SPC: Week 6
byWeek six already wow. Things are going good. Week six was dedicated to making Tablet life a little easier. The big thing I did was switch the position of the Start Bar.It’s not a hard switch to make and it doesn’t even require some fancy program: just drag and drop. However, overcoming 10+ years of “Start Bar on the Bottom” is proving…interesting. I often catch myself glancing at the bottom right hand corner, desperately looking for time, only to see nothing. I’ve also tried to click on phantom buttons on the bottom. I hope that it should be second nature within a few weeks.
Thanks to everyone’s input, I’m also happy to report that I’m back to doing my Statics homework on my Tablet again (not happy that I have to do Statics HW, but happy that I am able to do it on my Tablet). This time I’m using Journal and I’ve found that it work very well, even better then OneNote (2003 or 122007). A lot of this has to do with the fact that Journal is paged-based program, where you have actual pages, and OneNote is free-flow based program, where you can just write and write without having the worry about page breaks. Since I need to print it out and turn it in on pages, using a page-based program makes more sense and seems to work very well.
I was also able to setup a grid that was the exact same as the grid on my E2 paper that I print to:
Better yet, I was able to determine that the Toshiba M200 has ~145 dpi. Why is this so critical (and cool)? When I set the zoom to 100%, it really is life size:
Here’s how my first homework assignment turned out:
Other posts that may interest you:
Andrew, Just like you, I changed the position of the Start Bar to the top - it makes more sense when you read in bed or put the tablet against you in class. About Onenote and math: Try and download the education pack from Microsoft, which gives you the smaller scaled graph paper - I am using it now for math. when I do my homework and I know I need to turn it in, all I do is to change the page format (under format menu) to A4, and Walla - you have pages ready to be printed. You can draw a red border to the left and even make circles for the three holes if you want to put them in a folder later on… and save it all as a stationary. If you are using Onenote for everything else, there’s no reason to use journal, it will just makes things hard to find later. I also recommend the equation writer (also from the education pack) which allows you to write long equations and paste them directly to Onenote.
Let me know how it works!
February 20th, 2006 at 6:10 pmThere is a way to get onenote to only display a single letter-sized page per page tab (I don’t know what else to call the tabs on the right/left). If you go into the Page Setup, just change the size from Auto to Letter and that will make it only show 1 8.5 x 11 piece of paper (minus the margins). I don’t know if it will work for your stationary or not (although I don’t know why it wouldn’t) but that’s how I create my cheat sheets for classes. The ability to drag text boxes easily around anywhere makes them very easy to organize and fit a lot of info on the page.
February 20th, 2006 at 7:24 pmHave you ever tried to the equation editor for the math part of your text?
February 21st, 2006 at 7:35 pmHi tracy, I found this entry useful to ask to myself one important question… DPI. I calculated the DPI of a 1024×768 12.1″ and is 105 DPI vs 1400×1024 12,1″ as you said is around 145 DPI. As I heard it in the podcast with Eric Mack, you tried both resolutions and you find it useful becouse you can view 2 pages side by side. As long as I´m goin to get a Tablet PC soon, my concern is and if you can answer that to me would be so helpfull, (some screenshots of real size can´t hurt too.) How wider the pen stroke is in a low resolution screen that in the higher? Can you simulate a pen or a 0.5 pencil in the screen of the m200? What is the finer penstroke you get in the low resolution screen?
Thank you very much…
February 24th, 2006 at 9:00 ammazzorca,
Tracy didn’t write this article, I did (Andrew).
“How wider the pen stroke is in a low resolution screen that in the higher?”
This will depend on what resolutions you are comparing. The M200 can easily switch between 800×600, 1024×768, and 1400×1050.
“Can you simulate a pen or a 0.5 pencil in the screen of the m200?”
You can set the pen size to whatever you want. Something interesting that I found is that while I prefer using a 0.5mm pencil/pen in real life, I like using a thicker pen setting on my tablet.
“What is the finer penstroke you get in the low resolution screen?”
I’m not quite sure what you mean.
February 27th, 2006 at 10:43 amHI Andrew!! I read your name after I pressed the POST button….sorry. Thanks for your response. I ask about a 1024×768 vs 1400×1024 screen resolution in a 12,1″ screen. My concern is about size of the hadwriting, I tend to write small, and like to know if you can have a good .5 pencil width in a 1024×768 setting? I mean.. I really like the picture you posted, but how that will be in a 1024×768 screen? you can make handwriting as small as your notes? can you make some screen capture in real size of the two resolutions, of some writing with the smaller pen in onenote or jornal and post it here so i can see the real diference?. In my country there is no talbet to test, so I will get to import one, And this is a very important decision to leave to luck. I hope this is clear, becouse english burn my head
February 27th, 2006 at 3:16 pm