All work and no play?

Tablet PC Team — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:56:12 GMT

The Tablet isn’t all about productivity. It is good for playing games! I have been scoping out the wide world of internet for games that I can play on my Tablet and that are also fun and friendly--casual games that are good for pen or touch.

I’m not really going to be reviewing the games, some will probably be more interesting than others; but I will be highlighting some interesting features. So, what am I looking for in a game? Potential! Hopefully this will be a fun public investigation of some unique and interesting interactions that pen and/or touch can provide; whether it is in a game or more broadly.

This week I would like to give special recognition to some students at Stanford (Daniel Salinas, Travis Skare, John Shedletsky, and Douglas Wilson) who used the Tablet SDK to create a game called Euclidean Crisis. The game was nominated for an award at the 2007 Independent Games Festival. They didn’t win but I say game on!

As a general aside, I feel compelled to note that this is from my own personal opinion and I’m not representative of Microsoft. So, with that said, a pen friendly game will be coming up next week...

Technorati tags: Tablet PC, Tablet, Games, Pen, Touch

Lindsey Noll | Windows | Tablet PC | Software Design Engineer

Working hard by playing some games

Media Center improvements for pen and touch.

Tablet PC Team — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:17:00 GMT

Aaron Stebner provided instructions in this blog post to help users optimize Media Center for Pen and Touch interaction.

"There are 2 new settings available in Windows Media Center for Windows Vista that can be used to control the visibility of mouse-related controls in the Windows Media Center UI. These settings are primarily designed for touch-screen development scenarios, but can be useful in other situations as well. "

Navigational arrows and playback controls are always visible after enabling both settings.

Registry Keys that need to be changed:

Show playback controls all the time:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Capabilities\TBP = 1
Navigational arrows are visible whenever toolbars are visible:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.GlobalSettings\bindNavHintsToToolbars = 1

For more detailed instructions, read Aaron's blog post.

Tom Alphin, Program Manager, Windows Core UX / Tablet PC

Tablet PC Team Blog : touch

All work and no play?

Media Center improvements for pen and touch.