Just got this in from xThink, announcing the release of MathJournal 2.1. MathJournal is available for $249, with student pricing for $119. Stay tuned for some xThink contests.

Check out these new features:

Enhancements in MathJournal 2.1:

• Easier installation for Windows Vista
  Simplified installation for administrator and non-administrator users.
• Support for Pegasus Mini-Note Taker
  Brings pen-based math to desktop and laptop computers!
• Export as Web Page option
  Post your MathJournal work to the Internet or email to friends and colleagues!
• 2D Plot Grid
  Better visualization of plots!
• LaTeX output
  A second option (besides MathML) for rendering your hand-written math in typeset format!

• Sound control to embed audio messages in a MathJournal file
• Movie control to embed videos in a MathJournal file
• Export to Microsoft Outlook to send an HTML version of the MathJournal workspace directly to email.
• "Open" item in the popup menu of the Text control to open Web pages, file paths, or launch commands directly from the MathJournal workspace.

xThink, the makers of the popular ink based products Calculator and MathJournal, recently announced how their products are spreading in use over in Croatia. From their press release:

Those who watch xThink's worldwide progress are aware of xThink's activity in Croatia (especially if they speak Croatian!). Since late 2006, xThink has been building a partnership with Croatia's Ministry of Science, Education, and Athletics, which is led by Dr. Dragana Primorca.

On Saturday March 24, 2007, Dr. Primorca and Deputy Minister Dr. Dragan Schwarz, signed an agreement with Drazen Vidovic, xThink Marketing Director. Licensing agreements are in place for both xThink Calculator and Math Journal. The signing ceremony took place at the Marjan primary school in Split, which is the fast-growing and second-largest city in Croatia.

Be sure to watch our InkShows on Calculator and MathJournal

I’ve been quite busy doing real life stuff using the Lenovo Thinkpad X60 Tablet PC since I started walking the bleeding edge and installed Vista RTM on my Toshiba M200. Now that things are evening out a bit, I’m getting back to testing and tweaking and finding out what works and what doesn’t on this soon to be legacy Tablet PC (assuming you are Vista bound.)

After coming back to the M200 with Vista RTM installed I’m enjoying working with Vista and looking forward to giving it a try on the X60. (Hopefully tonight.) The M200 indeed performs snappier, but of course that is without a lot of Toshiba’s utilities and drivers loaded. Alas, there are still a number of those driver related issues that keep me from full functionality on the M200, and as I’ve said before, M200 users need to get used to that fact, as Toshiba is not going to support the M200 under Vista.

Although I haven’t installed them yet, (and may not-given that things are working well at the moment) Laptop2Go has a new set of NVidia drivers that I’ve seen some good and some so-so reports about. Suffice it to say, with the drivers I’ve installed (see this post) now that I can put the M200 to sleep (that just sounds weird) and I can achieve screen rotation through the Mobility Center, I can basically accomplish everything I need to on the M200, except play any video at all through Windows Media Player, and use the hardware buttons.

Something I did not have a chance to test until recently is how the Windows Mobile Device Center works with syncing on my PPC 6700. The Mobile Device Center is not included as a part of Vista RTM and in fact is still listed as Beta 3. (Download located here.) Beta 3 did work under Vista RC1 but with issues (it would eventually sync after a few retries) but after downloading and installing WMDC Beta 3 and installing in under Vista RTM, those issues seem to have gone away in my case. I have been able to sync successfully each time on the first try and the process seems much quicker. I’m still puzzled that the WMDC window requires me to manually open it after I’ve connected, but the syncing behavior works just fine.

Of course that points to the question in the headline of this post. Vista RTM is scheduled to be released to business clients tomorrow, November 30. Will we see a host of new drivers become available immediately, or will they dribble out as we wait for the consumer launch at the end of January? I don’t know and don’t have any real hints. What I do know is that regardless of how quickly new drivers, updates, and the like appear, those of us on the bleeding edge will be looking ahead to the constant update process. It sure will be nice to not have Beta this and Beta that on a system for awhile.

In this first installment of User InkReviews at GottaBeMobile.com, GBM reader Steve S takes an extensive look at xThink’s MathJournal 2.

As a daily user of MathJournal, Steve is well qualified to give us the inside story on MathJournal, what works, what still needs work, and how much improved MathJournal 2 is over MathJournal 1. Steve has his Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and his Masters of Science in Gasdynamics from the University of Michigan. He uses MathJournal daily in his job in the technology and manufacturing business. Steve knows his math and he knows MathJournal inside and out. In addition, Steve is the top contributor to the xThink support forum at TabletPCBuzz.com.

• Read this User InkReview on MathJournal 2
• Visit xThink

Price:

NEW: MathJournal 2.0
Regular $249; Student $119

MathJournal Classic
Regular $149; Student $69

UPGRADE: from MathJournal Classic to MathJournal 2.0
Regular $100; Student $50

UPGRADE: from MathJournal 1.1 to MathJournal 2.0
Regular $69; Student $39

FREE UPGRADE for recent customers:
You can upgrade to MathJournal 2.0 for free, if you bought MathJournal 1.1 on or after June 1st, 2005.

What  a great contest! We received a steady stream of entries up until 11:50PM last night and almost all of them were correct. It looks like many of you took the opportunity to review the demo videos and agree with us that Math Journal 2 is an awesome application.

