How many times have you told your computer to do something and you really wish it would do it?  I know I have a few times... :)  Well, In Windows Vista you can use voice commands to make your computer do all kinds of things.  Navigation of the Start menu, opening and closing programs and general navigation though out the OS.

In this InkShow I give a quick overview of Voice Command and speech recognition.  I cover the basics and don't get into some of the more advanced features (that's another InkShow), but if you have never seen it in action, this video will show you what it can accomplish.  I take a look at opening and closing program, menu navigation, starting up OneNote and dictating a couple of lines and then also take a look at how you can navigate thru multiple windows that are running on your computer.

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Have you ever watched John Madden doing his football analysis, inking all over the players, marking playing routes and wished you could do that on your Tablet PC? Well, your wait could almost be over.

During Mobile Connections, Microsoft's Stefan Wick demoed a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that showed how Tablet PC users could ink on a video. Even better, during the Hands-On Lab, developers got to work on the same code and do it themselves.

During my session at the Hands-On-Lab, I shot this video so you could see if for yourself. The implications of being able to ink on the video and have the ink play back in real time, in sync with the video are great. Imagine marking up a video with your kids handwriting, and then sending it to Grandma and Grandpa with a special handwritten note. What about the lawyer or doctor with video of an EEG and wants to write on the video, marking critical areas, and then sends the video off to a colleague across the country with the important parts marked and circled, notes made, and played back in real time with the video. In addition to marking up is the ability to have that ink searchable through attributes stored with the video, on your desktop, on the web, etc! The possibilities are endless.

Remember that this app is a prototype  and not fully developed - but it shows the promise. All it needs are developers to take the app and finish it off, develop some products around it, or integrate into some other applications. Developers, look for this sample code to be made available soon on msdn.com/mobilepc . I will post an article when all the sample code from Mobile Connections becomes available for download.

UPDATE: Stefan Wick, the developer who demoed the application at Mobile Connections, just let me kow that the sample code is available for download here. In addition, he said they are working on a detailed developer article to be posted at http://msdn.com/mobilepc

• Watch the InkShow (22.3mb, 4:13 Windows Media streaming, or direct download)
• Visit the MSDN Mobile PC site
• Visit the Windows Presentation Foundation website

Enjoy!

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This past January at CES, we began to see the first indications of Tablet PCs being able to support both an active digitzer pen and touch, with the operating system adapting to both, while still offering a superb experience for the user.

Well, Hilton Locke, who works on the Mobile PC team at Microsoft, has been busy working on the touch aspect of Vista and gave me a demo of how touch works within Vista, the new touch pointer icon, and also how this new adaptive / multi-touch experience will offer additional benefits to the user. Hilton also let us know that he expects many OEMs to begin offering this type of display in their Tablet PCs once Vista is released, offering consumers a lot of choices.  To me, this type of adaptive display offers the best of all worlds, enabling me to interact with my Tablet PC  how I want to interact with it - touch or pen.

It is important to note that the Motion LE1600 Tablet PC that Hilton is demonstrating this on is an engineering prototype and is not indicitive of what Motion may or may not be working on.

You can keep up to date with what Hilton and the Mobile PC team are doing at http://blogs.msdn.com/hiltonl

• Watch the InkShow (22mb, 4:09 Windows Media streaming, or direct download)
• Visit Hilton Locke's blog
• Visit the Tablet PC site

Enjoy!

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From the very introduction of the Tablet PC almost 4 years ago, the Snipping Tool Power Toy has been an all time favorite. It allows Tablet PC users the ability to “snip” a screen shot using their pen, much in the same way you would “snip” a newspaper article using scissors. It applies that personal touch to screen shots and annotation soley using the pen.

When the Experience Pack came out last year, the Tablet PC team reengineered the Snipping Tool UI, providing a nice pie shape interface that made it more pen friendly. With Vista, the Tablet PC team reengineered the interface again, this time reverting back to a traditional File dropdown menu. In addition, all annotating is now done in the editor instead of on the layered screen. Although, I’m very disappointed to see the UI change back and I prefer Snipping Tool 2.0 instead of the one in Vista, the Snipping Tool in Vista does have some improvements, and it is good to see the Vista Team include it as a standard program within Vista instead of a downloadable add-on. It is definitely much more than a Power Toy.

I hope you enjoy this Software InkShow and it gives you a good idea of what to expect with the new Snipping Tool. Maybe with enough feedback, we can encourage the Tablet PC to change the Snipping Tool back to a more pen friendly interface.

• Watch the InkShow (11:23 minutes, 41mb, .wmv streaming or direct download.).
• Visit the Vista website
• Download the Experience Pack and Snipping Tool 2.0 for Windows XP

Enjoy the show.

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Handwriting personalization in Vista is where it starts to get really interesting for Tablet PC users, and that is the focus of this Software InkShow.

In Windows XP SP2, the only method of “training” the recognizer is to add words to the dictionary. That does help a lot when dealing with unknown words, but it doesn’t do anything for those odd characters like 4s, Ks, Vs, etc. With problem characters, you basically have to figure what the recognizer is looking for and tailor those characters to it.

With Vista, things are a whole lot better. You can now tailor the recognizer to your own handwriting and deal with those problem characters much easier. In this InkShow, I cover targeting specific problem characters and symbols, training the recognizer with sample sentences, turning on automatic learning based on corrections you’ve made, and  submitting problems to Microsoft for further analysis. I also go over how to transfer your personal recognizer to another Tablet PC.

I hope you enjoy this Software InkShow and it gives you something to look forward to in Vista.

• Watch the InkShow (21:11 minutes, 86mb, .wmv streaming or direct download.).
• Visit the Vista website
• Visit AbletFactory.com

Enjoy the show.

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With Vista, comes a whole new experience when it comes to the TIP. It is obvious that Microsoft has listened to alot of suggestions when it came time to start implementing Tablet PC features into Vista. In this Software InkShow, I take a look at the new docking options, Auto Complete features, and password security. I will be covering the handwriting training in another InkShow due in several weeks.

I apologize if I repeat a couple of things during the show or seem a bit lost at times. When I recorded this show, I was on my 4th time time through after dealing with Explorer crashes in Vista, which would in turn get my audio all goofed up. So, I was kind of walking on egg shells the whole time hoping that I woudn’t experience another crash. Gotta love beta software!

• Watch the InkShow (22:48 minutes, 113mb, .wmv streaming or direct download.).
• Visit the Vista website

Enjoy the show.

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In this first in a series of Vista and Tablet PC InkShows, we take a look at Pen Flicks. Pen Flicks are gestures that allow you to do simple navigational and common functions more quickly and with less effort. Things like scrolling down, copying text, issuing a keyboard command with a stroke of a pen, etc.

Watch for more Vista Tablet PC InkShows in the coming weeks as we try to give you some ideas on what lies ahead.

• Watch the InkShow ( 7:51, 24.9 mb, WMV format. Best viewed by downloading to your computer and watching it locally)
• Visit the Vista website

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