OK, those of you know me that I have worked hard to earn my gadget boy status. So please excuse me as I take some space here to talk about a new cool gadget – the Tablet PC. I’ve been doing a lot of web development recently and I’m a Mac user. The problem is that what I do looks fine on a Mac in Safari and Firefox, and even Firefox for the PC. However, invariably, it will break Internet Explorer for Windows. IE is not just evil, it is old. Microsoft realizes this and is busy working on a newer version to conforms to more recent standards (like Cascading Style Sheets). Anyway, the point is, I really have to see the sites I develop on both a mac and Windows. My colleagues were getting tired of me kicking them off their machines, so I decided I needed a Windows machine to do development (Virtual PC is too slow and too much of a space hog).
Mike Eisenberg had been gushing about his tablet PC for two years now, so I decided I might as well try it while getting a testing machine. I went with the HP tc4200…it is GREAT. It would be better if it didn’t have to run Windows, but it is very cool. Understand that I have a Bachelors of Fine art, and grew up wanting to be an illustrator, so there is nothing better than a tablet I can draw on. It comes with a pressure sensitive pen, so it really is like drawing on paper. I knew it was for me when I was drawing a picture, flipped over the stylus to erase a line and then….ready…brushed my hand over the erased are to brush away the debris…like on real paper.
I still have my Mac as my main laptop, but this thing is what I have in my hands for note taking and working out ideas. Add OneNote and you have an awesome scientific notebook.
Required software if you get one: Microsoft OneNote, Alias Sketchbook pro and the free Tablet PC Expansion set.
Apple PLEASE MAKE A TABLET!
Here are some examples of notes. Did I mention you can search on hand written notes.
