player's betting sequence, which is intractable to a simple algorithm.

We recommend How to Become a Professional Con Artist http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1581602693/ref=pe_arr_d_1581602693_6_txt

You are 19,547 times more likely to purchase this item than other customers.

Dang.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Business Week says that the outsourcing craze has peaked and demand is increasing for American programmers. It then goes on to warn that “routine programming” is continuing to flow offshore and that programmers wishing to be employed in America have design skills.

The funniest line in the piece is on a recent CMU grad who “landed a plum assignment with tech consultancy Accenture Ltd.” Oh, the naivete of youth!

So I wrote a rough pass for my OneNote PowerToy: it synchronizes voice recordings on a SmartPhone / PocketPC onto a desktop and imports them as links into a OneNote page. After spending some time with a hex editor, I backed off the idea of trying to do a binary edit of the OneNote file to embed the links as native OneNote audio embeds (even though, in fact, OneNote embeds a link to a file, so it ought to be possible to do the binary edit, but not for a Sunday morning project).

Unfortunately, using a file link results in an annoying “Are you sure you want to open this potentially unsafe file?” dialog every time you click on it. I'm pretty sure that this annoyance will drop my PowerToy back at least to the middle of the pack. So I thought, “Well, what can I do that would be slick?” and my thought was “Automatic voice recognition of the voice notes, at least to get a running shot at search / browsability.”

It turns out that voice recognition of a file could hardly be easier: it's literally a 10-line initialization block and then an event-handler for the results. When tried on a .wav file generated from my noise-cancelling Plantronics headset the results are definitely adequate, but the results on the low-fidelity recordings from a phone are so poor that I'm not even going to include the capability in the PowerToy.

Oh, hey, today's our 1-year anniversary of moving to Hawaii. Rockin'. Had a great time at Honaunau yesterday freediving. My freediving has taken a big step in the past couple months -- I'm now really comfortable for about 1:30 on the bottom, which is great, because the reef fish change from being scared to being curious at about 1:00. My goal is 2:00 on the bottom, with :30 of swimming up and down time. I'm also getting more and more confident about taking a shot at the 100' club...

Loren asks how one would spend various amounts to promote the Tablet PC.

• $10 million. I would “bake in“ ink and voice input support to a word processor and spreadsheet. If I didn't happen to have a world-dominating suite of office products, I'd do it in Open Office for heaven's sake. And I'm not talking about ink comments or voice notes: I'm talking about multimodal control. I tap my pen and say “Equals Sin B6“ and the spreadsheet cell becomes “=Sin(B6)“ or I say “Equals Sin...“ and then tap my pen in B6 for the same effect. Or I'm dictating a memo and see a word screwed up five spots back, but with my pen I can highlight the wrong word, choose the alternate, and return to the original insertion point very rapidly. The Tablet PC will never go horizontal until people can create the 3 most important document types: email, spreadsheets, and .docs with a speed comparable to composing them with a keyboard. (Note I used the word “composing“ and not “entering“) Corollary: The device that allows such creation in a mobile context will be a breakthrough comparable to the original PC
• $1 million. I would sponsor an X Prize for the above.
• $1. I'd put it towards my blog hosting expenses.

UPDATE: Oh, and pictures and diagrams.

I'd like to enter the OneNote PowerToy competition and, since getting a fourth Tablet PC is not particularly motivating I'll even tell you what I've got -- your voice notes on your Smartphone / PocketPC get automatically changed into OneNote items. I've got it working using file links but I'd like to add note flags and embed the link a la native OneNote recording, though, and you can't do that with the XML import API. Has anyone reverse-engineered the .one file format at the hex level? You know, like we did when we were kids?

Anyone interested in a little Open Source cooperation?

http://www.dontclick.it/ shows how effective a clickless interface can be.

