with the help of my partner from Mind&Machines, Micha Voigt (thanks), I have written an article (in german) about tablet pc development in general for german dot.net magazine. Thanks dnm for giving us the chance to do this! Its a basic overview what you can do in TPC develop. Article is called "Da Vincis code"......check it out at your local magazine dealer ;-)

Its quite a while since my last blog-entry. The reason is, that we did a lot of non tablet development with Mind&Machines in the last weeks to earn some real money, as the Tablet Momentum is not as strong as we had hoped to be. Nevertheless, we are quite motivated to continue with Tablet PC enabled applications in the near future.

I just bought a copy of Onfolio now, as the beta had expiered. I was RSS-Blind for some weeks, so I am not really up to date what is going on in the TPC univers. I'll come back here after I have updated mysef, hopefully, this should not take to long

finally, we made it into the tablet pc software showcase. well, it was out fault, we never submitted pink before. now, with version 1.2, we did. we got our certification and pink 1.2 is now an official member of the tablet pc catalog and showcase.

or knowing anybody not having one? don't panic! p'Ink is with you now. We have updated p'Ink setup and code that it also works on non Tablet PC hardware. Of course, handwriting recognition does not work off tablet, but anything else. We also added a textfield for comments that you can enter by keyboard. This also works with MSN Desktop Search. If you have an external grafik tablet like wacom, for example, you can add ink notes as you can with a tablet pc hardware.

We would be hyppe to get some response from users using p'ink with such devices. Lets say we sponsor the first 5 users which send us a mail to shop@mindandmachines.com and mention that they use an external tablet with a free copy of p'Ink 1.2

You can download the trial through our website http://www.mindandmachines.com. The download is the same for all packages

with p'ink 1.2 it is possible to index annotated pictures with MSN Desktop Search. The attached picture shows how to activate this feature and is also a nice example. what you can use p'Ink also for, annotating your screenshots. For me, Techsmith SnagIt and p'Ink are a great duo.

finally, pink 1.2 is available. it all started out with a little test if we are ready to submit pink 1.0.2 to TPC catalog. And then, we found some small things we wanted to improve. Here we are, nearly 2 weeks later, we did it. We have version 1.2 what is quite the same as 1.0.2 with a little beautifying in the UI. Here are the RelNotes

• integrates with MSDN Desktop Search
• new Note-Display and OuterInk appearance
• better uninstall behaviour
• usage of TIP context where possible
• works now on non Tablet PC OS (Win XP Home and Win Xp Prof)
• better optic in slide show
• more flexible export capabilities, new optic in export, too
• ink was not rotated if the Note was not selected (corrected)
• slideshow did not work all the time correct (corrected)
• if EXIF Tag was preset with a value, this value is preserved
• textfield (preset with EXIF tag value) that can be filled through keyboard also for non Tablet PC Users

pink 1.2 is available as fully functional 30days trial download from out website http://www.mindandmachines.com. There is also an updater called Patch120 that updates any previous version to a fully pink 1.2 version. It is meant for existing users, registered ones and trial ones. It keeps all your settings in place and does prevent you from re-registering your software. The patch is available through http://shop.mindandmachines.com/media/products/Pink1.2.0_patch120.zip

We are looking forward to your feedback

wherever I went and showed ablet PCs people started to ask me where to get this stuff. So, we decided to become Tablet PC vendors. That is great. On the other side, we have now to update our shop to support TPC ordering. By the way, we are also selling the deprecated version of Laptops, the NTPCs.

USP is that we ship a copy of our TPC software with each order. If you want to buy a TPC, contact me!

well, while all other TPC folk seems to travel from conference to conference, I sit here in switzerland at the fantastic "Zuger See" and do a mixture of p'Ink development, Business management und working to earn money. Yesterday, I finished an article for german dotnetMagazine, hoping they will publish it some day. Its a basic overview of TPC development in german. We are also working on an updated version of p'Ink where we want to optimize some stuff. After that, we will submit t for certification to be able to enter the windows tablet pc catalog.

