Summertime!

Just wanted to say that we're having a great time on the southern coast of Norway. We're having a great time, the water is hot (22 c) and the sun is shining!

Demonstration of the Ink Everywhere application

If you’d like to test the application, you can download a very, very early demonstration from here:

Download v.0.1

Extract the contents of the zip file to a directory on your computer, and execute the file Falch.InkOverlay.App.exe. The file sits in the tray icon, and when you select an edit control or another field that can recieve input, the cursor changes to an ink cursor, and you can write away. After ca. 1 sec of not writing, the ink is converted to text and inserted into the input field.

Missing features:

• Windowless controls (controls inside IE, Mozilla etc) wont be inkable.
• The current input scope isn’t tracked.

I’m working on converting the application to a Text Service, which should provide a bit more functionality in the above areas.

Looking forward to your comments. I can be reached by email at chfalch at broadpark period no

Vacation

Ah! Today is my last day at work before my vacation starts! I’ll be leaving for my two week-vacation on sunday. We’re staying in the southern part of Norway in our summer house by the sea.

See you all!

Ink everywhere?

Rob's article about ink in Vista (about the lack of ink everywhere) made me both post and think (actually I've been thinking a lot). I've been working on a little utility for giving me ink everywhere, and wanted to post some pictures about my progress so far. The idea is that the utility would replace the TIP completely, letting you write directly on text fields all over Windows.

The application is still being developed, and important features like detecting the input scope (web, email etc) and integration with windowless controls in IE (on the page itself) is still to be added.

Take a look at these pictures of the application:

Inking in IE:

Inking in the search field in IE:

Inking in Explorer:

Renaming a folder:

Inking in Outlook:

Rob on Vista and Ink

I just read Rob Rushway’s “Vista and Ink” – article over at GottaBeMobile, and I must say that I think he really hits the nail on its head. Missing the opportunity to add native ink support in Windows Vista controls is how Microsoft can make sure that Tablet PCs will continue to be a technology for the few.

Read the article and pay attention to what Rob says. I agree with him in every word he writes here. Thanks for being so clear about the issue, Rob!

Power (again...) and laptops..

I was reading (a bit late) the post on “What is new” about power consumption. And since I’m interested in power consumption (ok, I know I’ve said that before!), the following paragraph got me thinking:

“Well, almost. We expect to be able to pick up a PC -- be it a notebook, Tablet PC, or UMPC -- and just be able to use it and not have to even remember that there is a battery in it after three, five, or even seven hours”

When I went home on friday, I just shut the lid of my Tecra M4, put it in my bag and rode home on my bike. After having diner and watching a game of football on tv, I popped the lid and spent a few hours reading blogs and news on the net. Then I closed the lid and went to sleep. Today we got up early to work on hour new appartement and checked a few stores for stuff we needed to buy. When we finally came home this evening I woke up my Tablet again, and I’ve spent the past three-four hours reading blogs, writing and watching Brasil getting beaten by France.

As I write this post, I’m still on batteries, and I haven’t thought too much about how much power I have left or even about the fact that I’m running on batteries (I still have around 1:46 hours left if you’re curious).

I’ll soon close the lid and go to sleep. Forgetting that the Tablet is still running on batteries. But hey, it hibernates when the battery gets low on power, so that’s nothing I need to think about!

UPDATE: It’s sunday morning, and I just wanted to share with you all that this update is also written on batteries. The Tecra started up without a complaint this morning, and I didn’t have to think about batteries at all.

kids and computing time

We've got 5 kids in total. And we've got three computers. Now we're thinking about how we should share the available computing time between the kids. In an ideal world we'd have enough money to buy Tablet Pcs for them all (and maybe a few ultra mobiles as well)

What we think we need is a couple of strong desktop pcs for gaming, and two laptops for surfing and for homework. All our children are very interested in computers, allthough they have different areas of interest. They’re all playing Sims 2, except for the youngest one who is more interested in games where he can play with numbers and letters. They all love writing and changing stuff in their homepages (I’ve tried to get them to blog, but they’re not interested), and they all do their homework using computers. Some of them are more interested than the others, and they all do different things on the computers.

Our problem is that our current computers are old. They’re all more than 4 years old, and allthough I’ve put some work into keeping them up to date, they’re showing signs of their age. So this is the time for a major upgrade!

