What's new in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition?

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By Jon Honeyball

Posted on 6 Nov 2002 at 11:06

Tablet PC Edition isn't a subset of Windows XP - it's a clear superset. Think of it as Windows XP Professional with extra features. Nothing's been taken out of the Professional product. The fact it's based on XP Professional is a good indicator that these products are aimed at the business worker, not at the home or SoHo environment. Despite that, it will have interesting applications for research students, artists and those in similar areas.

The key component of Tablet PC Edition is the new handwriting-recognition engine. It takes the strokes from the digitiser and stores and processes them. This is important, because although tablet support needs to be 'added' to applications to make it a seamless working environment, the core engines do stand by themselves. This engine, and the technology it contains, is spectacular. It can cope with cursive, joined-up handwriting, and do so at any angle on the page. You can think of it as being several generations on from the cursive Transcriber engine found in the Pocket PC platform. When implemented in an application, it allows you to write anywhere on the page in any orientation. The ink is preserved on screen, but the engine silently converts the ink to raw text in the background. This is how you can search ink for textual words - the inking engine has already done all the hard work.

Naturally, there's a full SDK (Software Development Kit) to allow you to add full ink support to your own applications. As a result of this, one marketplace for Tablet PC - namely, the vertical marketplace found in business forms, stock control, diagramming for insurance purposes and so forth - can immediately be met with custom applications.

How does this translate to the more normal Windows XP Desktop experience? Well, Microsoft has provided some helpers to let you use ink in a wide range of applications. There's an on-screen typing and handwriting area that takes handwriting and converts it to text. This is then squirted into the application with the current focus as standard Windows keyboard messages. The application doesn't know that its typed input came via this route - it just works.

A floating keyboard isn't necessarily the right answer for all applications' needs, but we at least have an impasse until applications are written to take direct use of ink technology. To help get round this, the handwriting engine can place an invisible writing area on the top of the Desktop, overlaying an application underneath, and thus provide an ink-aware layer floating in front of your application. This is how the support for Word works, for example. To be honest, it's a bit clumsy, but it's a workaround until Word is upgraded. Microsoft also supplies ink objects as COM objects, which can be placed in any COM object-supporting application and then executed in place. So you can drop handwriting annotations over the top of an Excel spreadsheet, for example, or send a handwriting note reply in an email from Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft has bundled two main applications - Sticky Notes for leaving yourself virtual Post-It Notes, and Windows Journal, which showcases all the various handwriting technologies in one simple note-taking application. I can't see anyone using the latter for serious or heavyweight work, though - for starters, it has its own private data format for storing files on disk, and we don't need yet another file format. However, it does clearly show where Microsoft's Tablet group sees this technology going in the future.