Chapter 8. Additional Tablet Features
This chapter discusses a couple of additional features on the tablet that you might not be aware of. Sticky Notes is a tablet application that you can use to quickly jot down notes. Inkball is a pen-based game that is available only on the tablet. The end of this chapter has some thoughts on the future of the tablet.
Sticky Notes
Sticky Notes is a simple application for jotting down quick notes in ink and making short voice recordings. The main advantage to Sticky Notes is that it launches quickly, so there’s no waiting for the program to open while trying not to forget the phone number you want to write down. While Sticky Notes is not nearly as sophisticated and versatile as Windows Journal, the ink you write on a sticky note can be copied over to Journal and Microsoft Office ink areas or converted into an Office picture.
Since I hardly ever convert my handwriting to text, I almost always use Sticky Notes [instead of Journal]. – Kamish Tumsi, Tablet PC team
Tip
To take advantage of Sticky Notes’ fast-launch ability, make sure you have the icon available on the Quick Launch bar on the Windows taskbar.
All of your sticky notes are kept in a single stack, which you can browse through with the Next Note and Previous Note buttons in the sticky note window or Page Up and Page Down keys on a standard keyboard. As shown in Figure 8-1, the sticky notes window also shows the date/time stamp for the note and how many notes you have total and provides buttons to create a new note, delete the current note, drag and drop the current note, copy the current note, and record and playback voice. To create a new sticky note, simply tap New Note and start writing. Each sticky note is one page only, so if you need more space you can either make the sticky notes window larger or continue writing on a second note. If you resize the window to create a large note and then later resize it smaller to take up less screen space, the large note will have scrollbars to get to any ink that is now hidden.
Scratch Out Gesture
There’s no eraser tool in Sticky Notes and no way to select individual ink strokes and remove them. Sticky Notes does, however, provide an optional scratch out gesture. It works similarly to the scratch out gesture in Journal in that it removes whatever ink strokes intersect the scratch out, rather than ink that is covered by the scratch out, and it requires a fast motion consisting of many horizontal strokes. If the scratch out gesture isn’t working for you, make sure it is enabled by tapping the Tools menu, tapping Options, and adding a check mark next to Enable Scratch-out Gesture. Also, make sure your strokes are quick and strictly horizontal strokes, cutting through the middle of the ink you want erased. Even though there is no eraser tool, pens with an eraser will erase ink in Sticky Notes as a stroke eraser if you have that function enabled on the Tablet And Pen Settings control panel.
Caution
Be careful what you scratch out or erase. There is no Undo in Sticky Notes.
Voice Recording
You can also put a quick voice memo on any sticky note in the stack. As with written sticky notes, voice notes are for recording short bits of information and ideas, rather than entering long speeches, and there is no text conversion ability. It’s less important to have a good microphone with voice notes than with speech input on the input panel, but the better the microphone and the less ambient noise, the better your recording will be.
Tip
The only indication that there is a voice recording on a sticky note is whether the play button is grayed out. Because that’s pretty subtle, it’s a good idea to put a short written note on the note saying there is a recording attached.
To record voice, choose an existing note or create a new one and tap the Record button. When you are done, tap the Stop button. If you want to add more to your recording, tap Record again, and the recorder will pick up where you left off. To listen to the voice on a note, tap the Play button. While the note is playing, the slider shows your place in the recording as it slides to the right. You can skip ahead or back in the recording by dragging the slider and pause the recording using the Pause button. If you delete the note, you delete the voice recording as well.
Caution
If you pause the playback of a voice note and then start recording, the recording begins where you paused and writes over the original recording from that point forward.
Drag and Drop vs. Copy and Paste
While you can’t select part of a sticky note, you can copy the entire thing. As with almost every other ink feature we’ve looked at, exactly how you do it determines the result. There are two ways to copy the contents of a sticky note. If you tap the Drag And Drop button, the entire note is selected with a solid outline, as shown in Figure 8-2, similar to when an ink area is selected as an object in Microsoft Word.
