On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 10:23:02 -0800, "me" <me@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:

>> As I consider the potential usefulness to me of a tablet PC, its
>> greatest single limitation is the apparent lack of tools for
>> integrating it into my desktop environment.
>
>Re integrating into desktop environment. Not sure if I fully understand the
>issue but is this of any use?
>
>http://www.orangeguava.com/
>http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkonther.../03/index.html

I don't think so. I do all sorts of things on my desktop computer that
would be either pointless or dispensable on a mobile tablet PC, such
as photo editing, printing postage, working on one document while
referring to several others, and debugging application software. A
desktop computer offers numerous resources for such activities that
the tablet does not, notably the ability to support multiple
high-resolution displays. Unless I could integrate the tablet PC more
or less seamlessly into the desktop environment, I could not use it
effectively for desktop work.

(The desktop computer offers several other capabilities that are
important to me, such as large, fast hard disks, bus slots, and
multiple USB connectors. I recognize that only a tiny set of power
users will demand all of these features, but I believe that a large
proportion of all users would value at least one of them. The 1024x768
display has disappeared from desktop computers, and increasingly from
laptops, for a good reason.)

What I envision is a software product that makes the tablet PC look to
the desktop computer like just another monitor in a multi-monitor
system, except that the parts of the display that are on the tablet PC
may be edited with the stylus.

Correct me if I'm wrong; I did not pursue either of those links to the
point of finding all the technical details about the product, but it
doesn't appear to me that either one is pushing the envelope in that
direction.

A plain old network connection between the tablet PC and the desktop
is the closest approach to what I need that I have seen, but it's not
very close. To take a very simple example, suppose I'm editing
document A on the tablet while I study document B on another display,
and I want to swap them. I need to be able to drag document A up, drag
document B down, and continue working. If the two computers are
networked, I must instead close each document on its respective
computer (using different pointing devices and gestures), then reopen
each one on the other computer and relocate the part I was working
with. A sequence of two gestures is replaced by a series of operations
that probably takes the better part of the minute. Furthermore, if
either document was maintaining unsavable state information (such as
the status of a software development system's debugging session), it
is lost. In any case my train of thought is broken, and the whole
process becomes disruptive rather than helpful.

My email address is llm040903 at earthlink dot net.