I spotted this while travelling and I think it validates a lot of what people have been saying about how a tablet PC and pen is less psychologically intrusive. I type much faster than I write but I can't keep eye contact while I'm doing it as well so writing on screen let's me look as if I'm paying more attention. Decent note software like OneNote with the audio recording let's you think, secure in the knowledge that you can write down the key bits and your analysis but go back and listen to the whole thing if you need to.
June Entman, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has banned
laptops from her classes for first-year law students, telling them they
must take notes with pen and paper. "The computers interfere with
making eye contact," said Entman. "You've got this picket fence
between you and the students." She said she wants her students to spend
less time taking down everything she says and spend time "thinking and
analyzing" instead.
USA Today, 21 March 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-21-professor-laptop-ban_x.htm


Mary

There are a few too many keynotes for MIX to feel like a grassroots developer camp; this is a conference that hasn't quite settled down to what it's going to be. There's plenty of interest. After Joe Belfiore's demo of Vista Media Centre, ebay in Outlook, MSN Money in Excel and the UMPC, I skipped between two sessions: one on search, marketing, advertising and branding, the next a technical view on writing bots and activities for MSN Messenger (natural language is back). And there are some spontaneous sessions springing up in the few breaks (from the 9am keynote to the party that went on till past 9pm, we were talking and taking notes for a good eight hours yesterday). I'm hoping to catch up with some microformats people at the Birds of a Feather session in the food court this evening.

Now that it turns out the iPod packaging video was an internal training exercise to help avoid all the flashes, splashes and checkboxes that splatter so much Microsoft packaging (although I still like the sleek Mac Office case), I can't quite make up my mind if http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~sallyjo/ms_screen_res.pdf is a real Microsoft advert from New Zealand or a spoof. sethops, micheinnz - have you seen it for real?

I found myself first agreeing and then disagreeing strongly (and out loud) with the Cult of Mac blog when I got to the last sentence of this paragraph. "For most touchscreen tasks, direct visual feedback is less important than careful integration and responsive software, as the limited market penetration for digital illustration tablets with built-in LCD screens has shown. For more innovative and cursor-free touch functions, such as virtual keyboards (typing, video-editing and musical), visual feedback is far more important. On a traditional tablet PC, that eats up serious real estate and negates many of the benefits of touch input."

'Traditional tablet PC' can't mean passive digitiser (dumb screen that you can touch with a stylus or a fingernail), because those are limited to industrial tablets and PDAs, and very few of them are PCs rather than embedded OS devices (Win CE and embedded Linux for the most part). The OQO and the Nokia 770 are the main exceptions (Windows XP and a reasonably standard Linux) and they're PDA size. You do need a virtual keyboard on most passive digitisers because of the poor smoothness; even when the OS lets you write anywhere on the screen, the curves of your writing aren't what they should be.

But the modern Tablet PC running the Tablet Edition of Windows XP is a bit of a different beast. The active digitiser samples more often than a graphics tablet (though it's the same technology, just a higher sampling rate), so it's very like writing with an ink pen. The only time you'll hunt and peck on a virtual keyboard is for passwords and URLs where 'usually right' isn't good enough. The rest of the time it's up to the application developer whether you write into an input strip - or anywhere on the page.

OneNote, Journal, Art Rage, Grafigo: applications that are designed to work on a touchscreen let you use the screen without needing to go back to a keyboard (virtual or not). Utilities like Sensiva Symbol Commander and ActiveWords let you trigger actions with gestures or individual letters instead of keyboard shortcuts. ritePen is a great handwriting recogniser for desktop and Tablet PCs that lets you write anywhere, even if the application isn't designed that way. A video editing or musical composition app that understands pen input shouldn't need the keyboard input that's designed to be faster than mousing through menus when your input with a pen is both fast and accurate. The next generation of touchscreens won't have the alignment issues that have made it hard to recogise input close to the very edges of the screen (which is why Word's write anywhere option doesn't cover quite all of the screen).

'careful integration'. Definitely important.
'responsive software'. Absolutely.
'eating up screen real estate'. Not when you design and integrate it well. Touchscreens aren't the problem; it's understanding how to use them to replace the keyboard rather than replicating the mouse.

This is another place where I'm impatient for Vista; it will have a cross-hair cursor to make it obvious you’re using the pen, on-screen ripples that let you know you’ve clicked on the screen and eight gestures called flicks that mean you can copy, paste, undo and delete just by flicking the pen in a particular direction. Vista can also learn what your handwriting looks like to make it easier to recognise what you write. If you want to use your finger to touch the screen to select something and it's a combined active and passive digitiser so you can, there will be a little magnifying ring to show you more clearly where you're clicking.

As to the form factors, the first is very like the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook with touchscreen sitting on my desk at the moment. Folding the screen down to use it without the keyboard is the principle used by any convertible Tablet PC, although I can't see room on the mockup for any hinges ;-) And yes, narrow widescreen is a little off when you rotate it to portrait. This falls in what Ken Delaney at Gartner told me he calls “the 1kg wasteland” because so many products of this size and weight have failed, compared to standard notebooks or smartphones and PDAs. “You don’t have the benefits of the larger devices or the portability of the smaller devices”.

The notebook using a second screen as a configurable keyboard looks huge fun. OLED would do that nicely. It would, as the blog remarks, be pricey. It's price that's held people back from buying devices like Wacom's Cintiq (a touscreen monitor that's a desktop Tablet PC) because everyone one I know who's seen one wants one but not enough to pay that much. And I don't think a screen would be comfy to use for typing - with no key action your fingers get tired very quickly on projection keyboards. We've been using pen and paper for centuries and we're good at it. Making software as good at it shouldn't take that long.

