Comments on: Tablets, Tablet PCs and software development

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:21:55 +0000

I believe my preconceptions about tablets were Newton-based. I don’t know that anything has matched the Newton’s drawing & note-taking capabilities since, except through integration with other apps and screen real-estate.

Apple must be sitting on some intellectual property that would put them near the front of a contemporary tablet market should they ever re-enter.

By: Tonio

Tonio — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:26:49 +0000

I’ve been using Wacom tablets for years, and I find them useful about 10% as often as I’d hoped (still useful, but only occasionally). One reason is, as you discovered, one gets awfully good with a mouse, which turns out to be better for certain precise kinds of input than a pen.

My problem with tablet computers is that they’re expensive and underpowered … and not Macs, so I’m holding out for a Cintiq (integrated display and tablet). The smallest one is almost portable enough to carry with my laptop (but won’t run on battery).

My main personal experience of handheld tablets was three generations of Newton. The original was useless (both the handwriting recognition and battery life sucked), but the second and third generation Newtons were amazing (I still have my MP2000 and it still works just fine). I have about three years’ worth of meeting notes on my MP2000. No more recent pen-based system has offered the refinement of the Newton’s UI (e.g. gesture-based select, copy, and paste; near perfect in-situ handwriting recognition)

By: Sunny Kalsi

Sunny Kalsi — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:27:31 +0000

I got the tablet for drawing, primarily, and the lag as well as the corner problems with tracking (with the three different brands of tablet PCs people I know have, they all show this problem) do make it hard to draw. However, the biggest problem is that software is just not ready yet. You should be able to draw stuff free-hand and and just import it into [uml program], do some fine-tuning, and bob’s your uncle. The problem is that the free drawing and estimation to higher order things (e.g. shape -> square -> class) is not presented consistently and in a flexible way. I often get issues when writing. It guesses what you’re writing, then re-guesses when you’ve moved onto another word, even though the original word hasn’t changed (in Vista, at least).

The nice side-effect is that it forces you to use pen without touching the screen (the grease on your finger makes the screen hard to write on) which is apparently the “right way”.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:27:43 +0000

I wouldn’t say my goal was to necessarily make them better – it was to make them faster. I guess I have this crazy idea that adding a simple illustration to my text shouldn’t cause me to break stride. As far as that goal goes, OneNote is the best so far. I can pump out typed text with embedded freehand drawings at a good rate (for me).

I’d have to wrest control of J’s Mac to make OmniGraffle work for me. I have tried it and it is sexy and seductive. I’d say it’s unbeaten for making beautiful diagrams without trying.

I own Illustrator, so I’m interested in trying Inkscape for comparison. I have only dabbled with Illustrator on the tablet, but it or Inkscape might be good candidates for adding some quality on top of rapidity.

Microsoft really seems to treat Visio as the red-headed stepchild of the Office suite. In 2007 it had its boots polished, hair brushed, face washed and then it’s been sent out into the cold, hard marketplace with all of its old usability problems.

By: Alastair

Alastair — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:32:16 +0000

Interesting - I've never even considered a tablet as a way of making my diagrams better. I've always thought the ultimate diagram tool was declarative, sort of like graphviz or perhaps linogram, but interactive and with manual tweaking allowed. For example, I just want to say "give me three connected boxes with these labels" and get a half-decent diagram. We're not quite there yet. Until that day comes the best advice I have is: give up Visio. I don't know what it is about Visio, but that program just Defaults To Ugly. You can generally tell when someone has used Visio for a diagram. There's usually a smattering of stylistically mismatched stencils and hand-drawn shapes connected with auto-routed spaghetti and rendered in non-complementary primary colours. It's the visual equivalent of ransom note typography, and the bulk of the blame rests squarely on the tool and not the users. Put simply, Visio does not make it easy to make an attractive, or even just effective, diagram. Try some other tools and you'll see what I mean. I'm a big fan of OmniGraffle; this is a great example of Defaulting to Purdy. Diagrams just look nicer thanks to the developers attention to detail. I also rate Inkscape very highly although it doesn't hold your hand quite as much as OmniGraffle. Interestingly, the new Inkscape 0.46 has tools that may be more appropriate for tablet use (eg calligraphy tool, tweak tool). Maybe worth a look?