

Wow.  So this is what it's like to lust after a Microsoft product. - mnemonicsloth
http://haythamalaa.blogspot.com/2009/04/windows7-adds-math-input-panel.html

======
jwecker
I tried. I tried really hard. I tried to gloss over the part about one of the
panels hanging. I tried to not think about licensing terms or the hard cost. I
stopped myself from wondering how responsive or open the dev team would be to
user input. I purposefully didn't look up whoever the company was that
actually developed the software before Microsoft took it over - and I tried
not to assume that that was the case.

I'm exhausted.

~~~
ktharavaad
While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research
goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this
is completely related but you can take a look at some of these papers
published by Paul Viola regarding research done at Microsoft on ink group
recognition and content parsing.

<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/>

(scroll down)

Dr. Paul Viola is also the guy created the first realtime face detector ( the
one in openCV ).

~~~
eru
Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) works for Microsoft Research, too.

~~~
wglb
As does Tony Hoare, apparently.

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litewulf
I own a tablet and I think that Vista really shines there. The tablet input id
amazingly well integrated and the overall user experience is great.

(I have the X61t, which I think is quite possibly the nicest piece of kit
ever. Silly mac users will never understand ;))

~~~
listic
How does tablet input feel like? You have to use a special stylys, don't you?

What is the CPU, is it LV or ULV and how is the battery life? This is the
field where I find all of the existing notebooks lacking. I wish manufacturers
have addressed this problem, at least used the existing ULV CPUs!

That said, I'm happy with my X60s, maybe it and the tablets are even the
nicest pieces of kit ever, but they could have been made so much better!

~~~
warfangle
What does battery life have to do with tablet inputs? Tablets (at least, the
typical kind and not the kind with built-in screens like the Wacom Cintiq) use
relatively little power (much less than, say, charging your phone via USB).

Different tablets use different technology. The Wacom tablets use an inductive
charge (from the tablet itself) to charge a capacitor on the pen. This means
that yes, you need a special stylus. However, because of it, you can get much
more precise location and pressure readings. You also don't need to change any
batteries in the stylus, as it's powered "over the air."

~~~
DougBTX
(I assume he was thinking tablet input => MS TabletPC)

~~~
ben_straub
Something like 95% of TabletPC's use a Wacom panel for the pen input, and
those panels have similar characteristics to the Wacom consumer tablets and
Cintiqs.

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rkowalick
The real question is: can it do commutative diagrams?

~~~
antiform
These are the times when I wish that this technology was open-source (correct
me I'm wrong), so if it was lacking, it could be added. I would love to have
some similar way of turning commutative diagram sketches into TeX-ready form.
It would save me hours of times fiddling with the current LaTeX packages.

~~~
eru
Do we have two category theorists here, or has the unlikely happened and
commutative diagrams found an application in the real world?

~~~
yummyfajitas
They are used fairly often in geometry and analysis. Other times _should_ be
used but are not (I assume due to authors who don't know much latex).

Regardless, I'm drooling over this. If only you didn't need to use MS word to
make it work...

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DannoHung
I had a tablet once. It's... the problem is that it's still a laptop computer.
It's just not suited for being a digital notebook, whatever that's supposed to
be.

It is simply not enough for there to be some parts of some applications geared
towards tablet style interaction, the ENTIRE system needs to be built for it,
and Windows with tablet input just wasn't.

~~~
ben_straub
I've had mostly the same experience. I can type _much_ faster than I can
write, so notetaking isn't much of a killer app.

However, the ability to add diagrams and sketches to my notes is REALLY nice.
Things like this are really compelling:
[http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/cat_sketchnotes.htm...](http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/cat_sketchnotes.html)
But the form factor and responsiveness aren't anywhere near a Moleskine.

------
lallysingh
If we could get a few more use cases for tables like this, maybe we'd see a
combination trackpad-tablet input sometime in the future on some laptops? Or a
secondary tablet input (as some particularly gigantic 2-screened monster
laptops currently do).

Pen input is just so damn natural, but writing over a laptop screen is
terrible. Useful ways to map tablet input onto parts of the screen (like this)
would be a wonderful middle-ground.

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hypermatt
Damn I could have used this in school ;) I can't even read my own math
notiations ;(

~~~
johnnybgoode
I don't think I've ever seen ";(" before. I see a meme in our future... ;(

Edit: I'm honestly curious; is this a common emoticon? It seems simple enough
that I should've seen it before.

~~~
DannoHung
It's the Pop-Eye emoticon. ;( "I yams what I yams"

~~~
johnnybgoode
You are right. I knew the expression seemed familiar for some reason.

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asnyder
xThink's MathJournal(<http://www.xthink.com/MathJournal.html>) has been out
for some time and has a very similar featureset.Unfortunately for them it
looks like the 800lb gorilla strikes again.

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veerasundark
This is cool.

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mvbma
TeX much ?

~~~
daeken
TeX doesn't do OCR at all, let alone for mathematical expressions. Regardless
of who developed it, this is quite cool.

Edit: I wonder how much of this is straight up OCR and how much of it actually
watches how the text is written. Could be some really interesting tech here.

~~~
Radix
Here you go. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630233>

Hold on while I find the better link... Here you go:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-
impr...](http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-improvements-
in-windows-7-handwriting.aspx)

I thought this second one was pretty interesting. An EMR company CEO on a
forum I sometimes read enthusiastically pushes Win 7 over XP. Apparently it's
_much_ better.

~~~
daeken
Interesting, thanks for the link.

