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Archive for the 'Tablet PC Software' Category

GeckoTIP Tablet PC Firefox Extension

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

There is a new Beta for the fabulous GeckoTIP Firefox extension perfect for your Tablet PC. It provides Input Panel support for Firefox. I can’t imagine surfing, doing research or writing this site without Firefox and its multiple open-source generated extensions. Be sure to uninstall any previous version you may have installed of GeckoTIP. Go here for an earlier Tabletology.com post on the lovely Grab and Drag Firefox extension perfect for surfing with your Tablet PC.

By the way, happy belated Birthday, Firefox on your first successful year! It certainly changed our way of using the internet. All for the better.  emoticon Download Firefox here.

New Tablet PC extensions for Firefox

Monday, October 31st, 2005

Two great new Tablet PC utilities for Firefox have just been released or updated:

1. The GeckoTIP extension, developed by Ian Weiner (thanks Ian), provides Tablet PC Input Panel support in Firefox and Thunderbird. Previous versions tended to be somewhat unstable, though I am grateful for anyone (Jim Hurd) contributing these handy utilities.

Check it out and be careful to uninstall earlier versions before installing GeckoTIP:
http://geckotip.mozdev.org/ 

2.  The Grab And Drag extension provides Adobe Acrobat-style grab and drag page scrolling with the mouse. It is an extension for Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 and higher. Easy to disable when you need to grab some text! It’s a utility I have been wishing for. I would like it to work in MS Word as well.
http://grabanddrag.mozdev.org/index.html

Adobe Acrobat crashes again

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

I have been taking extensive notes using my Tablet PC within Adobe Acrobat Standard 6 on a 106 page PDF. I then opened another PDF document within Firefox and Crash, Boom! I am afraid many highlighted passages and notes have disappeared and I’ll have to start again. Grrrrrrrr. Lesson learned: Save frequently!
adobegrr.jpg 

PDF Annotator & Adobe Acrobat

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

I’ve had PDF Annotator on my Tablet PC for about 6 months. I stopped using it because there were issues with it (Lynette really never took to it (yet)), like hogging the memory etc. Still, given that Adobe had failed to produce anything reasonable for inking I was happy with it and hoped it would develop further. The other problem is that I do at times lapse into printing off journal articles. So the combination of these two led me to ignore PDF Annotator for a little while. I decided today to see how things are coming along. I upgraded my version and opened up a pdf and things are looking ok. I have two immediate wishes I can think of right now:

  • The ability to have some kind of bookmarking feature so I can easily figure out where in my 313 page document I bothered to highlight or make notations. Preventing me from looking through the entire document again looking for annotations would be very useful
  • I also would like to have the option, like in Adobe Acrobat, to use the dragging tool (the little hand) to move from one page to the next rather than clicking (see in pic below) or using the scrolling wheel on the side of the TC1100.  

pdfannotator.jpg

What about Adobe? I have Adobe Acrobat Standard 6. It can bookmark notes and give me one click access to the page and its annotation.  The Adobe marking tool is a sad imitation of inking. Both programmes have something that is useful. My happy understanding is that the developer of PDF Annotator is working on the bookmarking feature.

adobeannotation.jpg
The continuing problem I seem to have with Acrobat is that it crashes way too much and is basically a memory hog. 

ArtRage: Even for the Artless

Sunday, October 9th, 2005

One of the first downloads after getting my tablet was ArtRage. It was (and is) free of charge and seemed too good to be true. Not to mention that there aren’t that many tablet specific pieces of software around. Could ArtRage really let you (apparently) smear around paint or smudge pastels on rough paper–while creating a digital image on a tablet? Well to my untrained eye it certainly seems like that. Keep in mind, I couldn’t save my life drawing a stickfigure.
artrage2.jpg
ArtRage has a very user-friendly layout. After installing and opening the programme anyone can start dabbling without having to scurry off to the help section. On the left of the programme is the palette with the various media (crayon, watercolour, pencil etc). You can also control the thickness and its pressure.
artrage1.jpg 

For a while I was doodling a lot! I pretended to go through a variety of periods: the blue, the red and the green. What great artists took decades I accomplished in a month! Amazing fun software.
painting2.jpg
My red period
painting3.jpg
My blue and green period
painting9.jpg
My blue (and yellow) period
painting5.jpg
Art Rage Tracing Paper feature