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Tablet Mac Becomes Reality
teknokracy writes "MacMod has a story about a unique Mac hack. Joseph DeRuvo Jr. says: 'As a Photographer and a Dyslexic the idea of being able to use a Tablet as a platform for showing photographs, editing, and an extension of my badly organized memory is very appealing. ... So taking matters into my own hands I cut into a Dual USB iBook and didn't look back.' It seems our intrepid hardware hacker hasn't just flipped around the LCD and added a semi-functioning touch screen - he's completely engineered a new kind of mac portable, complete with a CF reader, properly installed touch sensor, and topped it all off by properly engineering it all into an Ives-worthy design. With all the trouble these particular iBook models have experienced, why not hack one up for fun and turn it in to something useful?"
The site is already down. Using the NYUD cache of it shows a message that the site is down...MirrorDot has it though.
If Apple released a tablet computer (oops sorry, can't use the English word 'Tablet' anymore its owned by MS) i think they'd take the market - make it a little bit smaller tho and im sure they would manage to fit a slide-out keybord in there too!
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It's been done before
How in the world does he type on this thing?
Using Inkwell, which is part of OS X. I've read that it was developed from the handwriting recognition technology developed for the Newton.
I recently bought a Tablet PC off eBay (Compaq TC1000) for use in a data acquisition system. I can see how the Tablet PC might be useful for certain vertical applications (like my own), but IMHO it's not a very good platform for general computing.
Suprisingly, the handwriting recognition is not that bad (with SP2). The biggest problem I've found is that the OS is simply XP with a few "tablet" features bolted on. The Tablet PC really needs an interface developed from the ground up to make use of the pen-based interface.
For example: As we all know, Windows uses the second mouse button for contextual menus - some of these menus are not easily accessible (or accessible at all!) using left-clicks. Left clicks and left double-clicks can be done by tapping the pen, but right-clicking is done (on my machine at least) by holding the pen to the screen for a few seconds. This is pretty kludgey; the contextual menu pops up at unwanted times, like when I'm trying to drag-and-drop icons, or maybe when I'm thinking for a moment and I'm letting the pen rest on the screen.
That's one example, but their are others. Like I said, the handwriting recognition isn't too bad, but it's awkward for entering things like URLS (despite some helpful tools such as ".com" buttons). My model is "convertible" tablet, and I find that 90% of the time I'm using it in laptop mode.
YMMV
Listen I'm no engineer I do not have a machine shop available to me, I did the best I could to get the thing working. I could not save any more room then the height of the hard drive, the flash card reader case had the guide rails for loading the flash cards in,( I did not want bent pins, or to fumble with trying to get the card seated when I am in a hurry ) Also, I wanted to be able to remove the individual components when I needed to, I had already gone through one bad USB hub. So that's where I was coming from.