Here is a quick rundown on the TabletPC User Group meeting last night.
We had a bit of a smaller turn out (~13 people I think) this time around but I’m just putting that down to the fact that it is just a really busy time of year. Those who did turn up were not disappointed for two reasons. Firstly the sessions were great! Secondly we had a couple of early departures (flights to catch and children to collect) so at the end of the night we had a perfect 1:1 ratio of prizes.
The first session was presented by Edward Robinson from Intergen. He covered off using OneNote in general and taking advantage of the tablet features specifically. Items demoed included:
· Entering notes (typed and ink)
· Organising notes
· Search
· Screen clippings
· Drag and drop of content into OneNote
· Recording Audio
· And more….
Following on from Ed was Marcel Ollman from Waterman who provided a thought provoking demo of the Mimio digital capture bar. These things are so cool! You stick one to the side of a flat surface like a wall, whiteboard, table or floor and it captures the motion of a special pen as digital in on your computer via a wireless link (a gross simplification – check out the Mimio website for more details). It does not take much imagination to realise that combining a Mimio, a Tablet PC and a projector makes for a really great toolset if you are wanting to get a group of people into a room for a brainstorming session.
I brought up the rear and gave a very brief overview of a couple of pen-centric utilities that really enhance the usability of a Tablet PC in slate mode. StrokeIT allows you to assign actions to gestures. ActiveWords (with the free InkPad plugin) allows you to assign actions to words written on an ink enabled scratch pad. Both are very powerful tools that enable you to become more productive in slate mode. I’ve blogged about StrokeIt before. I’ve just started using ActiveWordsand will be posting more on it in the coming days.
The meeting was wrapped up with some housekeeping. The main points were:
· If you want to be invited to the meetings in the future make sure you register on the TUG web site as we will be using that as the primary communications mechanism.
· The discussion forums are more than a little bare at the moment (one category – no posts) so please provide feedback on what areas are of interest to you and we will make it so.
· The holiday period. December is a hectic month and in January many people are on holiday. For this reason neither TUG nor our sister group, the Windows Mobile User Group, will be holding meetings in these two months. The next WMUG meeting will be in February and the next TUG meeting will be in March. Announcements will be via the TUG Category feed on my blog and by email to all registered users on the TUG web site.
Many thanks to Microsoft for hosting the event and to Motion, ActiveWords, Microsoft, Telecom and iStart for providing prizes.