Blog:: Craig Pringle

Great news – yours truly is confirmed as a speaker for TechEd New Zealand.  My session is titled “Getting Started With Tablet Development” and my main goals for the session are:

1)      Introduce developers to the tools ad resources they need to get started with Tablet Development.

2)      Get more developers enthused about the tablet PC as a platform.

The only bummer is the timeslot that I currently have allocated – 9a.m. the morning after the party!  Looks like I won’t be cutting loose this year.  That could still change so here’s hoping!

Sadly – for those of you in NZ – if you have not already registered for TechEd then you are missing out this year as the event is sold out.  Is it just me or is there a need for a bigger purpose built conference venue in New Zealand?  I vote for building one in Wellington!

Darren over at Tablet Minds provided this space saving tip in a comment to an earlier post:

“One thing I use is TrayIt (http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm). It allows you to send programs into the tray, and you double click them to restore them. This is great for Lotus Notes, which I have to have open all the time, but won't minimize to the tray. With TrayIt, it will. Now I don't have to suffer with Notes hogging a spot on my taskbar when it isn't in use.”

Sounds like TrayIt could be useful for any app you need to have open in the background all day. Great tip!

Outlook, for those that use it, provides a native way to do this. Simply right-click the icon in the systems tray and select “hide when minimized”. When you minimize Outlook there will be no icon on the Task Bar, just the icon in the System Tray.

Einstein Technologies has released the long awaited new version of Tablet Enhancements for Outlook - TEO 3.0. This is a great Outlook Add-in and will be a huge help to heavy Outlook users. There is a 15-day free trial available and I recommend giving it a try.

Tablet Enhancements for Outlook is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook® 2003 and 2007 that turns the popular personal information manager into a fully pen-enabled application on your Tablet PC, UMPC, or Origami device. TEO 3.0 replaces Outlook's standard UI with fully ink-enabled forms and lets you write and keep your notes in your own handwriting. No synchronization required.

If you want to learn more GBM has posted an Exclusive chat with developer Josh Einstein, so check out the GBM Audio Ink Show.

Josh Einstein, creator of Tablet Enhancements for Outlook (TEO), sent me this tip…

"If you want to add TEO to your list of tweaks, you can use the TEO tab settings to squeeze out a little bit more vertical screen real estate. By settings the tabs to the left or right (in Tools -> Options) TEO will fit better on wide-screen devices such as 800x480 Origami devices.”

Great tip for Origamis Josh!

In Part One of this series I suggested disabling the TIP icon because lets face it – taskbar real estate is a scarce resource.

As much as I love ActiveWords I don’t like the default placement of the inkpad icon. The good news is you can change it.

I un-dock the Ink Pad icons and configure it to be semi transparent. To do this:

1.       Right-click the Ink Pad icon in the System Tray (not the big one on the Taskbar)

2.       Select Undock

3.       Right-click the Ink Pad icon in the System Tray

4.       Select settings

5.       Adjust the transparency to suit. You may also want to change the “show Inkpad on” setting to Click.

By default this puts the inkpad in the top left corner but I find it gets in the way of menus there. I prefer it towards the bottom right corner. To move it:

1.       Right-click the Ink Pad icon in the System Tray (again!)

2.       Select Show size handles

3.       This puts two white boxes on your floating Ink Pad icon. Dragging the top left one moves the icon, dragging the other one resizes it.

The other tweak I perform for ActiveWords is to Hide the monitor bar.Just right click the ActiveWords icon and select AWMonitorBar > Hide monitor bar