If you drag the selected sticky note into an open Journal note, the actual ink strokes will be inserted into Journal, as shown in Figure 8-3.
Dragging the body of a sticky note to any Office program inserts it as an Enhanced Windows Metafile (.emf) picture containing both the note content and the note background and date/time stamp, but it can still appear one of two ways. Figure 8-4 shows how the sticky note picture appears in Microsoft Excel, which is similar to how it appears in Microsoft PowerPoint.
If you drag a sticky note into Microsoft Outlook or Word, the picture appears as an icon that you must double-tap to open and view. Figure 8-5 shows a sticky note dragged into an Outlook task.
If you want the actual picture of the sticky note to appear in your Word document or Outlook item, rather than the icon, tap the Copy button on the sticky note rather than the Drag And Drop button. Next tap in the Office document to place the cursor, select Paste Special from the Edit menu, and select Picture (Metafile), as shown in Figure 8-6.
After you tap OK, the picture contents are visible directly in the document, as shown in Figure 8-7.
Note
While you can copy from a sticky note, there is no pasting anything into a sticky note.
Copy and Paste of Voice Notes
If you drag and drop a sticky note containing voice into another document, the voice recording is never included. If you copy and paste a sticky note containing voice into Outlook or Word using the normal Paste command, as opposed to Paste Special, two icons will appear in the document, as shown in Figure 8-8: one for the sticky note and the other for the audio. In this case, double-tapping the picture icon will open the picture and double-tapping the audio icon will play the voice recording.
Tip
A quick way to turn a sticky note into a stand-alone metafile picture and a .wav audio file (if the note contains audio) is to tap the Copy button and paste the note to the desktop or to a folder. Once the note is an .emf file and the audio is a .wav file, they can be inserted into the application of your choice.
Tools and Options
The Tools menu offers the option to export all of your notes into a single file as well as import a file containing one or several sticky notes. This file is readable only by Sticky Notes, so its main uses are letting another tablet user have a copy of your note file or backing up a large stack of notes. If you import a notes file into Sticky Notes, the two files are merged and new notes are added onto your existing notes. In the Import dialog box, there’s an option to replace your existing notes with the imported file. If you choose this option, all of your existing notes are permanently deleted.
The Tools menu also controls the options for the scratch out gesture, deletion confirmation, and how Sticky Notes will launch and appear. If you use Sticky Notes often and for important information, you may want to adjust these settings so that Sticky Notes is always on top when maximized and confirms deletions before permanently removing the note.
Tip
To make drag and drop from Sticky Notes easier, turn on the Always On Top option temporarily and then turn it off when you are done.
Inkball
When you’ve had enough of working for a while and decide to play a game on your tablet, you’ll find that, except for Pinball, all the games included with Windows XP work well with a pen. The tablet also comes with a brand new game that requires a pen and is only available to tablet users: Inkball.
Inkball is sort of a modern Pong or Breakout type of game in which you use ink strokes instead of a paddle. The goal is to bounce colored balls off ink strokes you lay down on the game board and put them in holes of the matching color without letting any balls enter holes of a different color. Once a stroke is hit by the ball, it disappears, so you will need pretty continuous pen work as the boards get more difficult. You’re awarded points by how fast you clear the board and by the color of the balls you sink. Gray balls are worth nothing but can go in any hole, Red are worth 200, Blue 400, Green 800, and Gold 1600. Just to keep things interesting, there is also a time limit, walls that disappear or only block certain balls, walls that change the color of the balls, and ramps that speed up or slow down balls. As shown in Figure 8-9, the boards incorporate more and more elements as you move from beginner to expert. For examples and an explanation of all the different game elements, see the Inkball Help.
Drawing Ink Strokes
If there’s a key to Inkball, it is understanding how a ball will bounce off the ink and laying down those strokes well in advance of the ball. While the possibilities are nearly endless, here are four basic moves to get you going.
The Flat Shot
A flat shot just reverses the direction of the ball. In a pinch, just tapping a quick dot directly in front of the ball has the same effect. Figure 8-10 shows what this looks like.