I was wondering if it makes sense to support also external grafik tablets for our app. what does the community think? Are there grafik talet users out there reading TPC blogs or using TPC related software? As I know WACOM ships its volito tablets with ArtRage, at least in germany.

The last 2 days I attended a ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Conference in Germany where 5 of the major ECM Vendors in the German Market presented their Portfolios. I was the only geek with a Tablet PC. Most attendees where very interested in the TPC and I gave several demos and explanations. It was a round table thing and a lot of guyes where hidden behind their 47'' Lids (or that kind of size).

Ink based Documents where not a topic at all and Ink based Annotations within ECM Suite produtcs, well ;-). Where will this lead to? Enterprises start using DMS and ECM Products on one side and there are new mobile and innovative Clients around vendors have problems to catch up.

I found some strange comments for my blog entry about the new version of p'Ink. They say:

14 MB March 30 10:56 AM      Published by: MOHAMED  (http://MAHSJ)

looks to me like some spam tool that automatically ads commets to blogs?! If somebody has similar comments, let me know, would be interested. If I am wrong, MOHAMED, please let me know ;-)

Mind&Machines has a free give away software to create great easter picture postcards. Its a subset of what the Mind&Machines p'Ink application can do.

You can download your free copy here.

Send your easter picture postcard to info@mindandmachines.com. The best 3 pictures will get a free serial for our p'Ink Picture Annotator tool. The winner pictures will be published here.

happy easter

we have put a new update of p'Ink, the award winning picture annotation tool, on our website at www.mindandmachines.com. Its version 1.0.2 and we have the following updates & fixes

- there was a problem when sending postcards and mailcards from outlook to outlook express or webmail clients. this was because of a RTF "feature" of outlook. We found a work around and sending pictures by mail now works fine with any client

- there was a bug when selecting additional colors for inking. The so called "Outer Ink panel" could crasg what caused the app to hung (ligically, as there's a state management inside). We fixed that

- honestly one guy had a problem starting the app at all. He got a non-sying exception. We extended the app with a exception reporting framework that prints out all error information and is also able to email this directly to our support center (like IE does twice an hour ;-) ). We do not do this silently, the user has to accept to participate.

The update is available as a full download. Registered users can download an update package that only works on already installed versions. This avoids that the app has to be activated again.

We also shrinked the download size from 14MB to 5MB by making the documentation smaller from 10MB to 1MB. There where a lot of large images in, we optimized the size.

The 1.0.2 fuill installation is already online, the update will in a few hours. Registered users will receive an email with all information

HOPE YOU HAVE FUN WITH IT!

Thanks, Colin! Thank you very much. Well, there's no Toshiba or any other Tablet TV Sport in germany right now. My experience is, that 9 out of 10 people (technical and professional, non persons on the street) do not know about Tablet PCs at all or do not know, that this is a 100% Windows PC with PLUS.

We spoke to Manufactures: They where only interested in shipping large volume to distributors and resellers. Unfortunately, we found that the folks wherr not able (or willing) to talk about Tablet Philosophy or strategy at all. "vertical markets" was the monotonous answer

We spoke to "evangelists" (sales people, I think): They told us "we do not see the home market in the near future. That's not where we do big business. Give us the vertical killer app"

We spoke to distributors and resellers: The told us, that it is to expensive to bundle software for them because they have to educate their internal people to support the package. They sell the hardware. If oyu want to "bundle", sell the hardware and put your sofwtare on.

So, its the chicken&egg, vicious circle thing. Does it need software to sell tablets or tablets to sell software?

But as a conclusion: WE WILL NOT STOP MAKING TABLET SOFTWARE, the probelm is, it takes us longer to do so, as we have to do other things to get enough money to fund tablet development.....

On Day 2, we decided to try to make some business. We spend the morning visiting the boothes of TPC OEMs. We had a long and interesting discussion with a german TPC and Toshiba reseller. Bad news for all TPC software ISVs: All told us that they go away from preinstalled ISV software and also, as OEMs told at WMA, target "vertical maerkets" and big company customers. They do not see the TPC as a home, private, or so called "end-users" tool.

