Ancient (1996?) Tablet PC and Squeak

David Faught dave_faught at yahoo.com
Fri Aug 15 16:37:40 UTC 2003


Well, I've stepped in it again.  I bought a used, old tablet PC with
the idea of doing cool, wirelessly mobile things fairly inexpensively
and found out something I didn't know before.  The Windows 95/98
handwriting recognition software commonly used on these things is
licensed "per install".  In other words, if it gets re-installed on a
PC that it was formerly installed on, it counts as another install and
is charged for again.

It happens that on the particular tablet that I bought, the hard drive
was wiped before the sale, as a reasonable precaution.  So now there is
no handwriting recognition unless I want to pay the licensing fee for
the software again (which I don't).  The pen does work, but strictly as
a mouse pointer.  I do have a regular keyboard too, but that detracts
somewhat from the "cool, wirelessly mobile" idea.

Enter Squeak.  I was planning to use Squeak on this tablet anyway, but
now I'm thinking that it may be the primary application, and using
Genie should work for lots of things.  For me, the one big lack in
living in a Squeak environment is a full-featured web browser.  So my
question is this:  how feasible is it to use Squeak in place of the
native handwriting recognition, copying text out of Squeak and pasting
it into other native OS applications, like the web browser?  How usable
will this really be?  I'll let you know after I try it, but I'm looking
for other experience or opinions.

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