Tablet PCs

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Fri Jun 13 16:53:40 UTC 2003


On Friday 13 June 2003 08:50 am, David Faught wrote:

> 1. Why has the mouse remained so popular when it's clearly inferior
> to just directly pointing (even with a stylus)?  Surely the
> technology of the digitizer has gotten much cheaper over the years.
>  It can't be just a cost issue anymore.

Part of the answer has to do with ergonomics. To use a tablet over a 
long period of time with typical applications means you have to 
switch back and forth between keyboard and stylus. So all the tablet 
PCs have an alternate pointing device on their keyboards.

If you're doing something that's graphically intensive and doesn't 
have too much need for text, a stylus makes sense.

Wacom makes a high-end monitor/digitizer for graphics professionals 
that's pretty impressive.

Nathanael and I have been working with Alan to make the use of Squeak 
on tablets much better. We'll have a demo of our combined work within 
a couple of weeks.

Nathanael is improving the recognition quality of Genie; I'm adding a 
UI for easy definition of new gestures, editing unrecognized ones, 
using gestures with eToys, etc. Also I'm making an ink 
capture/editing Morph that can be used in places where character 
recognition isn't needed (or can be deferred).

We've also changed the event dispatching in Genie so that we can use 
gestures with (for instance) Connectors or small text fields in a 
more natural way.

> 2.  Why does the Squeak GUI depend on 3 mouse buttons, when most
> styli (?) have only 1 or 2?  It is desireable (to me anyway) to
> have full function of the tablet PC without an attached keyboard,
> and use the keyboard as an optional enhancement.  Squeak seems to
> be designed to require the keyboard.  Maybe I need to look at Genie
> more closely. Does Genie answer this question?

We've also added the possibility of having separate gesture 
dictionaries for red-button and yellow-button events (without and 
with the stylus button pressed, typically).

The blue button isn't much used in Squeak; it's easy to map a gesture 
to blue-button clicks for getting halos, etc.

Genie 2.20 will be out very soon, and Nathanael promises dramatically 
improved lookup accuracy in 3.0.

Still, no matter how accurate your gesture recognition is, it's 
painful to enter any large amount of text when you're just doing 
per-stroke recognition. Most of us don't do clean, disconnected 
strokes when we write fast. We'll be experimenting with feeding the 
strokes captured by my Ink Morph to Genie in the background (perhaps 
using a dictionary like M$ does), but I don't expect it to work very 
well.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE



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