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29 January 2005
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I have a lot of respect for the MVP community. On the whole, these are people that devote serious chunks of their own time to doing stuff out there in the Microsoft tech communities. There are exceptions of course that I would question, people who seem to me to be MVP's based more on who they know that a demonstrable contribution to the community, but 99% of them deserve muchos-props.
Occassionally, just occassionally, I stumble across a person though and find it absolutely unbelievable that Microsoft hasn't yet noticed him. Take my friend Walter. Walter is a colleague of mine at my current contract, a quiet unassuming chap who everyone around here refers to as the Web Service god. "So, he knows web-services" I thought, "big deal". Well, it turns out I'm a schmuck and it truly is a big deal.
I'm developing a synchronous messaging layer at the moment and needed to enlist Walter's help. In order to demonstate some tricky concepts he pointed me at WebServiceX, which is a publicly available collection of around 60 web services that's picking up well over 600,000 hits per day. 600,000 hits a day!
Well it turns out, this is Walter's own site. He developed the site, he wrote every single web service in it. Businesses run their enterprises it seems around software which relies on chatting to Walter's web services. The site scales, has high up time and Walter can be relied on to deliver absolutely anything you would ever want to know about web services.
This quiet, unassuming chap that sit's across the room from me quietly tapping away on his keyboard all day is actually the coordinator, producer, site ops technician, developer and after-hours CIO of one of the world's most popular online public web services repositories.
So, I know Microsoft people read this. SIGN HIM UP! I have never ever in my entire career of writing, speaking, coding and consulting EVER seen a clearer example of someone that should get MVP status. You just have to google on WebServiceX (sites and groups) to see how much this guy's site is used.
Incredible stuff.
3:35:23 PM 
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I'm about a month and a half late with this one, but I only just found it.
If you are using a Tablet PC with Office 2003, then click this to head over to TabletPCDeveloper.com and download the latest recognizer context tags for Office. These enable much better handwriting recognition in the apps by tuning input fields to the type of data they expect (numbers, email addresses, dates etc)
3:35:22 PM
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Speech recognition used to be very difficult, computer . Minute average PC has no less than three microphones and it uses these Tucson: area of noise intimidating background noise server computers better able to focus on the sound of my voice. I just did the first training session and I thought I would try to produce a pool of intrigue just by speaking to my computer . So far the results do seem little better than they used to be all my older Tablet PC these. However, as you can see there are still some problems.
11:46:02 AM
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There's a story over at Microsoft Watch that Motion are working on modified version of their slate, without a hard disk, with a smaller processor and running Windows XP Embedded. Apparently Fujitsu are working on something similar.
It's just my opinion, but I think this is a universally bad idea from the point of view of TabletPC acceptance. I used to lust over the Motion Tablet's - they seemed to be well designed machines with a great selection of peripherals to overcome the limitations of being slate only. However, I've had a chance to see one in action, and I've gone right off it. It's slow, painfully slow, has very limited disk storage and I think the slate form factor now is a bad idea. It's hard enough trying to convince people that Tablets are a great idea, but it just seems so much harder to do with a slate. After all, while SP2 has greatly improved areas such as handwriting recognition and speech input, Microsoft still have a ways to go before the pen alone is a productive and completely intuitive (for non technical people) way to work. For example, how do you explain to someone barely comfortable with a normal PC how to shift-click and drag a bunch of files with a pen. The "natural" input areas of Windows XP Tablet edition also take a bit of getting used to. My father for example has become something of a luddite with regard to operating systems of late, and I just know that if I sat him down with a slate to do his emails, correcting his spelling with the handwriting correction part of the ink panel, he'd get frustrated and miserable very quickly. "Why can't I just write it out and have it accurately know what I want to say, all the time".
There are of course areas where a slate is awesome. Quick lookup of information, the odd bit of data entry into an Infopath form, note taking in meetings - these are all great areas for slates, and they are probably the areas of activity that I see most people with convertibles putting their notebooks into slate mode to work in. I do. If I need to read a document, capture some information in a freeform manner, or browse the web, I tend to do it in slate mode. Everything else though I use a keyboard for. A convertible notebook has so many more selling points over a slate in that it is a full powered notebook with extra capabilities. It's kinda like saying Superman is great guy in general, but has cool abilities that we all wish we had.
So, back to the Embedded XP tablet idea. What Motion and Fujitsu are planning here is a device with extremely limited storage, that won't run off the shelf line of business applications, or bespoke ones without a lot of re-engineering, that has no rapid high productivity input device (keyboard), and that demands a learning curve be climbed before anything productive can be achieved. At least with a convertible people can be productive from the get-go and gradually adopt the pen way of working.
Slates in general, I think ,do little if any good in promoting the Tablet PC as the great platform it really is. Embedded XP slates are just going to make Tablet PC evangelism even harder given the massive compromises in all areas these devices will have to make. These devices wont be true Tablets, the won't be able to do the things a true Tablet can do, but everyone will think they are and maybe get a very bad impression of a platform that is suffering enough from misconceptions already.
10:37:26 AM
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2005
Pete Wright.
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