September 16, 2003
Freebie Tablet PC PowerToy idea
There are some little gotchas with the Tablet PC that drive me batty. Maybe some energetic Microsoft employees can write some PowerToys for us that solve a few of these idiosyncrasies.
One of them is that sometimes it's tricky to resize a window. The problem is that the resize frame cursor appears when the pen is away from the screen and then when you move the pen in to touch the surface the pen position has invariably changed and you wind up tapping not on the frame, but somewhere else.
One workaround, might be a utility that snaps and locks the cursor to the frame.
It might work like this: A little app might watch the mouse to see when it's over a window's frame. If it is, and stays still for some amount of time, then that mouse position is stored for another length of time. If the pen is pressed to the surface before this second time period ends (and if it's not too far from the stored position), then the saved mouse coordinate is used rather than the actual position. The result is that the cursor is snapped to the frame.
I might not have the logic quite right here, but maybe someone's got a fix for this.
A little visual feedback--similar to the right-click's press-and-hold feature would give the user feedback that the snap feature is in force.
Posted by Loren at September 16, 2003 05:20 PMthe simple solution is to change the appearance of you Display properties. (right mousr click your desktop, select properties or control panel ...)
Then click on the Advanced button for whatever style you are using and choose Active Window Border. Increase the size to whatever you want. You can do the same with scrollbars and menus and so on. That really makes the using a Pen to do stuff easy
Thanks iggykin. I should have mentioned this. When I got my first Tablet PC I went through and customized the various settings to make it easier to tap system tray icons, resize windows, wallpaper settings, and so on. I've given up making these tweaks though. Maybe I shouldn't have.
On the other hand, a dwell-and-snap feature potentially goes beyond just resizing frames, although that's the one area that I see people have the most troubles with so that's what I was suggesting it for.
Maybe we need a little tweak app instead, that walks the user through various actions and "calibrates" the system to their needs. Hmm.
This just goes to show you: Sometimes it's best not to think like a programmer and instead think like a user, but even then I still think like a programmer. Hehe. Thanks again!
I confess that i initially always increased everything(menus,title bars, scrol bars, buttons...)to make pen handling easy but if you are a demanding user (whatever that maybe-for me, anybody running more than 10 windows) then the performance might not be optimal
Posted by: iggykin on September 20, 2003 02:13 PM