My Favorite Vista B1 Feature for Tablets
I'm getting pretty frequent questions from folks wondering if Vista beta 1 really works on a Tablet PC. Not only does it work but one feature has been a really boon for me: the new panning tool in IE 7 (Vista only version). This is the first of what might be a series of posts on my favorite new and maybe even old features.
The great thing about using a pen is that it is so natural, but unfortunately Windows wasn't designed for a pen from the ground up, so we have to make due with UI elements like narrow scroll bars. If you are a heavy duty user you may have widened the scroll bars but that's just too much work for most of us and doesn't really solve the problem. If you are reading something you still need to glance away from where you are reading to the scroll bar, scroll, then look back and find where you were reading. The panning tool in IE makes "high cognitive load" scrolling a thing of the past (well in IE anyway). You can now absently scroll the page and keep on reading at the same time. Okay - that may not sound like much but it is really awesome in practice.
Now you do lose something for this scrolling magic - you can't select web page text when the tool is in use. You can still click on links, but when you drag you scroll instead of select. For me this wasn't too hard to get used to, I scroll a lot more that I select so I'm happy to switch out of panning mode if I need to select something.
Ian LeGrow - Tablet PC Team
