Tablet hardware review- FrontPath ProGear

Jerry Bell jdbell at fareselaw.com
Mon Aug 5 19:24:29 UTC 2002


Hi Ned,

Thanks very much for the World menu preference- I was using etoyfriendly, but I've just seen that it also filters some items from viewers. (does it do anything else?).

My main problems thus far have been over-zealous world menu pop-ups (solved by setting etoyfriendly and putting a World menu in a flap for easy access), and making Genie easier to turn on and off.  

I've also had problems with the red/yellow/blue buttons, since I don't have any modifier keys on the tablet. I know Genie can handle them but I don't like the way switching with Genie feels.  Instead, I'm putting buttons in the same flap that holds my World menu; I'm going to use them to change the type of click my stylus will generate.  The flap has a nice big 1/2" square tab which I've positioned at the top left of my tablet.  This tablet doesn't require a special stylus to work, so I can pull out the flap and access the (also large) buttons using my left thumb, which seems to work pretty well.  (The Genie on/off buttons go on this flap too)

I did not know about the CE enhancements change set- I'll take a look at it.  

I've also had inconsistent results with Mouse Over Halos - it doesn't seem to work reliably, perhaps because of the nature of using a stylus.  

I have been very impressed with Genie- I never took the time to really learn about it before, but with the tablet I was forced to check it out- and it's been incredible!  

I've been running on a very high level of excitement since this tablet arrived.  I was surprised by how great Squeak feels with a tablet- it seems to be a great match for the eToys environment.

Is there anyone else out there doing work with Squeak on a tablet?  I'm sure that a lot of the PDA work will apply, but there are also other aspects that won't- for example I would assume that most of the PDA stuff is based around swapping applications in and out full-screen due to the small screen sizes available.

Jerry Bell

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ned Konz [mailto:ned at bike-nomad.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 1:32 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: Tablet hardware review- FrontPath ProGear
> 
> 
> On Monday 05 August 2002 10:22 am, Jerry Bell wrote:
> > I'm interested in hearing about what other people are doing with
> > tablets to prevent spurious menu pop-ups, etc.
> 
> I just posted a change set that adds a preference to turn off the 
> World menu from clicks.
> 
> Also, have you seen the WinCE enhancement change set that is at:
> ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.2/wince/WinCeEnh3_1_43
32.1.cs.gz

It's for 3.1alpha and WinCE, so will need some tweaking for 3.2 on a 
Linux tablet, but it looks like it'll improve some behavior on tablet 
devices.

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






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