Thinkpads Forum

Got my X61T a few months ago and love it. I have Office and OneNote. Can someone recommend some applications / utilities that really take advantage of the tablet feature, or would otherwise be very useful with the X61T?

inkseine

I'm typing this on an X60T that I have owned for a couple of weeks. Every time I've tried to use the tablet feature I have been underwhelmed by the extra functionality it provides. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice laptop, but the tablet functions for most people will probably provide little added utility, unless the buyer had some specific application in mind before he bought the tablet in the first place.

Totally loving onenote, just to reiterate it!

I use tablet mode to take notes in OneNote. Having all my notes in electronic form makes organizing and archiving them very easy. I type much faster than I can write, but I take 90% of my notes in tablet mode in order to be able to draw graphs, diagrams and mathematical formulae easily.

Some of my professors use tablets to write on powerpoint slides. Tablets are useful for presentations of all kinds (academic or business).

If you're artistically inclined you might want to check out the very neat painting program ArtRage.

The tablet gaming scene is pretty slim. Most currently existing games do not lend themselves well to tablet input (other than simple point-and-click web games), and the market is too small for new tablet-based games.

Are you able to use OneNote's erase function through the eraser-end of the Wacom pen? When I turn the pen to the eraser-end, I can see the eraser cursor on the screen, but when I tap the screen, nothing happens.

Are you pressing hard enough? The eraser is not as sensitive as the tip.

I just recently downloaded Inkseine, haven't had time to truly explore it yet, but I hear its great.
I love checking out GottabeMobiles Inkshows, I think they have one for an Inkseine tutorial.

Xtal wrote:Are you pressing hard enough? The eraser is not as sensitive as the tip.

So I have to press down so that the eraser "head" is pushed into the pen? That's kind of inconvenient and will damage the screen, right?

zephyr wrote: So I have to press down so that the eraser "head" is pushed into the pen? That's kind of inconvenient and will damage the screen, right?

That is correct, so it kinda of 'depresses' the head of the eraser pen a little. And no it does not damage the screen....I doubt they would make that feature on the pen if it did induce screen damage!

I'm going to buy an X61 Tablet in the next few weeks or months or what have you. I was mostly interested in the tablet for the increased comfort reading long documents in slate mode and the increased resolution you can get with the SXGA+ screen, so I wasn't going to really use the tablet features much. Maybe scribbling formulae or diagrams once in a while.

Then I opened this thread and saw that Inkseine demo. So cool! It might be one of those things (like tablet functionality itself) that seems much more useful in principle than in practice, but it also seems like it could be genuinely useful--like taking notes in a notebook, but with electronic enhancements. So instead f graduating from notes in a notebook to notes on a laptop, you get notes in an electronic-ish notebook.

Microsoft is really pushing the ideas of new interfaces (see also their Surface projects). I don't know if it's necessarily better than keyboard-and-mousing, but it's definitely cool.

Bluebeam PDF Revu. Really good PDF program that also happens to work very well with the pen. (Far better than Adobe Acrobat IMHO.)

ptantra wrote:Bluebeam PDF Revu. Really good PDF program that also happens to work very well with the pen. (Far better than Adobe Acrobat IMHO.)

That looks really nice. I've been looking for ways to annotate PDF files (underlining, highlighting, scribbling). Too bad PDF Revu costs so much ($149). Anyone know of less expensive alternatives that can do this kind of annotating on the tablet?

I hear, PDFAnnotator is a decent replacement for BluBeam.

zephyr wrote:That looks really nice. I've been looking for ways to annotate PDF files (underlining, highlighting, scribbling). Too bad PDF Revu costs so much ($149). Anyone know of less expensive alternatives that can do this kind of annotating on the tablet?

It's cheap compared to Adobe Acrobat. At $149, it's about 1/2 the price of Acrobat Standard and yet has features only found in Acrobat Pro/3D.

You can try PDF Annotator, which is considerably cheaper than BB Revu, but no where near as comprehensive or polished. If you only need to make a few, quick markups, PDF Annotator would probably suit you fine. If you need to make more substantive markups, you would probably be better off using Revu.

Even on non-tablet machines, I prefer Revu over Acrobat, just on UI alone.

Xtal wrote:The tablet gaming scene is pretty slim. Most currently existing games do not lend themselves well to tablet input (other than simple point-and-click web games), and the market is too small for new tablet-based games.

True, the mainstream games aren't really games for tablet-mode, but, there are some awesome games where someone with a Tablet PC has a much much better playing experience:
Crayon Physics Deluxe: http://www.crayonphysics.com
World of Goo: http://www.worldofgoo.com/

Don't miss out on these!! I just played World of Goo for a few hours, and only stopped to share how fun and addicting it is.

Also, there are Tablet PC games made/released by Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/down ... letpc.mspx

If you are into linux or virtual machine world, you can try "Xournal"(GPL and free) to highlight, draw, or annotate PDF documents.

The projector in our school has wireless but we need Epson's proprietary software(EMP NS connection) in order to connect to it. Once it is connected I can walk around with my tablet and use it as the white board to write on. It's very convenient.
However there is no EMP NS connection software for linux.

fongj wrote: Crayon Physics Deluxe: http://www.crayonphysics.com

I have to second this... : ) This game can be played with other pointing devices but it's so much better to play on a tablet PC.

P.S. OneNote, and ArtRage (http://www.artrage.com/)

For math, there's Inftyeditor:

http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html

which will convert equations into LaTeX.