Introduction

Introduction

The year is 2015. You find yourself resting on a beach in Maui, watching nearby youngsters zip along the boardwalk on their brand-new Segway Human Transporters. The sound of the ocean, ever so soft and reassuring, fills the air with its soothing rhythm. Your early retirement has treated you well it s not a bad lifestyle at all for having invented Cheezy Dew, the world s first and greatest caffeinated cheeze drink (the lawyers require that cheeze be spelled that way for reasons we won t go into here). It s a great time to continue writing your third best-selling autobiography, Cheezy Does It. You reach down into the icebox for a refreshing can of Cheezy Dew and grab your computer.

But what does it look like? Surely you aren t holding a clumsy 3-pound laptop with a 2-hour battery life it s 2015, for Knuth s sake! Maybe you re imagining a quad-processor 64-bit machine the size of a credit card that s capable of flawless voice recognition and responds to the affectionate name Computer. But what if, in addition to dictation, you want to draw a self-portrait of your profile for the cover ( la Alfred Hitchcock)? What you re therefore imagining is a powerful computer the size and weight of a light clipboard that allows you to draw on it with a pen. What you re imagining is a tablet computer.

Tablet computers have been one of the Holy Grails of computing for decades. Television and movies such as Star Trek popularized the notion of tablet computers to a broad audience of technophiles. When we imagine the future, slate-like computers with interactive screens just make sense tablet computers are the natural and expected evolution of desktop and laptop computers. In considering tablet computers, it is not a matter of whether they ll arrive, but when.

This book is specifically about Microsoft s tablet computer and the Tablet PC Platform. It explains how to best use the new Tablet PC Platform API as well as how to design your applications for pen-based users.