Blog:: Craig Pringle

Previously I blogged about the new Mobility Centre in Windows Vista. While many of the utilities available in the Mobility Centre are new versions of familiar tools there are a couple of new things that are pretty cool.

One of the coolest in my opinion is Presentation Mode. This can be toggled on or off bin the Mobility Centre.

By clicking the picture of the projector you can configure how presentation mode behaves. This will launch the dialog shown below.

As you can see entering presentation mode will prevent the computer from going into standby and turns of system notifications – which means no embarrassing Windows Live Messenger pop-ups.

Optionally you can disable the screensaver, set the audio volume and turn off or change the wallpaper. This means you can have your cool wallpaper most of the time and use something more professional for those client facing presentations.

Another cool trick is hidden away. Clicking on the “Connected Displays” button will show you the currently connected displays. Most recent displays will uniquely identity themselves. If you use the same projector frequently you can remember it. If the checkbox is ticked for a particular projector then as soon as you connect the display Presentation Mode will be enabled automatically. Very handy! Naturally as soon as you disconnect the projector or disable presentation mode your previous settings are restored instantly.

The Mobility Centre is one of those Vista features that once you find it and start using it you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

The first thing you need to know is how to get to it. You can of course find it in the control panel, or if you enter “Mobility” into the Start search box you will find it. However there is an easier way, the keyboard shortcut Windows key + X.  That is fine if you are docked or in laptop mode on a convertible; but for tablet use I recommend assigning a hardware button to launch the Mobility Centre.

When you launch the Mobility Centre you are presented with a collection of tools that are useful to – well mobile users... hence the name. The tools available will depend on your hardware. For example of your display driver does not support rotation, that tool will not be shown. In addition I understand that the mobility centre will be extensible for OEMs so your hardware manufacturer may add in their own tools.

For those of you on a small device you will be interested to know that he dialog will resize itself if the screen is not wide enough – for example if you are using a small in portrait mode. This is the sane dialog when I rotate my LS800 into portrait mode.

Something that is not instantly obvious when you launch the Mobility Centre is that each icon is in fact also a button that takes you into an associated control panel application for more advanced configuration.

Here’s a rundown on what’s available in my Mobility Centre.

Brightness

Use the slider to adjust the brightness. Clicking the icon takes you into the brightness settings for the current power scheme.

Volume

You can mute the PC and use the slider to adjust the master volume. Clicking the speaker takes you into the sound control panel applet, so you can modify playback and recording devices.

Battery Status

View your remaining power or change your power scheme. Clicking the Battery icon launch the Power Options dialog. Matt Faulkner has a good post about Vista Power Schemes over on GBM.

Wireless Network

Shows you your connection status and allows you to enable or disable the WLAN with a click. You can also click the signal strength icon to go to the Connect to a Network wizard.

Screen Orientation

Click the Rotate screen button to cycle through your screen orientations. Clicking on the icon will take you into the Tablet PC Settings control panel applet with the “Display” tab selected.

External Display

Click here to enable or disable the external monitor. Clicking on the icon will take you into the Display Settings dialog. There you can change the position or screen resolutions of your screens if need be.

Sync Centre

Your one stop shop for all your OS sync tasks. Click on the Sync Settings button to configure offline file and mobile device sync settings. This could be a future post in itself.

Presentation Settings

Enable or disable Presentation Mode. This will certainly be a future post cause it is so cool!

Well that’s the rumour according to this post on GBM. They are picking the release of a Dell tablet in the North American spring.

I would see this as a hugely positive development for the Tabletscape and I whole-heartedly hope that it is true.

The reason that I think it would be a good thing is that Dell is a very effective marketing machine with hooks into the consumer market. This will greatly aid with legitimising the Tablet PC in the eyes of a still sceptical market.

Of course rumours of this sort are fairly common. I’m yet to see the mythical Apple tablet! We shall see if I can get my hands on a Dell Tablet anytime soon.

