Software Development Process and Industry Analysis by the former Editor of Software Development, Computer Language, and Game Developer Magazines
Archive for the ‘TabletPC’ Category.
A few weeks ago I got an email asking if I was interested in selling one of my idle domain names — inkpositive.com. “Sure,” I said, and named a price that covered the hour of time it would take me to transfer the domain. The subsequent process (contract, escrow.com, “I can’t tell you who my associate is…”) makes me think I could have asked for a couple more hours worth of revenue…
Thee UMPCs up for grabs in this CodeProject programming competition:
…must allow new means of input: ink, touch, and more. Build a great application that encompasses these needs, write an article about what you’ve done, and you may win one of three cool Samsung Ultra-Mobile PCs.
One winner per month, 3/15/07?6/15/07.
Hmmm…. maybe make that two UMPCs still up for grabs …
Vista has built-in voice recognition capabilities. One of the things that really jumped out in the Tablet PC was that the correction interface makes all the difference when it comes to using alternative input techniques: a service pack released for the Tablet a year or so after the initial launch was a landmark in the usability of handwriting for text entry. I’ve just begun using voice recognition in Vista and am very impressed with the correction interface. It may have reached the tipping point for usability (at least with a sound-cancelling headset).
Success! I can access Tablet SDK functionality from Java. Rather than use COM, my original tactic, I did what I joked about: used C++/CLI so that the call is Java->Unmanaged C++->C (Win32)->Managed C++! Pretty funny, but not all that hard to follow in the source code. I have to say, I’m going to guess I’m the first person to write code to convert a jstring into a char* and pass that into a gcnew System::String!
Look for an article on DevX by the end of the month.
So I’m trying to write a program to manipulate the Tablet PC Input Panel from within a Java application. So I have to use JNI to interop with a native .DLL written in C++. My DLL uses Win32 to find the handles to the Java application edit windows and then uses COM to manipulate the TIP. I dunno’: I feel like throwing some gcroot<String ^>s in there, just to cover all bases.
Killer post by Chris Pratley on setting up OneNote 12 so that it stays synchronized across multiple machines. I love OneNote and this makes me love it a little more.
Oh, and something else I just discovered that makes me love it a little more: they’ve added “section groups” so now you can have Notebooks | [Section Group]* | Section | Page. So, for instance, I have a Work notebook, a Section Group for a specific Client, a Section Group for each project, and then a Section for, say, Requirements, or Meetings, or Research, etc. Perfect!
Oh, and another another thing that makes me love it a little more: you can now hook an Outlook item directly to a OneNote page. So, for instance, you can schedule, say, a “Weekly Review” in Outlook for Fridays at 1PM and then when it pops up, *click* and up comes OneNote, all linked back and forth. You could use this as an alternative to the Daily Journal PowerToy.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
10:06 AM
Turns out that, contrary to what I’d feared, the Tablet Input Panel for the Tablet PC does recognizes SWT components as text labels, and you can use the TIP to add recognized handwriting to a Java/SWT application:
So now, the challenge of programming forms in Java for the Tablet PC reduces to the problem of setting the TIP context dynamically from Java so that you can command it to bias the handwriting towards the expected entry type (a date or a phone number or what-have-you). The difficulty with that is that as far as the TIP is concerned, all java.exe executables look alike. So I’ll have to figure out some way, within Java, to register for a callback when the TIP gets activated. Then, use JNI to set the TIP context. Stay tuned?
Created with Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Beta)
One place for all your information
Download: Table Input in Java.one
Unpredictability and recognition systems
Sunday, May 28, 2006
12:18 PM
In reading Jeff Hawkins book On Intelligence I came upon this great anecdote about developing Graffiti:
“I recognized that people were willing to learn a difficult task (typing) because it was a reliable and fast way to enter text into a machine. Therefore if we could create a new method of entering text with a stylus that was fast and reliable, people would use it even though it required learning. So I designed an alphabet that would reliably translate what you write into computer text; we called it Graffiti. With traditional handwriting recognition systems, when the computer misinterprets your writing you don’t know why. But the Graffiti system always produces a correct letter unless you make a mistake in writing. Our brains hate unpredictability, which is why people hate traditional handwriting recognition systems.” (Emphasis added)
To this day, I prefer Graffiti for PDA input, although I would love Shark/Shapewriter (which bolsters Hawkins’ point even further). On the other hand, I prefer the TabletPC’s TIP and correction UI to Graffiti; I’m not sure it’s faster, but the correction UI is good enough that using it is predictable. Voice recognition systems, though, definitely produce the “unpredictable == hateful” reaction in me.
Created with Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Beta)
One place for all your information
Download: Unpredictability and recognition.one
Editing and State Transitions
Saturday, May 27, 2006
8:58 AM
I absolutely love this research paper from Microsoft that describes a UI for a recording application. The great thing is that “all” they did was rethink the classic recorder interface of “rewind, play/record, fast forward” with a new state transition for “re-record that last thought.” The UI tells the story:
Isn’t that great? The results are significant, too: content creators uniformly preferred the interface and, even more significantly, 84% of listeners preferred freeform recordings made with this interface to recordings made with a traditional UI. I love that delivered quality depends on editing interface — something I’ve noticed when trying to write high-quality software for the Tablet PC.
I’ve actually thought of similar (though not as elegant) approaches to pen-written passages: accumulate short sections of expressive thought and assemble them using an interface different than the cursor-based WYSIWYG of a Word / classic keyboard editor.
Created with Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Beta)
One place for all your information
Download: Editing and State Transitions.one
Anyone have experience using specialized input contexts with Java/SWT?
