Blog:: Craig Pringle

I notice I get quite a few referrals from Google from searches for “Motion LE 1600” in New Zealand (or similar).

The good news is there is a reseller for Motion in New Zealand.  It you are interested in the Motion Tablet range (as well you might be) contact Lindsay Douglas at itoyz for more information. Tell him Craig sent you!

Update: Also getting hits for LE1600 and LS800.  Again contact Lindsay for more information.

In case anyone missed it the TabletPC User Group was plugged in the latest TechNet Flash email sent to NZ IT Pros.

Thanks for the plug Nathan!

If you don’t get the TechNet Flash Newsletters and you would like to then you can register here and be added to the list.  Update:  Fixed broken link for TechNet Flash registration.

Over the past couple of days I have been mulling over the idea of blogging in ink like we have seen on Philippe Majerus’ cool ink enabled blog.  There are certainly some issues yet to be overcome – as pointed out by Warner Crocker – but as I have previously posted these are not insurmountable.  While ink blogging has an inherent coolness factor the question I have been asking myself over and over is Do I need to be able to blog in digital ink?  

The answer – surprisingly – is a two part one.  No, but…

The first part of that answer is the easy part.  It boils down to the very essence of why I blog at all.  The reason I maintain a blog site is to share my thoughts with a community of peers spread around the globe.  For a blog post to be successful it needs to be communicated effectively to the people who read my blog and (hopefully) of interest to them.  The body of a post being in ink rather than text may decrease the value of the content and probably decreases the effectiveness of the communication.  The reason I say that is that handwritten text is slower to read than typed text – especially if your handwriting is like my chicken scratchings – and slower communication is less effective, particularly to those who read hundreds of posts a day.  Even worse – if the post is stored as ink and rendered as text there will be the inevitable failed recognitions which could lead to the message becoming lost in translation.  As such I believe that O don’t need to blog in ink for the sake of blogging in ink.

The second part of my answer is where it will get interesting.  But there will be situations where ink will add value to a post to help it communicate its message.  Adding a sketched map to a post about a TUG meeting to show “Meet Here”, inserting a quick diagram or annotating a photo.  Indeed you can do these thinks now.  I frequently use the Snipping Tool from the TabletPC Experience Pack to do such things.  The problem here is that it is a two step process.

For me inking for the sake of inking adds little value.  I suspect the ability to do this will be upon us soon and to those contemplating this I urge you to Think Before You Ink.

For my money the ideal solution would be a blogging client that allows you ink the post and selectively convert that ink to text before you post it – link in OneNote.  I’ve also been toying with the idea of an InfoPath based client that could submit to the Blogger API or MetaWeblog API but I fear these may be beyond my development capabilities.  I might start with something simpler like an InfoPath form that submits the post via email.  Either way I’ll keep you posted.

II have just read Warner Crocker’s post outlining the challenges posed by blogging in ink, many of which I have been mulling over myself since stumbling across Philippe Majerus’ ink-enabled blog.

For me the showstopper issue is the loss of search functionality both on the site itself and when being crawled by search engine bots.  In my case my hand writing would come a close second :)

Last night I sent an email to Philippe Majerus – the talented developer who added ink to his blog to ask him how he was turning ink to VML.  In his response he told me that he has written Ink Renderer control in ASP.NET that renders the ink as VML or as a GIF depending on the capabilities of the browser.  This approach is very, very smart and it opens up a world of possibilities.  Not the least of which would be to render the same ink post as text for the search engine bots and for your own internal site search.

I think Philippe has done a sterling job so far and I have told him this.  It is clever developers like him that make the web a richer experience for the rest of us.

A while back I stumbled across a feature in PowerPoint 2003 that is moderately useful on a notebook PC.  I’m blogging about it now for two reasons.

1.      I have figured out how to take a screenshot of it.

2.      I have realised that TabletPCs may well be the reason this feature exists.  If not then it is still a feature that is very useful if you are running a presentation from a slate or a convertible in tablet mode.

Microsoft call this feature “Presenter View” and it is a little hard to find because (a) it requires that you are running the projector as an extended desktop and (b) it is off by default.  

First I’ll tell you what it does, then I’ll tell you how to turn it on.

When you start a slide show with presenter view enabled the presentation is displayed on the secondary monitor (i.e. the projector) as per normal but on the primary monitor, your Tablet or laptop has a view displayed as shown below:

This saves plugging in a mouse to navigate slides when you need to present from a TabletPC – works great on a podium and gives you access to your notes and better in presentation navigation.  Begs the question – why the heck is it off by default?

Anyway to  turn it on navigate to Slide Show > Set up Show.... and click the "Show Presenter View" checkbox.

Philippe Majerus has done a great job of adding ink to his blog site.  It works for me – looks great.  Now he just needs write a nice long entry telling us all how he has put it together…  :)

Warner Crocker has slammed Laptop Magazine’s Tablet PC buyers guide and frankly I agree.  It is woefully out of date and therefore useless in terms of helping readers make informed buying decisions.  (Should be called The Second Hand TabletPC Buyer’s Guide)

What really burns my noodle is how on earth do people who are employed to stay current in a particular field still have a perception that it acceptable to publish information that is months out of date like our friends at Laptop Magazine?  News is only current for as long as it takes to distribute it over the globe and then it is history.  Information that out of date stopped being acceptable when the world stopped shipping mail by sea.