I’ll get back with more thoughts and ideas on this topic, and I might even ask you for some help or advice, since we’d really love to be able to give our kids the computing time they want.

Version 1.1 of the Power Controller Utility for Toshibas

Just posted a new version of my “fan utility”, which controls the brightness/cooling method of your Toshiba Tablet PC. Download it here if you’d like better support for automatically change brightness/cooling method when changing back and forth from AC/DC.

My Life in Ink

Just got an email from Warner and Rob over at GottaBeMobile.com saying that they just published my contribution to the Life In Ink series. If you’d like to read it, please go here. Thanks for having me over :-)

I wish I was living in the US...

Since I’m both in love with Tablet PCs and with Beetles (I know I haven’t written much about them here), I wish I lived in the US so that I could watch the last episode of Pimp My Ride… (from GottaBeMobile.com). Since it’s all about Beetles and Tablet PCs..

Why am I still using a Tablet PC?

My colleage just recieved a new desktop computer. The specs aren’t that important, but goes something like AMD 64 Dual Core, lots of memory (2GB) huge and fast harddrives etc, etc. It boots in no time, makes almost no noise, his development IDEs (Flash/VS2003) boots instantly, programs compile before you can even blink your eyes and he can play Battlefield 2 with superb graphics and speed. He can use whatever keyboard he like and connect any monitor(s) he’d like.

My Tablet PC has got a decent processor (1,7ghz), has got enough RAM (1,5GB) and has a small and efficient harddrive. I’m constantly working on optimizing it’s performance, by lowering the processor voltages, removing unwanted programs and utilities (and even building my own utility to save battery and minimize heat). The screen is small, and the computer is not built for running games (haven’t even tried running Battlefield 2 on it).

We both spend our workdays mostly in the office sitting at our desks. We both try to use tools like del.icio.us and Bloglines to become less dependent on storing our data locally, and we both use our computers as an integrated part of both our private life and in our daily work.

So why do I have a small, slow and hot computer while he has got a brand new fast, cold and large one? Why do I still want to use mine even though his works so much better? It even cost only half of what mine did!

The answer is simple and easy. I won’t trade lying in my sofa and reading my feeds, taking notes in OneNote when in a meeting, taking notes on the plans of our new appartement or being able to develop software whereever I like for his computer.

Just because its not a mobile computer and I cant bring it around with me.

I’ve always been a strong beliver of mobile computing, and seing his new desktop computer and still being convinced that mobile is the way to go makes me feel good!

Using my Tablet PC in our new appartement

We recently bought a new appartement in the middle of Oslo. Since we have one week with lots of children (five in total) and one week with only two, we needed a solution that took these considerations into account.

We called an architect who helped us draw out a very nice solution that basically gave us one additional bedroom a bigger kitchen and a small room to keep all our computers and other work-related stuff.

So, where do the Tablet PC fit in here? First, we had great use of the PDF Annotator when discussing the drawings. We could sit in our sofa with the Tablet in our laps and draw, annotate and discuss the different solutions.

When the carpenter came to the appartement, I used my Tablet PC to take notes as we walked through each room. Using handwriting was a big help for us, since I could send away what we wrote down right after the meeting.

We also used the Tablet PC to post pictures of different items we’re giving away or selling (a fireplace (!), closets, bathtub). A couple of hours later I had arranged for someone to pick up these (large and heavy) items.

So thanks to my Tablet PC, buying, planning, building, redecorating and selling has been easy as a piece of cake. Hope the rest of the rebuild goes as smooth as we hope!

FIFA World Cup 2006: Brazil's coach using a Tablet PC!

Just noticed when watching the World Cup that one of Brazil’s coaches were using a Tablet PC! Didn’t reckognize the model, but you could clearly see that he was using his laptop in tablet mode with a pen.

Another proof that Tablet PCs are becoming more and more popular!

New harddrive

I just installed my new Seagate Momentus 100GB 7200RMP harddrive in my Toshiba Tecra M4. There is a noticeable difference in speed when using the computer, especially in disk-intensive applications like video-editing apps etc. The computer boots faster, and applications generally loads quicker. The whole thing just feels quick and snappy.

The upgrade process took me approx. 45 minutes, using Acronis True Image to clone the disk. I chose the Seagate disk after reading this report comparing a few small SATA harddrives. Thanks to these threads on the Tablebuzz.com forums for hints and tips!

