As I sit here brainstorming how I am going to design my managed implementation of the Sylantro Application Interface (SAI) protocol, I am reminded that the benefit of the Tablet PC isn’t always about the ink. Sure that’s what first comes to mind, how useful it is to draw, sketch, write, etc. But there’s more to it than that.
I find that I am much better at the initial design on the Tablet PC because of its form factor. It allows me to be more relaxed and comfortable which lends itself well to the creative process. At first I’ll brainstorm some ideas in TEO’s Journal, but soon I’m moving to the VS.NET 2005 Class Designer to start laying out the object model. This is where I find that I work better on the tablet. Sure it’s more time consuming to enter class names and member names with the TIP, but for some reason, with the tablet, my thoughts flow better and ideas come more easily and I’m less distracted. All the while I’m using the tablet in slate mode but not using a pixel of ink.
So this is the message that I think sometimes gets lost when talking about the Tablet PC. It’s not always about the cool things you can do with ink. It’s about having a highly portable full fledged Windows XP computer with a flexible form factor that lets you use it just about anywhere.
Now I just gotta wait for all 3.8 GB of VS.NET 2005 to download to my tablet since I deleted the ISO. :(