DevX has posted an article that I am really pretty proud of: a literate programming tool for .NET using Microsoft's Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005. By using Word styles and embedding XML tags, you can label your code fragments in a Word document as compilable (including specifying assembly targets, compiler options, etc.). Additionally, the code fragments can have references to other code fragments within them, so that your code fragment can say “<<using block>>” and you can fill in those details someplace else in the document (in a separate discussion, an appendix, or even in a hidden “boilerplate“ section).

A SmartTag assembles all of the code fragments for a given “compilation unit,“ (think normal source code file) and all the “compilation unit“s for a given “assembly target.“ They source can be placed on the clipboard as an XML tree of fragments, as an assembled compilation unit (ready for pasting into Visual Studio), or can even be compiled directly from within Word. I support C# and VB.NET “out of the box“ but it's a simple matter to support additional languages for compilation.

Normally, I'm content to write a tool for an article and leave it for as inspiration for further exploration by others, but I think this tool has such potential that I'm going to continue developing it, possibly on SourceForge or, more likely, hosted locally. In particular, I'd like to add FIT capabilities so that authors would have the ability to confirm that their code behaves as they expect; macros so that adding code blocks was as easy as “Ctl-C“ (or whatever); and the ability to specify “alternate fragments“ so that you can say “If we replace Listing 12 with Listing 13, you can see the behavior do such-and-so...“

I'm going to reveal a new site on the subject shortly...

Loren Heiny is has begun posting screenshots from his work developing IDE plug-ins allowing inked comments to be made on source code. Personally, I think this is a tremendous use of the Tablet. DevX has just put up my article on literate programming in .NET using Word (in other words, a Word document whose code listings are supported by a “compile this!” smart tag). I was able to use Word's ink annotation capabilities in that project, as well (especially when ink comments are set to “float in front” of the text), but Loren's is definitely the more focused effort.

Oh, I am freakin' killing myself. I bought an M1400 last freakin' week in order to get a ViewAnywhere screen and Motion ships an 8” diagonal-screen Tablet. I am so severely bummed words can't express...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I live in Hawaii, see. And the view from my lanai (what you mainlanders would call a “porch”) is a panoramic view of the Kona coast. My office, on the other hand, has a window that looks at my garage and a stone wall and another that looks at a tree five feet away. I so want to be able to work outside, with a full-fledged computer that I can write on while sipping an ice tea and watching the surf break...

The most anticipated patch in Tablet PC OS history is now available!

