As mentioned a while back, I recently obtained a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which I’ve been playing around with a bunch. I like it quite a bit– the handwriting recognition is a whole lot better than the older Toshiba model I used for a while last year, and the interface works a little more smoothly. Of course, it runs Vista, and the Office redesign is a world of pain, but you can’t win ’em all.
There are a couple of things I’d like to be able to do with this that I suspect will require new software. In particular, I’d like to be able to use it to make occasional sketches, and put together lecture notes. I did this previously using the Windows Journal program, which would be really useful if you could export the files as, well, just about any format other than greyscale TIFF. I wrote out a couple of weeks’ worth of lectures in Journal before discovering that I could get them into a format useful for students only by first saving them in Microsoft’s one-page web archive format, then opening them in Explorer and printing to PDF. This is, shall we say, sub-optimal.
So, my question to you, the tech-savvy readers of the Internet, is: What should I be using instead? A colleague who has a tablet says nice things about Grafigo, particularly the way it turns rough sketches into more regular shapes, and that sounds interesting. Google also turns up things like this article on tablet software, some of which sounds kind of cool (MathJournal in particular), but I’d love to hear feedback from people who aren’t professional software reviewers.
So, what should I be putting on my shiny new tablet? Or, to put it in a slightly different form, what should I be asking people to buy me for Christmas to put on my shiny new tablet?