In response to the comment I made on this post Lora has posed a question on WhatIsNew.com:
“What more do you want? Come on. I know you want more. You always want more. I want more :) I think the applications have only touched the tip of what is possible, even with today's current operating system, hardware, and developer tools. It's our imagination and practical sides that limit us.
So, to borrow from an urge that my father continually uses, "If you could snap your fingers, and right now have what you want, what would it be? What would you be using right now?" (in terms of applications for Tablet PCs)”
My answer to that is twofold:
1) The things I want to see in Tablet PC applications right now include (in no particular order):
· Native ink support in Acrobat Reader. And every other application too, of course, but Acrobat Reader is a major one for me.
· Easier ink on the web. Sites I interact with I want to be able to do so via ink. An obvious example would be OWA.
· TIP-less interfaces. Does that one sound a bit scary? If you think about it the Tablet Input Panel is a means of entering ink into legacy controls that don’t support it. I want future versions of the OS to extend those controls so that they do.
· Write anywhere – an extension of the point above… Why should I have to write in a particular place? As long as the UI knows that I am imputing data – like I told it with a gesture – then I should be able to write anywhere and have it magically converted to text.
· To be able to create links between pages in OneNote. I know it’s suppose to be coming but I want it two years ago.
· Windows Server 2003 R2 has a new replication technology for replicating data between Distributed File System (DFS) servers that only replicates the parts of a file that have changed, not the whole file. I want that for Offline Files. (OK that’s not tablet specific, but tablets are mobile computers at the end of the day.
· On the topic of network synchronisation – Sync Toy should be network aware. (Oh you’re online – I’ll sync then…)
· Better ink in Outlook (Will someone at Microsoft please write Josh Einstein a cheque for TEO!)
· Figure out that I am writing on an angle and just deal with it. Text is linear and always flows left to right on the horizontal axis – but who annotates documents like that?
· Speech recognition needs to be vastly improved, particularly the way it deals with background noise (What was that?). It’s not there yet for most of the environments I work in.
· A better ink-aware blogging client (but that’s why I’m writing BlogPad)
2) Despite my “Application make it” statement there are a number of things I am gagging for on the hardware front:
· Instant on, or the appearance thereof.
· Oodles of battery life. I want 10-12 hours without carrying a spare battery. And it needs to be in a device not too dissimilar to the TC1100 I carry now.
· Higher screen resolution on more tablets.
· Lighter devices (without giving anything away)
· Lower price.
· WiMAx :)
Sound reasonable to you?