Ok I have been here in sunny San Francisco for a couple of days and this is the current break down:
Paul Mooney is talking about how the TabletPC just amazes him; I have to agree the machine is amazing and after watching Charles Petzold make his Portege M200 do some very amazing things in the graphics area of use for the new Real Time Stylus APIs (most with less than 200 lines of C#). I need to say that if these machines do not start to really take off soon a major oppurtunity will be lost.
Paul also asks why Tablets have yet to really grow in market size and after seeing the hardware talk yesterday I have to agree with the speaker (I can not remember his name but he is the hardware engineer behind the tablet); that currently the big problem with the tablet for the consumer market is the lack of a optical drive. Consumers want the machine for entertainment mostly; and this is about to be fullfilled. In the next couple of months a new batch of tablets are going to hit the market and they have integrated optical drives, so now the only thing that needs to happen is that the price needs to come down some and the market will explode.
Now as to programming the tablet I am very interested in how the tablet group has made it possible for the developer to expand the ablilties of the machine you truely have the ability to grab the data straight from the digitizer and mainpulate it how ever you want. I will be posting some example code for playing with the real time stylus in the next week (hopefully:). Charles Petzold definately made me think of new ways to extend the functionality of this machine.
until next time
blair