This is a little late, because I've been doing post travel stuff, and then getting ready for the new VSTS class coming up. To the fine folks in Montreal, I say:
Pardonnez-moi, svp, mes amis!
So on Wednesday night in Montreal, I gave
my presentation to GUMSNET: Ink in 60 Seconds. Despite my rather hideous attempt to apologize in French for not being able to speak French, they were most gracious hosts. (And darn it! I rehearsed that apology over a dozen times on the trip, until I had it down pat; and then I fell apart when I actually had to give it. Here's what I meant to say:
Bon soir, monsieurs! Mon nom est Martin L. Shoemaker, et je ne comprends pas le français. Pardon, si vous plais. Je suis un debutante en français. Mais mon Tablet PC comprend le français!)
I got caught in a lot of Montreal traffic, and also had to fight to find parking in Centre-ville, so I was just a bit late. And then my machine had to reboot. But we finally got rolling, and I started writing little Tablet PC demos, with a 60 second clock running. There were occasional laughs at my expense when I missed the 60 second mark; but on the other hand, many of the demos were done in under 30 seconds. The Tablet PC API is just that powerful. By the time we were done, we were drawing pictures, editing them, erasing them, saving them, loading them, and exporting them as images. We were also drawing shapes that the Tablet PC recognized and identified. We were converting handwriting to text, in both English and French. And we even wrote some text by hand and then had the Tablet PC speak it out loud. We finished with ten ideas for great Tablet PC apps just waiting to be written. I hope that I inspired someone in the audience to go write one.
There was one hang-up in the presentation; and I promised the good folks from GUMSNET that I would blog about it, including what I learned afterward. Late in the presentation — right about the time I tried to do handwriting recognition, when I needed really good ink collection —
my wonderful Gateway CX200X Tablet PC started exhibiting dead spots that were strangely reminiscent of
the bad old days of Toshiba. The dead zones weren't as consistent, but they were irritating. And they always seemed to be right where I was writing text en français to try to show off the multi-lingual power of the Tablet PC. The audience was forgiving for this, but they did insist on knowing the answer when I learned it. Well, here's what I
think I have learned. I noticed that the pen seemed to behave better when I held it at different angles; and then I remembered that when we broke for dinner, I dropped the pen. And as far as I can recall, there were no dead zones before the break, only after. I suspected that maybe I had jammed something in the pen tip; and with a little experimentation, I found that rotating the pen around its axis or relative to the screen could sometimes make the dead zone go away. Suspecting a pen problem rather than a screen problem, I pulled out
my spare pen. And I have had no dead zone problems since.
All in all, Montreal was a delightful place to visit, and I hope to return some day when I have a little more time to visit. And the folks at GUMSNET were a great audience. I ran about 40 minutes over time (gee, there's a surprise); and they were all alert and attentive right to the end. We would probably have stayed longer, but the Microsoft employee who was keeping the facility open for us wanted to go home!
Of course,
Richard would have my hide if I didn't mention that Ink in 60 Seconds is the opening segment of
our Tablet PC Programming Workshop, where you can learn all this and much, much more about building your own Tablet PC applications. In the class, you won't just watch: you'll build a full-featured Tablet PC application yourself, and learn the Tablet PC from the inside. I hope we'll be adding a public Tablet PC class to our schedule first, but you can always bring us to your site.
