Creating a nice touch experience for your touch Tablet PC
I’ve acquired a few touch tips for those getting a P1610 Tablet PC, Lenovo X60 Tablet PC, or Ultra-Moible PCs and I thought I’d pass them along.
1) Set your Quick Launch icons to large instead of small. Right click the Qucik Launch tool bar, go to View and choose Large Icons. This makes it easier to launch new applications.
2) Set your icons to single click. Open My Computer, go to Tools / Folder Options. Under the General Tab, set “Click items as follows” to Single click. This will let you press an icon once to launch, rather than double click.
3) Move your open applications toolbar below the Quick Launch toolbar, giving more room and larger tap areas for the open application buttons. Right click the taskbar and choose to Unlock the Taskbar. Grab the top of the taskbar and make it a tad higher. Then grab the handle for the open applications toolbar and move it to the right and down until it appears below the quicklaunch toolbar. It takes a bit of work, but it’ll move. I actually prefer my taskbar like that on all of my Tablet PCs, but it makes the touch experience much better this way as well.
4) For units with lower resolutions, try moving the taskbar and docking it to the right of the screen. It will give you a bit more vertical screen real estate
5) Use the QuickLinks in Internet Explorer and store your most visited websites there. You will have a nice button to press rather than navigating a drop down of favorites
6) Increase the size of your windows scroll bar. Right click your desktop and choose Properties / Appearance / Advanced. From the drop-down, select scrollbar. I set my scrollbar to a width of 25, which makes grabbng the scroll bar with your finger much easier. I also adjusted the size of the Active Title bar to 30 to make the Minimize, Maximize, and Close icons bigger.
If you are using an Origami device with the touch pack, you might see some of these things already implemented. For those without the Touch Pack, you might try implementing these suggestions to see if you touch experience improves!
What tips / tools do you have for touch users?
