We get an email the other day from Electrovaya.

It turns out Warner Crocker writing at gottabemobile.com isn’t the only one who misses us. Electrovaya would like to give us some incentive to get more productive on our tablet pc blog. 

They’re asking if we want to review the Electrovaya Scribbler, a snazzy-looking slate number.

Have they visited tabletology?, we wonder. Do they know what they’re asking for?

They do clarify that we’re on the hook for the price of the unit if we don’t return it from Melville Manor Ravine Daycare (our new digs) in the same condition it was in when it left its Toronto home.

It’s a sordid story. Terrible really.

Just don’t ask about the dwarves.

What does every Tablet PC owner who presents in public or teaches want, that PowerPoint can’t do?

Ink in presenter mode.

I.e. you want to be able to see the current slide and its notes and its context all at once, and you want to be able to ink. Because if you can’t ink on the slides, what good is your Tablet PC in teaching? You might as well have an everyday laptop.

First you need to know the hidden PowerPoint trick. At least no one I have ever known, except for Olga who discovered it and showed it to me, knew about this. Are academics just hopelessly behind corporate types in their PowerPoint skills? Anyway, you can present your slides with the projector considered as a second monitor, not just cloning what you see on the Tablet. I’m sure you already know to right-click on the desktop, select Properties, then select the "Settings" tab and extend your desktop onto a second monitor. When your Tablet is docked, it’s your external monitor. In a presentation, it’s the projector.

Now in PowerPoint you go to Slide Show/Set up Show… and under Multiple Monitors, check the box for Show Presenter View. If you already have the second monitor enabled (as per above) and your screen extended there, you’re set; if not, it will prompt you to do that at this point. Now when you go to project your show, you can see your current slide, your notes, and a filmstrip of your slides for context etc.

Hard to believe you’ve been using PowerPoint so long without knowing that was there, eh? But that’s not the main point here. At this point, you’ve noticed you can’t ink on your slides, so you give up and go back to the old system, which probably involves having a paper print-out of your slides for context. Crazy! Crazy Wrong!

See the long discussion at TabletPCBuzz.

It turns out that Classroom Presenter from the University of Washington lets you do what you want to do. Yay!

I could write one of those funny posts about how horrendous the documentation is. Take a look here at the quick start guide to get the gist of it. (I do hope that link becomes obsolete soon!)

But let me be practical, and cut straight to the goods, and give you the quick start guide. This is assuming that you are into it for the inking, and not for the elaborate system of instant classroom feedback, which requires a whole room full of happy TC1100-using students, because of course you can’t get the TC1100 any more, even if your institution could afford to equip a whole room with them.

So install your Classroom Presenter that you have downloaded from above, and enable your second monitor display (your projector is second monitor as with Presenter Mode in PowerPoint), open your ppt slide deck that you’ve already converted to a csd deck (because those instructions are more or less clear). And here’s the magic step you are hard-pressed to find in the documentation: in your Classroom Presenter, go to Tools/Properties and select the "Display" tab (of course!) and check the box for "Enable Dual-Monitor Output."

I guess if you have flashy slides with animation etc, it doesn’t work so well. (That’s supposed to be a lo-tech frown, but something  here in WordPress converts it to a hi-tech frown.) "Try not using images!" That’s practical advice! Just give me back my blackboard if that’s where it’s come to.

Paris

Earlier this year C., a colleague of mine (see viral map), purchased an IBM Tablet PC after seeing my TC1100. She had never l heard of or seen Tablet PCs but was intrigued and purchased it soon after she met the tc1100. We’ve been working on a project here for two weeks in Paris and Rennes and I got to meet the newly purchased IBM Tablet PC firsthand. It’s quite light and sleek. Lynette is convinced that the resolution is not as good as our TC1100 though she prefers how the writing feels to the TC1100. It seems like a reasonable alternative once my TC1100 bites the dust, though I am still hopeful some manufacturer out there will produce a hybrid model. Lynette is possibly eyeing a Motion since she is quite the slate user.  

No one asked once about the Tablet PC despite many hours of hanging out at brasseries though there were stares. No one asked. Perhaps more inhibited? Or not that hard core on technology like we are? This was quite a different experience than at home in Halifax at the coffee shop, Steve-o-reno’s. Today, the very nice man at the hotel asked if there was wireless close by because it was obvious that I must be doing something out there at all hours of the day. Yes yes there sure is.

Here the TC1100 meets the IBM Tablet PC at an empty brasserie on Bldv du Montparnasse in Paris.

Au revoir from Paris where the duck and wine is excellent, where fruit is tasteful (yummy cherries and figs and more!), where zebra crossings are for zebras and and not humans, and where getting a taxi is a rare feat (I am sure that if there was less regulation on the taxi business it would defintely increase economic activity in Paris)!

Paris

A few days before I left for France I posted a question on the Tablet PC
Buzz asing how I could work best in Paris on my email and documents given
that my TC1100 had to go into HP repair. Well this is how things got
resolved.

I purchased a 4gb verbatim flash drive. I wasn’t looking for any kind of
self contained operating system but it came with Ceedo. James Kendrick
suggested I use Migo but since the flashdrive came with Ceedo I thought I
give it a try. Well, overall it wasn’t that great. I can see the
potential though.

First of all there seems to be a problem when I plug the verbatim in the usb slot and run Ceedo on a tablet PC. This is the error message that comes up ("to open TCServer.exe under Ceedo, all other TCServer processes must be closed"):

 
When I plugged it in to a non-tablet pc this error message does not occur.  

So how was I able to manage all my work email? Well since I was meeting
Lynette and her TC1100 in Paris, she agreed to let me use it while I
stayed in France. She left Paris for Montreal last week sans Tablet PC, a
strange thing indeed. I put all my working documents on her Tablet and
also created an additional account in Outlook and was therefore able to
access all my email and write new ones with abandon (thank to mostly free wireless generously donated by the French).

Lynette’s TC1100 will be returned to her when we meet each other at the
Montreal airport tomorrow and board the same flight to Halifax. I suspect
that she’ll be eager to put her hands on the TC1100. All in all, let’s be
very clear: leaving me with her tc1100 for over a week was the ultimate
sacrific and I am grateful for that! Would you hand over your tablet for
a week without having access to any alternative except perhaps webmail (yikes!)?

So no Ceedo and Verbatim did not help sufficiently though I did need a
new flashdrive. I think Ceedo does have potential but it would need to be
able to run Office and Outlook without a hitch. I also posted a question
on the Ceedo forum asking them about the tsc server issue. I had hoped
for some response from Ceedo support but nothing was forthcoming before I left for France and I just checked the form website and no rsponse has been posted. Not sure if Ceedo understands the importance of customer relations.

What Ceedo looks like when you want to remove the flash drive:

Check out more on Ceedo by reading today’s article by NYT’s David Pogue.

And as to my TC1100, I received an email from work yesterday that my
TC1100 has been ruturned. And repaired, I presume. Yay!