Will the Battle for the Networked Home Be Fought in the Kitchen?

Will the Battle for the Networked Home Be Fought in the Kitchen?

11:45:37 PM    comment []

Recommending the tablet

I made a policy recomendation to our head IT guy and my boss the other day. They were talking about instituting a policy for future hardware purchases and upgrades to be only laptops. I recommended that they consider convertible tablets for several reasons:

1. With a convertible, there is no downside vs a laptop (except price). You get the exact same functionality of a laptop, plus.
2. You get the added benefit of digital ink. As a design firm with industrial, brand and digital design, this could be a great enhancement to our work. Have you ever seen a sketch from an industrial designer? These guys can produce super sexy sketches in minutes. Being able to preserve the work in native file formats without having to scan, etc. would be a huge timesaver. Storyboarding, wireframing on the digital side, is quicker and leaving them in a handdrawn format for certain stages helps clients not try and intepret ideas as "too final".
3. Standardization of ink. With half of the company on PCs, trading docs with ink back and forth can be more seamless (tough stuff for the us Mac guys, I haven't been able to open an mht in Mac IE.) But also, how much time is wasted from note takers in meetings having to go back to their desk to type up their notes and send them out? Granted, people flesh out their notes when as they type, but i think there's a benefit to seeing someones notes from a meeting. Its kinda like an impressionist painting.
4. The cool factor. These tablets evoke the future of hardware and easily wow the technology challenged in a meeting. As consultants and designers, that kind of mystique is as good an accessory as the black turtle neck and German accent.

11:17:55 PM    comment []

Getting work done on the tablet

I wish windows messenger worked on this tablet in order to have a more comprehensive idea of trying to chat using ink. Can't figure out what's wrong, but it incessantly logs in and out, driving everyone on my buddy list with toast turned on crazy. My handwriting is quirky enough to for the recognizer to consistently see my U as N so i'm constantly writing referring people to yon.

I've made more of an effort in the past couple of weeks to use journal to take notes for my project. I've found that a huge hurdle right now is the infrastructure. Knut and I can send .jnt files back and forth, but for the other team members i have to export a web archive (.mht), which means having a second file to deal with and email it or print it for them.

I was able to do some electronic storyboarding by exporting my quark template into pdf, then writing the pdf into journal. From there, sketching the storyboards wasn't too bad, but writing that back to pdf was a nightmare. Journal or Distiller treated the entire page as an image so the resulting pdf was excruciatingly slow.

So it's the plumbing at this point, if these apps accepted ink, then i could storyboard directly into one program and use that program's native format to distribute and present to the client. PDF or PPT would be nicer for their ability to step through a doc vs. word or quark.

10:57:39 PM    comment []