Many moons ago (actually 1984), I saw my first Mac. There was great excitement around this product - it promised a new kind of freedom and a greater level of interaction with a computer, something we hadn't experienced before. I was at college doing Computer Science and we'd been working on DEC-10 mainframes, PDP-11 Unix systems and of course 8086 IBM PCs. Suddenly there was this highly graphical, highly interactive computer which really felt like it deserved the title "personal". We had great fun using MacPaint, filling irregular objects with shades of grey and thinking the future had arrived.

(Actually, I learnt first-hand that Apple weren't first - they just made a bigger commercial splash. In 1996 I was working for an IT department in a large bank and we were asked to visit the Bank's publishing department, who wanted to upgrade their multi-user document publishing system. We went to see them, thinking we would install MS Word 6 and Windows NT 3.51 ... but we got a surprise! In a carefully fitted room we saw 8 beautiful, pre-Mac graphical workstations, all sitting upright in portrait mode. It was a complete Xerox system for document production - with its own network and file server, its own WIMP user interface in black & white, three-button mice, everything. It had been installed in 1983 and was getting tired after 12 years of use! I was in awe. I didn't want to install any of our stuff ... I was inclined to persuade the publishing department to keep what they had!)

My point is that once in a while you have these new experiences - something confronts you and makes you realise bigger things are possible, or that you've been tied to some slavish way of doing things and it has to end!

(Has it ever occurred to you that a Windows desktop could be an interactive surface in which multiple mouse pointers could interact with objects ... instead of just one measly user at a time? Imagine the educational power of an interactive space where three kids and one adult could manipulate counting shapes, or words, or jigsaw pieces, or jungle creatures, together? Or perhaps a large interactive whiteboard where three people can all use digital pens at the same time, while two more contribute squiggles online from another city? But today's GUIs are very much single-user, one thing at a time. The Apple user interface design principle of "hey you, do this" has become a chain. You get one finger to clumsily prod and stab around your digital world. This needs to change.)

Well, the TabletPC is one tool that makes you realise you've been a slave until now. Suddenly I can just draw anywhere on the PC screen, like on a canvas. And the system actually makes a reasonable attempt to understand me. If I write the words Mike Seyfang on a OneNote page (i.e., the TabletPC notebook), a subsequent search for Mike using Windows Explorer will find my handwriting and show me the document. It understands something! Rather cool.

I've found that the TabletPC is good for writing music, and drawing chord shapes from my Chapman Stick. Other members of the family like to use it to write school reports. They find it a more natural way to interact with the machine (let's face it, poking things with a small arrow isn't exactly normal interaction is it? A pen is better). When I say "write", I mean just that - writing on the screen into MS Word, which is then converted into text with great fidelity and reasonable speed. Most of the Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Outlook, understand this digital ink.

Or you can do simple things like just "circling" an interesting snippet from a web page, and then popping it into an email to a friend - just the circled bit, not the whole page. I recently found an interesting circuit for an amplifier for my Chapman Stick, which I grabbed like this - see the attached picture with this blog entry.

12 months ago I was doing some consulting work for a hospital in Western Australia. I had an idea for a TabletPC-based forms program, allowing the doctors and nurses to collect data on the ward, without using paper forms. Their particular requirement was highly graphical - they needed to record marks on a body to capture the nature of large wounds. Now, with TabletPC, they can draw straight onto an on-screen mannequin using a stylus. And the Tablet can interpret their jots as having meaning, for example to decide on the severity of the wounding or to derive its approximate surface area. Try doing that on paper! (See the attached picture with this blog entry).

There are many archaisms in computing today - we're bound by things that shouldn't be so, roped to baggage which belongs to thinking buried deep in the past. I will leave you to muse on the unnecessary and dangerous nature of File->Save. (The computer designer doesn't understand that I would like my work to persist? Really?)

So in my view, the Tablet PC is a small step towards machines understanding and serving us better. There's a long way to go. Don't accept things as they are!

All for now.

PS: IBM has failed twice in the pen-based computing market, with its original ThinkPad (April 1992), and also its TransNote (2001) which combined a small portable screen with a separate scribble pad. This doesn't mean the Microsoft TabletPC concept is a bad one - we just need compelling applications that use "digital ink" really well.

PPS: The very useful "snipping tool" in the Microsoft Powertoys for Windows XP Tablet PC Ediition was used to capture the StickAmp screen shot above, just by drawing on the tablet screen with the pen. Sadly this has a bug which breaks the Office 2003 DRM technology (Digital Rights Management). Maybe a future version will fix this because the snipping tool is an awesome utility. See the 'secret document' picture attached to this blog entry to see what I mean.

Andrew Delin

Technorati Profile