Overall Vista runs really well on the Motion Computing LS800. However while there are drivers for all of the hardware, some of the software bundled with the LS800 does not run well or does not run at on Vista.

One such piece of software is the Motion dashboard. While you can install the current version from the Motion Computing wet site it does not run reliably. There is a newer versions that I have seen, but it is not publically available.

The good news is that you can replace most of the functionality of the dash with tools found natively in Windows Vista

Here are some of the things I have done on my LS800.

Remap tablet buttons

The Motion Button driver default settings for 2 of the tablet buttons don’t work out of the box. The button labelled “Hot 1” and “Hot 2” in the image below are configured to launch the Motion Dashboard and run a utility called mcrotate.exe (which is a Motion utility that simply rotates the screen) respectively.

Because these are not included in the OS and don’t work well (if at all) in Vista the buttons need to be reconfigured. To do this:

·         In the Control Panel enter Tablet Buttons into the search field

·         Launch the “Tablet PC Settings” control Panel applet.

·         Click the Buttons Tab.

·         In the “Button settings for:” drop down select “all orientations”

·         In the list of buttons scroll down and select “Hotkey-1 Button” then dish the Change button.

·         In the “Press” dropdown select “press a key or key combination”

·         Click in the keys field.

·         Bring up the TIP.

·         Change to the onscreen keyboard.

·         Tap the Windows key and then tap X. This is the keyboard combination to launch the Mobility Centre, which offers much of the functionality of the Motion Dashboard. More on this later.

·         Click on Ok

·         Select “Hotkey-2 Button” and click change

·         In the “Press” dropdown select “Change display orientation”

·         Click on Ok

I only ever use my LS800 in primary portrait and primary landscape. To disable the secondary orientations:

·         In Tablet PC Settings (which is still open right?) Click on the display tab.

·         Click the change button next to sequence.

·         Spots one and two should be primary landscape and primary portrait. Set spots 3 & 4 to None

·         Click on Ok

·         Close Tablet PC Settings

Dashboard Functionality covered by Mobility Center

·         Adjust the display brightness

·         Mute or un-mute the audio

·         Adjust the volume

·         Enable & disable wireless

·         Change the power scheme

You can also do some other cool things here – check out Sync Center and Presentation Settings for a start.

Search everywhere in Windows Vista.  The reason search dialog built-in to the Start Menu. 

There is a search dialog in each Windows Explorer window, including in the Control Panel. 

Additionally, there is integrated search in Internet Explorer and if you install Office 2007 you will find search in the Office applications as well, I am going to ignore those for this post.

The trick to finding what you need in Windows Vista lies in choosing the right search.

The Start Menu Search

In Vista this is the search that I use the most.  You simply press the windows key and start typing and as you type the search results are narrow it down.  Results can include programs, shortcuts, hyperlinks, documents, pictures, media files and more.  Because documents are indexed, if the search term exists within a document then it will be included in the results.

The downside of the Start Menu Search is that the results are displayed in the Start Menu above the search dialog where there is limited space and only limited results can be displayed.

There are also options to search the Intranet or show results, which will open the search in explorer which is discussed below.

Windows Explorer Search

In each Windows Explorer window there is a search dialog in the upper right corner.  Entering text in the search field will start the search in the folder structure from the current directory.  Like the Start Menu Search it refines results as you type.

In addition to this there is also save search button which will create a unique virtual folder in your searches folder.  The saved search will then be automatically updated when you navigate to that virtual folder.

Because the results are displayed in the detail pane of the Explorer Window any number of results can be displayed and you can scroll through them using the scroll bars.

Control Panel Search

When you use windows explorer search in the control panel you will find that only control panel results were returned.  There really cool thing though is that because there are links in the control panel for some of the tabs, you can search for the name of the tab and find results.  For example, searching for a “ mouse speed” returns a link that will take you to the appropriate tab.

So as you can see the results you get will depend on where you are when you search.