As some of you might know, Microsoft has been working on the first revision to the Windows XP Tablet operating system, code named Lonestar. It will ship under the name Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 and will be a free upgrade for tablet owners. More confusing is that Lonestar has been rolled into Windows XP Service Pack 2, so if you download the beta of SP2, you'll also get the beta of XP Tablet 2005. For those of you who are adventurous, you'll find the RC (release candidate) 1 of SP2 at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/sp2preview.mspx .
SP2 adds a great number of security enchancements, including the Windows Firewall, which replaces the Internet Connection Firewall. You'll find the new firewall much more paranoid and powerful than ICF. SP2 also adds the ability to download windows updates from MS, but delay their installation until shutdown (aren't we all sick of rebooting for updates?). But let's move on to the tablet enhancements!
First off, 2005 offers even better integration with MS Office 2003 and OneNote. SP1 for OneNote is due out after XP Tablet 2005 is released and that offers a better bag of tricks than the already capable 1.0 release. BTW: if you don't have Office 2003 on your tablet, run out and get a copy-- the tablet enhancements are superb.
Gone is the write anywhere feature-- but don't have a fit just yet. Instead, the TIP (tablet input panel) will open anywhere you tap in a document of most any kind. Tap (or hover, depending on your preference setting) with the pen, and you'll see a little icon appear. That's the new dynamic floating tip. See image below.
Tap on the TIP to open it up and start writing. There are some important and wonderful changes to the TIP.
1) As you write and come to the end of a line in the TIP, it automatically creates a second line so you can continue writing. In fact, it will keep opening lines as needed until you run out of screen real estate. Maavelous deal, maavelous. See image below.
2) As you write, the tablet will turn your writing into text, and show you what it thinks you've written. Simply tap on any of these words to correct them as needed. When you tap on a recognized word, the new TIP will show several alternate word choices, or you can write over any letter in your word to correct it. If you've ever used Decuma on the Sony Clie or Pocket PC, the concept is similar. See image below.
Now this beats the pants off the old correction system, and requires very little hand travel and much less work to correct.
3) But you won't be needing that correction nearly as much. XP Tablet 2005 does a superior job of recognizing handwriting. You still won't be able to train it to the way you write, but the horde of PhD's MS has employed to work on handwriting recognition have really made some major improvements. I have a terrible leftie scrawl, and the tablet did a bang-up job of recognizing my writing. In fact I had to work hard to force an error so I'd be able to capture the correction screen above .
4) URL and email address entry won't drive you bonkers any more. XP Tablet 2005 has gotten clever: it looks at the context and figures out what the possible input types might be. When you tap in the URL bar, the TIP has quick input buttons for common web address parts such as "http://", "www." and "/". It's also been retuned to understand common URL types and no longer thinks of them as normal word processing text. When entering an email address, the recognizer easily lets you put an "@" sign in rather than insisting on the letter "a".
5) Developers can create tablet aware apps that can set the context for a given field. Say you're deploying a group of insurance professionals who need to fill out a database form describing damage to an auto. Zip code fields can be set to only interpret handwriting as numbers, and writing the word California can be interpreted as "CA".
These new features, combined with falling prices and increasing power of current and future generation tablets should really jump start Tablet PC!
Microsoft has for some 1.5 years been developing their new handwriting recognition. The company responsible for collecting handwriting examples for them is Babel Infovox (at: www.babeltech.be).
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