But this post is not about that issue per se – it was simply inspired by it.  I’ve started to realise lately the profound effect that RSS feeds and blogging have had on my perception of information.  Basically I’m finding that the halflife of current news has been drastically reduced and is now a matter of days.  By the time I’ve read about something on two or three blogs it is old news.  

For instance, like many in the TabletPC community I eagerly devoured a number of posts about the new Lenovo X41 TabletPC that was recently launched.  The launch took place on a Monday, however I did not have time to record my thoughts about it until the following Sunday.  I hesitated.  Was what I was about to post still relevant?  I mean come on – this thing was launched a whole six days ago – does anyone still care?  I slapped myself and wrote this post anyway – and I know some people have actually read it :)

I’ve booked my spot for TechEd New Zealand this year and I’m reallly looking forward to it.  I missed out last year due to project commitments so I’m rearing to go this year.  

I need to confirm my flight and accommidation details but I’m thinking it could be fun to organise a TabletPC Geek dinner one night.  Leave a comment if you are going to TechEd and would be interested a dinner one night.  All comers are welcome.

Any vendor types interested in sponsoring said dinner or some drinks?

Uber Tablet Geek Marc Orchant posted the other day about a cool bluetooth enabled portable whiteboard that he read about on Engadget.  This reminded me of something I saw recently that I really should blog about…

The Mimio capture bar has been around for a while but it has come a long way.  From the vendor’s site:

“mimio Xi is a portable and low cost device that attaches to any whiteboard (up to 4'x8' in size), connects to your PC/Mac and when used with a projector, allows you control your desktop applications and documents directly from the board. Without a projector, mimio enables you to digitally capture notes or drawings that can be saved, shared, and/or integrated into other materials.”

The new version – the Mimio Xi – is very cool.  There are two parts to the solution.  Firstly there is the capture bar - this bit gets stuck onto the whiteboard, wall or floor.  

The second componet is a sleeve that fits standard whiteboard pens and transmits what is being written to the capture bar.  The digital in is then either recorded in the capture bar for later retrieval or transmitted to a laptop via a cable or wirelessly (with the wireless option sold seperately.)

This can be used in a number of ways.

1. Stick it on the whiteboard and capture a meeting – no computer required.
2. Stick it on the whiteboard and capture directly to a laptop or tablet – getting better.
3. Stick it to the floor and work on large sheets of paper – capture it all electronically.
4. Project your laptop screen onto the wall and use a blank pen to interact with applications. (getting warmer)

All of this is on the vendor’s site.  What isn’t is that it works even better with a tablet.

I saw this at a conference and the guy demonstrating it was using Art Rage on a lapop as an attention getter.  I showed him how I worked with my Tablet (actually he already wanted one) and then we borrowed a TC4200 from the HP stand and plugged it in.

What happened next was pretty cool.  We were running OneNote and projecting the tablet screen onto the wall.  It worked very well.  When using the capture pen on the wall there was no hover functionality and of course there was no pressure sensitivity.  These are both on the cards though.  What was really cool though was that both of us could create digital ink in OneNote at the same time.  I was on the Tablet and the demo guy was writing on the wall but in both cases what we wrote was turning up in OneNote as digital ink.  Is it just me or is this amazingly powerful for interactive meetings?

My friend and colleague James Andrews has started a blog called ‘blipverts’.  What is a blipvert you ask?  The Answer is here.

James also has a lengthy diatribe outlining why he hates the word ‘blog’.  I feel for you James, it is a stupid word, but that is no reason for you to avoid it.

The truth is that the English language is full of terms that have been abbreviated, adapted from other languages or just plain bastardised. 

For example legend has it that in the 1800s manure was dried for transport to make it lighter.  Unfortunately this created a problem when transporting this product by ship.  You see, when manure get wet it not only gets heavier, it also starts to give off methane gas, presenting a bit of a hazard.  To avoid this crates of manure use to be stamped with an acronym that stood for Ship High in Transit.  This acronym was then adapted to give this product a new name that is still in common use today and has nothing to do with shipping instructions.

I have no idea if the above is true, but it amuses me.  The point is that any word, regardless of whether we like it or not, is only a label for an item or concept.  An effective label is one that is readily understood by those at whom the communication is targeted.  In this respect the word blog is an excellent label.

You’re a blogger James – deal with it :)  I look forward to more thought provoking posts from you in the future, especially the one that you keep promising me about TabletPCs, which you also mentioned in your excellent post about the PPC.

Today was my first day of six weeks as a stay at home Dad. For the next six weeks I’ll betaking advantage of a benefit offered by my employer and staying home to look after my six month old daughter Sylvie.

I don’t know if I’ll be blogging more or less for the next six weeks, but I’ll try to make the effort.