Just when you thought the Office interface overhaul was making sense, with incredible attention paid to simple details, here's a reminder of why we need it. To find commands in an application, they need to be arranged logically and consistently. They need to be in the same place on the menu every day for muscle memory to get you there quickly. They need to always be in the same place on every PC so you can easily give directions to people. That's why personalized menus in Office are so annoying, as I was reminded just now when i installed OneNote 2007 beta 1 on a Tablet PC and saw far less on the menus than I was expecting. Personalized menus might work if they turned on after six months, when the application could really know what features you use, but by then you'd know where to look for things without feeling that the other options were in the way anyway. or they'd work if the PC was psychic. Or if you were the mythical 'standard user'. As it is, they're confusing for novices, irritating for power users and on the way out in 2007 Office. They don't apply for apps with the ribbon interface; the question is will they still be on by default in the other applications like OneNote and Outlook, or will they finally vanish into the oblivion they deserve?

And it's Tools > Customize > Options> Always show full menus to get rid of the irritation.

So Simon is trying out the new Skype thing and I’m checking out Office Live and I comment that the site has only been live for seven minutes and it’s already slow (although as so often this week it turns out to be our DSL going down) and he says ’ah, bleeding edge of technology again"... and then I decide to try this new blogging client. Consider this an experiment. </p>

 There are many nice things in Post2Blog - though I’m not sure about the emoticons, I’m both amused and disconcerted by the feature that replaces certain words (like Post2Blog itself) with a snippet of stored text, it counts LJ user tags as a Web service and I’m not sure about seeing the tags in the post window as I compose. But it has a Word toolbar so I can compose in my favourite place (Word!) and I like the spelling checker. On the gripping hand, I can’t yet find any way to do LJ user_pics... 

EDIT: the LJ tags seem to need a little work

"never mind the dotted quad, it's the thread that binds the Net together." For years I've been saying of online success that people come for content and stay for community. I've just had a long and fascinating conversation* with Marc Smith of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, nominally about the SNARF email triage tool and actually about the value and finite availability of attention, the value of interaction and current steps in detecting, visualising and using human relationships digitally. Ironically, talking about a tool that helps you with triage turned into a conversation that's sent me off in a lot of interesting new directions. I want to go to the Smithsonian folk music archive and find the songs from the first generation with choruses about how much people hate their cold, draughty, won’t-start-keeps-stopping, slow, dreadful, won't last wonderful new cars.

Marc is behind Netscan - software that measures and maps social spaces like Usenet; they're planning to turn it into a community reputation tool that could work for any threaded social space. Picturing Usenet - an article from the group in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication - has lots more visualisations and identifies various online personality types: questioners, answer people, trolls, locals, cynics, conversationalists... The treemaps that they produce apply to any hierarchical information - like the classic sales territories so many people track in Excel - so the Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In they've made available could be handy.

Computers have the ability to slice, dice, drill and map so much data from the information we store of them and the monolithic way so much information is presented is a real waste. After playing with the colour categories and To-Do tags in Outlook 12 and the visualisation of conditional formatting in Excel 12, I'm rather hoping that 2006 could be the year of data visualisation. Marc mentioned the ClearContext Inbox Manager as a way of getting Outlook 12-style goodness now, and I notice it works with ActiveWords which I must make time to play with (I got distracted by being able to use shortcuts in the Windows Search deskbar to get verbs - so I can type lj or flickr and a username to jump straight to someone on either service).

I'm now looking forward to the two new versions of SNARF we'll get this year and the new features planned for them... luckily for me, some of the things I thought it would be neat to see (like tagging people who matter to me irrespective of the statistics of our email exchanges) are already on the list.

*best parts of my job, the conversations

**SNARF and the Treemapper have their own pages but they're also on http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx -another of those interesting places to browse through. GroupBar is available there (a tool for grouping and managing windows for large desktops), as is the Search Result Clustering Toolbar for grouping search results into topics...

I'm writing about Office 12 beta 1 and as well as checking the software out and reading the Office 12 blogs by the developers I've been looking at the coverage by other writers. There's plenty of discussion of the new interface and whether it's just old wine in a new bottle, but the criticims of the persisting features aren't the ones I'd expect. I'm unhappy about limitaitions that I can't change. In Outlook 12 you still have to remember to explicitly check the spelling in the subject field in email, you can drag text into the subject of an appointment but not into the location and you still have to create appointments in a different time zone by working the time difference out yourself. I don't like that, especially as it would be so easy to fix those problems.

But PC Magazine complains that "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect". I don't want software changing things behind my back without warning, but actually AutoCorrect hasn't worked like that since Word 2000 and even then you could press Ctrl-Z to change a change back and edit the AutoCorrect list to stop the change. Word 2002 (XP), 2003 and 12 all have the AutoCorrect Options Smart Tag so if you don't spot the change until afte you've carried on typing you can still undo it. Hover your mouse over the changed text, click on the tag that appears and either undo the correction or tell Word not to change it ever again. That works for anything AutoCorrect does, from fixing two capitals at the beginning of a sentence to changing hyphens at the beginning of lines into bulleted lists. It's a very simple way of using AutoCorrect; you don't have to go find the list or edit individual entries. No software is going to know what you want every time but this way you can stop the changes that irritate you without losing all the advantages of having mis-typings fixed for you. Same goes for PowerPoint and Excel. if you're going to beat up Microsoft about broken features, pick something like Outlook timezones that really is broken.

Something I didn't know before: some of my Office content is now, by the wonders of licencing, on the official Microsoft support site. There's a piece on Word 97 and 2000 and some PowerPoint tips. Hope it helps people ;-)