The Bumper Shot
Just like a bumper shot in billiards, the angle the ball hits a stroke determines the angle it leaves. Forty-five-degree bounces are the easiest to predict, but virtually any angle is possible. These shots work best if you have a moment to plan them out before the ball gets there. Figure 8-11 shows what this looks like.
The Curve Trap
Like a concave mirror, a curved stroke generally sends a ball back toward a specific point no matter what angle it arrived from. This shot is handy for convincing a stubborn ball to get into the hole. It helps to lay down two or three curves on top of one another, so if the first one doesn’t do the job, the second or third will. See Figure 8-12.
The Defensive Ring
One of the hardest parts of Inkball is trying to keep the balls you aren’t working on out of trouble while you focus on getting a specific ball sunk. One way to do it is to totally block off the holes you don’t want balls to enter with lots of separate circles. The circles can overlap, but they need to be many separate strokes so that it will take several collisions before the hole is exposed. A variant on this technique is walling a ball into a corner with a bunch of flat or curve strokes. See Figure 8-13.
Inkball Tips
Inkball is a great game, and you’ll develop your own favorite techniques as you play. Here are a few more tips to help as you learn the ropes:
Spend some time on the beginner level to really learn how ink strokes affect the ball. These boards are sometimes so easy you can win without doing anything, but they are the best place to learn how to play.
Watch the color of the balls queued up in the upper left before they come out and plan your first few ink strokes to send them in the right direction.
Pause the game on the harder boards to figure out a strategy.
You can draw ink over walls, so don’t worry about making neat strokes on the game board.
If you set up a trap with many ink strokes and don’t use them all, use the Clear Ink command on the Game menu to get rid of them.
When things get too fast, you can slow down a ball by creating a head-on collision with another ball. It’s not easy, but it does work.
Don’t focus on one part of the board too long! Balls in other parts of the board have a way of getting into trouble if you don’t keep an eye on them.
Tablet PC—Today and Tomorrow
After living and working with a tablet for several months, I have decided my perfect personal information architecture is a digital data and mobility triangle like the one shown in Figure 8-14. At the top of the triangle and the center of my work would be my tablet. It would house my e-mail, all the files I was currently working on, and all the files I just like to have handy. I’d use it every day, take it with me most places I went, and do most of my work on it. At my desk, I would use it through an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard and the rest of the time use the pen. On one lower corner of the triangle would be my old networked desktop computer. Desktops are now relatively inexpensive to upgrade with faster processors and bigger storage drives. My desktop computer would keep an archive of all my files (including a synchronized copy of the My Documents folder on my tablet), burn my CDs, and be used for graphics or video work that required serious computational power and time. On the other corner of the triangle would be a cell phone with a calendar and a contacts list. The cell phone would synchronize with Outlook on the tablet so that I had that information available all the time. The tablet is very portable, but it still won’t fit in your jacket pocket. These three interconnected information systems would provide a range of power and portability to match any situation.
Of course, that’s just my ideal using technology available today. While working with the Tablet PC team at Microsoft, I was given a few glimpses into the next version of the Tablet PC Edition of Windows and had a chance to see some of the cool tablet hardware still in development. As the Tablet PC Edition of Windows matures and hardware improves, the tablet will deliver more and more thoroughly on the promise of being your one computer that you use in more places than ever before. What I saw was only a small piece of the future, but I assure you the future looks bright.
Key Points
Use Sticky Notes for jotting down quick notes that don’t need to be converted to text.
The Sticky Notes application does not have an eraser tool, but you can use the scratch out gesture to delete ink strokes, or you can just delete the entire note.
You can add short voice recording to sticky notes.
If you drag and drop a sticky note into Journal, the ink strokes are maintained. If you drag and drop a sticky note into an Office application, the note is converted to a picture.
Use Paste Special to get a sticky note picture to appear in a Word document or an Outlook item.
Experiment with the various Inkball shots, using the beginner boards to really understand how the balls react to ink.
Stay tuned to the world of pen computing. Everything described in this book is just the beginning!