The rest of the day, we gave us free to see what goes on with projectors (wireless preferred) and whiteboard presentation technology. We where also interested in 3D projection stuff that was shown at various locations.

Know what? that was cebit for me this year. The quality has improved compared to the last two years. I am sure I'll go there next year, mybe one day longer then.

What I found is, that Hannover was less full than the years before and so was Cebit. I was positively surprised about the quality of the fair. Michael Voigt of Mind&Machines was with me and we had a lot of good talks about Tablet PC stuff and other topics with various vendors.

For Tablet PC, almost any vendor or exhibitor had a first novice level support for people being interested in TPC stuff. A lot of visitors where "trying" out Tablet PCs but mostly, it was just drawing some basic lines into Windows Journal. You had to already know what to use a tablet for to get into the interesting talks.

We also found, that a lot of XP Home based touch screen "tablets" where shown. They have some note taking and basic reconizing software but work with touch screen technology and do not comply with TPC specs. I have no idea if there's a merket for this XXL-size Organizers or XXS size Tablet PCs.

Most interesting thing for me in Day 1: mmmhh, nothing really special, just a lot of good information.

We could not find any real Tablet PC specific software at Cebit. Maybe we did not try hard enough?

Well, it's quite a week since my visit to Cebit 2005, but during Cebit I had no acceptable chance to get connected. I stayed in a private room, what is quite common during Cebit fair time. There was no wifi available and I would have had to dial up, what, to be honest, was not what I was in the mude when I came home from the evening beer. So, I decided to late-blog what went on on cebit.

As I work as technical expert and editor for www.codezone.de, I attended an evening meeting of the german CLIP community. They had rented a medieval restaurant. It was a quite interesting evening, thanks CLIP. I met some people from Microsoft US who came to germany to find out why german students like Linux so much. We had long discussion about it.

tomorrow I will go for Cebit 2005 at hannover. I'll be there till monday and check out all new stuff and new tablet pc hard- and software. I will try to give a daily blog on what is going on.

If there's something special I can check out for you in the Tablet PC area, send me an email!

I was visiting the German Museum at Munich. They have a big exhibition about the history of computer science. And guess what: I found a sample of a windows bluescreen there :-), maybe it was not meant to be that way?

"We", thats me, my girlfriend, my colleagues Micha and Matthias and my brother, all have Toshiba M200 (5 over all). I also have a Hyrican Twist and I had promised to give a review here. Maybe the folks from hyrican have read this! It had a hardware defect and I had sent it back to the vendor on January 19th. I gave them a call on Feb 17th and they claimed it would be just back and they'd send it to me immediately. Well, a call on Feb 28th resolved to the information, that they somehow "forgot" to repair it and that they sent it to the manufacturer on Feb 17th (after my call). So, hopefully, it wil finally arrive back and I can give a fair review on it.

Why do I blog this? Well, I saw some links from google-queries for hyrican twist that pointed at my blog. So: everybody looking for Hyrican review: They promised it to be back end of next week... I'll write about it then

pray with me

Loren shows some new cases for Tablet PC. Looks great, no doubt. What I have a doubt is, that Tablet PCs with Ink digitizer make sense for such button-oriented gaming stuff. A touchpad slate would make much more sense for me.

My short term visionis, that the vendors produce such cases as add-ons, where I can put my standard TPC in. If I wanna play, I "attach" the gaming case, If I go to the beach, I use the otter-box. Its like having different "keyboards" or "joysticks" with me.

I know, I was talking about having different tablets for different tasks, too. I changed my mind on that! I suggest now having 1-3 standard slates hanging around. In addition, you have 1-N "cases" and 1-N "environments" that you can also exchange (assuming not to have ubiquitious networking within the next 2 years) betwenn the tablets. A Hard-Disk, that can be easily exchanged would be great, or tablets, that boot from USB Drives or Sticks

Long Term vision: The "net" is my environment. I go to the beach, "rent" a modern tablet (like a pair of ski) and log into MY working environment with it.