Has anyone tried tweaking the Mozilla Firebird browser for the Tablet PC? Seems like with access to the source you could do some interesting things with web pages and ink. For instance, maybe controls could support ink-aware history lists or could display "near match" drop lists for "recognized" words. Or maybe the browser could store "inked" markup layers on a page-by-page basis. Or maybe someone could come up with a hybrid ink/text control that would speed entering Urls.
Posted by Loren at June 2, 2003 11:09 PMHi,
I customized Phoenix for my Tablet PC, but only at XUL level (mainly removing un-used context menu entries to speed up pen access). The context menu now has either "Back" or "Open in new Tab" depending on where you click. See http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000033.html for details.
I'd love to have some form of Ink input for the url, even if it is unistroke only (like Pocket PC or Grafitti).
If you know somebody working on this, who knows some XPCOM (I don't), I'd be very happy to help.
Cheers
Dumky
Cool.
> I'd love to have some form of Ink input...
Me too. I see a few people are creating custom apps on tabletpcdeveloper for launching URLs, but I haven't tried any of them.
A while back I played with adding ink to an IE toolbar, but I found that I couldn't write URLs correctly enough of the time to make it worthwhile for me. Now that I've learned how to write for the Tablet PC better I might have better success with a URL tool.
If there's anyone else out there that's thinking about modifying Mozilla's code, let us know.
i had two utilites that enabled you to launch websites by writing ink. Those were previously at www.iggysoft.com and might still be there. You can find some of the stuff at http://www.tabletpcdeveloper.com/userarea/default.aspx
most of that work went into a product(am NDA'd) that is being developed by my employer. I will clean up the code and open source it or something.
with XUL you should be to embed(js) your sdk built apps in any mozilla browser and use XPCOM(has IDL interfaces) and XPConnect . Essentially its a javascript XPCOM component that can be embedded in any mozilla....hence ink on any platform.
I doubt its useful though since running mozilla on tablet pc as a primary web browser disrupts the XP experience(plugin nightmares and yes am sayng it mozilla is slow/sluggish as hell-and cross platform are almost always stupid. You could of course make those components avaible on your server (non windows) so that all them die hard anti-windows folks can use mozilla on their little XXnXX boxes to mouse on the the components.
until there are non-windows based devices that can appreciate ink and speech (not cross platform but highly optimized so it works ;)) i don't think there is any value in ink enabling mozilla.
IE on the other hand, all you have to do is ask your visitors (accessing your ink stuff in IE) to relax restrictions to your site.
I understand the frustration of having a pen enabled computer and having keyboard biased apps. Maybe ms should have made available as an option all that "pure pen" stuff they had worked on that usabilty studies said was un-windows. The usability studies nevertheless showed higher productivity with a pure pen but a new thing that didn't look like windows might have killed the platform early.
Anyone care to comment on Ink v. Inkwell
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/inkwell/
Posted by: Donal on November 27, 2003 08:42 AM