1. Titanic (1997) - $600,779,824
2. Star Wars (1977) - $460,935,665
3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - $434,949,459
4. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - $431,065,444
5. Spider-Man (2002) - $403,706,375
6. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The (2003) - $377,019,252
7. Passion of the Christ, The (2004) - $370,025,697
8. Jurassic Park (1993) - $356,784,000
9. Shrek 2 (2004) - $356,211,000
10. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002) - $340,478,898
11. Finding Nemo (2003) - $339,714,367
12. Forrest Gump (1994) - $329,691,196
13. Lion King, The (1994) - $328,423,001
14. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) - $317,557,891
15. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001) - $313,837,577
16. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) - $310,675,583
17. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) - $309,125,409
18. Independence Day (1996) - $306,124,059
19. Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) - $305,411,224
20. Sixth Sense, The (1999) - $293,501,675
21. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - $290,158,751
22. Home Alone (1990) - $285,761,243
23. Matrix Reloaded, The (2003) - $281,492,479
24. Shrek (2001) - $267,652,016
25. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) - $261,970,615
26. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) - $260,031,035
27. Jaws (1975) - $260,000,000
28. Monsters, Inc. (2001) - $255,870,172
29. Batman (1989) - $251,188,924
30. Men in Black (1997) - $250,147,615
31. Toy Story 2 (1999) - $245,823,397
32. Bruce Almighty (2003) - $242,589,580
33. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - $242,374,454
34. Twister (1996) - $241,700,000
35. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) - $241,437,427
36. Ghost Busters (1984) - $238,600,000
37. Beverly Hills Cop (1984) - $234,760,500
38. Cast Away (2000) - $233,630,478
39. Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (1997) - $229,074,524
40. Signs (2002) - $227,965,690
41. Rush Hour 2 (2001) - $226,138,454
42. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) - $219,200,000
43. Ghost (1990) - $217,631,306
44. Aladdin (1992) - $217,350,219
45. Saving Private Ryan (1998) - $216,119,491
46. Mission: Impossible II (2000) - $215,397,30
47. X2 (2003) - $214,948,780
48. Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) - $213,079,163
49. Back to the Future (1985) - $210,609,762
50. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) - $205,399,422
51. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - $204,843,350
52. Exorcist, The (1973) - $204,565,000
53. Mummy Returns, The (2001) - $202,007,640
54. Armageddon (1998) - $201,573,391
55. Gone with the Wind (1939) - $198,655,278
56. Pearl Harbor (2001) - $198,539,855
57. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) - $197,171,806
58. Toy Story (1995) - $191,800,000
59. Men in Black II (2002) - $190,418,803
60. Gladiator (2000) - $187,670,866
61. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) - $184,925,485
62. Dances with Wolves (1990) - $184,208,848
63. Batman Forever (1995) - $184,031,112
64. Fugitive, The (1993) - $183,875,760
65. Ocean's Eleven (2001) - $183,405,771
66. What Women Want (2000) - $182,805,123
67. Perfect Storm, The (2000) - $182,618,434
68. Liar Liar (1997) - $181,395,380
69. Grease (1978) - $181,360,000
70. Jurassic Park III (2001) - $181,166,115
71. Mission: Impossible (1996) - $180,965,237
72. Planet of the Apes (2001) - $180,011,740
73. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - $179,870,271
74. Pretty Woman (1990) - $178,406,268
75. Tootsie (1982) - $177,200,000
76. Top Gun (1986) - $176,781,728
77. There's Something About Mary (1998) - $176,483,808
78. Ice Age (2002) - $176,387,405
79. Crocodile Dundee (1986) - $174,635,000
80. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) - $173,585,516
81. Elf (2003) - $173,381,405
82. Air Force One (1997) - $172,888,056
83. Rain Man (1988) - $172,825,435
84. Apollo 13 (1995) - $172,071,312
85. Matrix, The (1999) - $171,383,253
86. Beauty and the Beast (1991) - $171,301,428
87. Tarzan (1999) - $171,085,177
88. Beautiful Mind, A (2001) - $170,708,996
89. Chicago (2002) - $170,684,505
90. Three Men and a Baby (1987) - $167,780,960
91. Meet the Parents (2000) - $166,225,040
92. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) - $165,500,000
93. Hannibal (2001) - $165,091,464
94. Catch Me If You Can (2002) - $164,435,221
95. Big Daddy (1999) - $163,479,795
96. Sound of Music, The (1965) - $163,214,286
97. Batman Returns (1992) - $162,831,698
98. Bug's Life, A (1998) - $162,792,677
99. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - $161,963,000
100. Waterboy, The (1998) - $161,487,252

Related...

So at first you think:

To_Do_Item ::= Done Item
Done ::= boolean
Item ::= String

But then you think:

To_Do_Item ::= Done Item Due
Due ::= DateTime

And then you think:

Due ::= DateTime | RecurrencePattern | DatePattern
DatePattern -- “next Tuesday” “3rd Fridays of the Month” etc...

And you're also thinking:

To_Do_Item ::= Done Status Item
Status ::= Done | Pending | Deferred| Waiting | Overdue | Next Action | Urgent

And what about “Every 3 months or 3,000 miles”? And how to distinguish between "If it's overdue, it's over," ("attend the concert,") "Due any time in a range," ("get a haircut,"), and "If it's overdue, it becomes more urgent."?

And wouldn't a To-Do List DSL be able to describe things like “Your goal is to exercise 40 minutes per day, but 40 minutes every other day is marginally acceptable. But if you don't exercise at all for five days in a row, you've got to get out of the house.”?

There are no easy domains...