MPB - Ian Legrow

Ian is the Program Manager for Tablet PC at Microsoft. He is doing a great demo of Tablet on current builds of Vista. There are a ton of great new thing that people are gonna love. Once again, not an exhaustive list, but here are a couple of highlights:

• Moveable, dockable TIP - Great control over the TIP, which has been a common complaints in Tablet/XP versions
• Erasing in TIP - Can be done with much better strokes than the diffiult “Z” stroke. Can use a single diagonal stroke, circles, etc., PLUS use the pen eraser in TIP!
• Handwriting training - A lot of work is being sone here. Not just on teaching the PC how you write, but automatic corretion based upon common errors you make in strokes. You can also “donate” your training data to Microsoft, to help with reco development.
• New version of Snipping tool - Improved version which gives more feedback on status, provides links, etc.
• Gestures / flicks - These are awesome. Gestures are pretty much just improved, but the intor of “Flicks” is very nice. Flicks are basically just specific motions that occur without touching the digitizer. Flick up in IE to move, scroll, etc. was a great demo!
• New button “states”. Support for button hold actions, as opposed to just push.
• Touch screens - Ian spent a good deal of time on using Touch with a passive digitizer. The big question there has been the error rate oif having a hand, etc. touch the screen while in use. When the digitizer detects the pen in “range”, it turns off passive digitizer response. Nice implementation, but we’ll see when general users start using it!
• Vista wireless projection - Had demo issues, but it is a great idea and will be in Vista.
• Mobility Center - Gret new tool that contains all the common functions that mobile users like to have handy. Volume, display, rotation, brightness, battery settings and level
• Presentation settings - Nice new “mode” that allows you to give a presentation without popups, screen savers, etc.. A “Monitor Discovery Wizard” will find and configure the presence of additional monitors. Nice!
• Blocked Shutdown Resolver - Nice handling of the ugly shutdown experiences we have now. MS has mad “significant investment” in more intelligent handling of hung apps, etc. to make this a better process for users. MS wants the default mode to be “sleep”, not shutdown.