Windows Tablet PC Edition
posted under category: Browsers on September 11, 2005 at 12:00 am by Nathan
I've been in heaven the last day or so playing with my wife's new toy, a Toshiba tablet PC. This thing os so cool and versatile, and it's so perfect for so many things.
There were a lot of little apps and toys that came with it (this is the boring part), the coolest of which are MS Journal, a freehand writing pad that is smarter than it seems, and the Tablet PC's input panel, which pops up whenever you hover your pen over a text area. The input panel also provides an easy mechanism for enabling the MS speech tools, which seem to be pretty good so far.
Now the fun part. I was amazed to see the effort that MS has put into the Tablet PC platform. They've done some really cool stuff, most of which you can download for free from the Microsoft site.
The MS Education Pack, though not so exciting for me, has my wife smiling about her future schooling plans.
The MS Experience Pack has got a lot of fun things, like a screen grabber, circle the part of the screen you want and send it straight to an email, write directly on your desktop with the Ink Desktop, and play crossword puzzles.
The Tablet PC PowerToys (you know, like TweakUI), were particularly astonishing. I count over 20 utilities, games, tweaks and apps, including a layered, pressure-sensitive painting program, animated drawing programs, at least 10 games, and my favorite, the easiest font creating tool I've ever seen, the My Font Tool. Want to download my handwriting font?
Microsoft has really done a great job on this OS. I'm really having fun with it. 5 stars, highly recommended. Thanks Bill!