Homework and Google

Allthough this is not a Tablet PC issue, I just have to share the story with you.

One of my daughters were doing here homework yesterday. Her task was to find the names of birds and plants from small black and white images on a hand-out. The funny thing was that instead of opening her book to find the answers, she turned to Google Images and startet to search. For each image she made a few guesses that she entered in Google Images search. If the resulting images resembled the ones on the hand-out, she trusted that she had found the correct answers and wrote them down. When I checked, almost all of her answers where correct.

I'm loving my new battery-pack

Last night I even left my powerchord at work when I left. Since tomorrow is ascension day I didn’t take the chance to leave it at work tonoght. I will try to stay on batteries to see how long they really last. Right now (after a couple of hours of use) the battery meter tells me that I’ve got approx. 6 hours 30 minutes left. It feels good! Next week I hope I’ll be able to order a new 7200 RPM SATA harddrive to further enhance my Tablet PC experience.

Edit and Continue in VS 2003

I’m mainly using Visual Studio for my development, allthough I have Visual Studio 2005 installed on my computer. There are two main reasons for doing this. First and foremost, VS2003 is less resource hungry than VS2005. Allthough I can run VS2005 on my Tecra without problems, 99% percent of the time I doesn’t use any of the functionality of the newer version. Secondly, our product is done in .Net 1.1, and we dont have the time at the moment to port it.

One of the new cool features of VS2005 is Edit and Continue: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/08/445742.aspx

I was a bit surprised when I saw this, since I’ve been using the functionality in VS2003 for a long time. Here is how we do it:

• Open your project in Visual Studio (2003) and hit Ctrl+Alt+P (Processes)
• Select the aspnet_wp process and press attach. Make sure you select attach to the Common Library Runtime
• Set a breakpoint in your code (this can of course be done before attaching to the process) and access the page from your browser.
• When your application breaks, change something in your code and build the application again.

We use this all the time, and don’t have any problems with working this way. We’re also simultaneously debugging legacy asp-code and javascript in the browser in VS2003., which is helping us finding errors in our application and prevent bugs that we’d otherwise would spend a lot of time debugging.

Google's new Java2Ajax kit

Google has just released it Google Web Toolkit, a set of tools that compiles java source code to browser-compliant Javascript and Html.

Since I’ve been interested in (and used) Ajax, I tried the demos that they have published. I am also running Internet Explorer version 7, and have turned on all the debugging functionality in the browser so that I see all javascript errors when watching a web page.

When trying to run the Dynamic Table Example demo, I got a javascript error saying “object doesn’t support this property or method”. This is a typical javascript error you get when f.ex. trying to access a new window you have opened that doesn’t exist (because it might have been caught by a popup-blocker). The same happened when trying the Kitchen Sink demo. Same reason, the javascript doesn’t check if a new window was really created.

I tried to run the demo in Firefox, and everything went fine. Since I always keep old versions of Internet Explorer aruond, I also tried it in IE 6, and it did work.

Not a very big issue, Google, but you should probably have catched the error in your framework when run in IE7.

New battery for my Tecra M4

Today I finally recieved my new battery for my Toshiba Tecra M4. The battery replaces the dvd unit (which hasn’t been used much) and was easy to install.

Now my battery meter is telling me that I’ve got approximatly 9 hours of battery left. As you might have noticed before, I’ve done a few things to optimize my M4 to make it run cooler and less noisy. I don’t think I’ll have the time to check out how long the batteries will last (I need to get some sleep as well), but I’ll see what happens in the next few days.

Next up is exchanging the built-in 5400 RPM harddrive with a 7200 RPM 100 GB  HD to improve boot time and try to further improve the performance of my Toshiba.

Btw, congratulations to Eric Mack who has finally become a YABHTU!

I broke my table - and my tablet survived

A couple of hours ago I broke my office table. It's a table made of glass (although rather thick glass) and it literaly exploded in front of me. I was standing beside the table, so I wasn't hurt except for a small cut in my left thumb.

On my desk I had my beloved Toshiba Tecra M4 and a nice Powerbook (that I have to validate web pages in Safari). They both fell down, but none of them was hurt. My Tablet PC was caught hanging by the ethernet cable and my eargoogles cable. The only thing that took any damage was my mouse. It's full of scratches and cuts.

And I spent a couple of hours cleaning up. In the picture below I've managed to put the two computers on the nearest table (which is now my new table).