The correct answers were:

Rand(4) = [ -0.6 0.8 -0.7 0.7

                  -0.7 -0.2 -0.2  1

                  0.3 -0.4  0.9 -0.9

                  0.2  -0.8 -0.6 -0.9]

We also accepted .7 since all appearances on the video indicated that .7 was the final solution. The answer we were looking for in exporting data was PowerPoint.

In addition to sending in the correct answers, we decided to award the MathJournal 2.0 license to the first person who sent in their answer in Ink. The consolation prize of Calculator went to the second person who sent in their entry in Ink.

So, on to the winners:

Congratulations to Bryan Pollack who won the Math Journal 2 license, and to Mark Petzold who won the Calculator license.

Special thanks to the anonymous donor who donated the license of Math Journal 2 to give away and to xThink for donating the license of Calculator.

Look for another contest this week…..

If you have not done so already, be sure to enter our MathJournal 2 contest, where you have a chance to win a copy of MathJournal 2, valued at $249. xThink has also donated a copy of Calculator to give as a consolation prize. So your chances of winning something just went up!

The contest ends on Sunday, with a winner to be announced on Monday.

This week, xThink announced the release of MathJournal 2.0. For students and those who work in the math or engineering field and have Tablet PCs, there couldn’t be a better solution.

To help celebrate this launch, we’ve been given a MathJournal 2.0 license to give away ($249 value) to one lucky GottaBeMobile.com reader. Special thanks to the “anonymous donor” who gave us this license!

Here is what you have to do to win:

1) Watch these short demo videos of MathJournal 2.0

2) Answer these two questions and email your answers to info@GottaBeMobile.com . We’ll pick a winner  from a group that answers both questions correctly and announce the winner on Monday.

• Answer to the rand( ) function that is demoed
• What application do they demo exporting MathJournal charts and data to?

There are few applications that utilize the power of ink better than the MathJournal tool from xThink.  Math on a keyboard is minimal at best, but the addition of the pen to diagramming and solving extremely complicated math problems makes for a very intuitive process.

Well, xThink has released their version 2.0 today.  Here are a couple of quick bullet points from their PDF press release

xThink has released Version 2.0 of MathJournal^TM, a user-friendly, powerful math tool for the Tablet PC. The release introduces many features derived from customer wish lists:

• Major expansion (75%) of the library of math functions, including functions for statistics and matrix math, and operations with scalars, complex numbers, vectors, and matrices.
• Even better recognition of handwritten, two-dimensional math expressions
• More math symbols, including Greek letters and operators, such as summation and product
• Streamlined user interface, including context menus
• Enhanced MathML (for typeset math output)
• Console control to enable keyboard-based math

Teresa Shu of xThink also sent us a couple of Camtasia videos of the product in action.  Even if you are not a mathematics afficionado, you will enjoy viewing these quick videos of a pen doing math!

Intro 1, Intro 2, Intro 3, and MathJournal to Microsoft Office demo

We would love to see a 3rd party review done of this product, but none of us here at GottaBeMobile.com feel we are math savvy enough to do one!  Anyone out there interested in doing a review to be published on GBM?  Email us at infoatgottabemobile.com if interested.

Also, a GottaBeMobile.com reader (anonymous, even to us ), has donated a copy of MathJournal 2.0 to be used in a contest as a giveaway!  Stay tuned over the next couple of days for how you can win a copy of this new release!

xThink has been testing their products to see how well they work with the UMPC form factor. They tested them with Future Pad PC from IBD in Germany and have published some screen shots of how Calculator and MathJournal look on the smaller form factors.

Their conclusions: the xThink applications work very well with touch screens.

In this special edition InkShow, Teresa Shu, of xThink, has sent us over a preview video of MathJournal 2.0, along with a couple of webpages that go over the function library and new features of MathJournal 2.0

• Watch the MathJournal 2.0 InkShow (3:35, 3mb)
• Read about the new features in MathJournal 2.0 and Function Library
• Download the trial  (version 1.1)
• Visit the xThink website
• Register for the MathJournal 2.0 beta program

If you visit www.xThink.com, you’ll notice that xThink doesn’t have a publicly accessible trial download of MathJournal. However, through a special arrangement with GottaBeMobile.com, xThink is offering our readers a special 45 day evaluation trial of MathJournal 1.1.

MathJournal includes the functionality of Calculator (see our InkShow), plus it features plotting, symbolic math, integrals, derivations, ability to define constants and functions, output to MathML, and more.

Download instructions:

1. Go to  www.xthink.com/downloads/MathJournal11.msi and download the trial.

2. Save the file to your harddrive. Run the install. When promoted for a keycode, press cancel. You’ll have 45 days to evaluate MathJournal.

3. Visit xThink’s support site if you have any questions.

Watch xThink’s own videos on MathJournal

Interested in learning more about xThink Calculator for the Tablet PC? Then you've got to watch this InkShow!

• Watch it now
• Download the trial of Calculator
• Download MathJournal 45 day evaluation (includes all the features of Calculator, plus plotting, symbolic math, integrals, derivations, ability to define constants and functions, output to MathML, and more
• Visit xThink's website

I had a good email conversation with the folks from xThink this weekend. Look for the beta testing on MathJournal 2.0 to begin soon. New features and functions to look forward to.

I'll be doing some beta testing for them and am really looking forward to it. If you are interested, check this page out.