Product Reviews

In the near-future vision put forward by Bert Keely (Microsoft Tablet PC architect) in his gushing foreword, and throughout the first 25 pages of the book, the authors do their best to convince you that Tablet PCs are the future. Well, they would, seeing as they're Rob Jarrett, a software design engineer, and Philip Su, a lead developer, both in the Microsoft Tablet PC Group.

If you've read this far, I'll assume your interest has been kindled enough to want to know more from the programming perspective, and with several Tablet PCs appearing in the marketplace, now's a good time to get involved in what could become a new computing paradigm.

Behind the inevitable self-selling by Microsoft - this is a Microsoft press book, after all

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- there lies a wealth of experience direct from the development team who built the framework within which you'll be working. As well as the in-depth description of the Tablet PC Platform SDK, which is ample enough to get you started on producing 'ink-aware' apps, there's a distillation of years of usability research into an essential overview of how to design pen-based apps and user interfaces that will work in the real world. Talking of which, the authors haven't forgotten that for many developers the question will be one of updating existing apps rather than building new ones from scratch.

For me, however, the crowning glory of this book remains its hands-on advice for designing in a pen-based medium, together with in-depth coverage of both ink controls and recognition. The CD-ROM contains not only the complete and fully searchable text of the book itself, but also the Tablet PC Platform SDK and plenty of sample code in C#. The only downside is the thin appendices, running to just seven pages of BuildingTabletApps Library Reference, and four almost superfluous pages of hardware guidelines.

Like buses, and hopefully Tablet PC users, more books on the subject will no doubt follow shortly. However, if you're already committed to embracing the new breed of Tablet PCs, this reference is as good a place as any to start.