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 ;-)