Scoble, why can’t I use my preferred input method?
Posted on April 27, 2005
It seems that Microsoft isn’t making it easy to allow third party screen-keyboard applications to hook into the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). For some examples of these type of applications see this great jkOnTheRun article. I prefer the MessagEase application, but jk has only great things to say about SHARK.
Anyhow, these alternative keyboard applications have been designed based on a significant amount of research on improving our input speed with a stylus over handwriting or qwerty onscreen keyboards, so they can be very useful if you use your Tablet PC in slate mode like me. However, from my conversations with the developers of MessagEase it appears that Microsoft isn’t making it easy to allow third parties to hook into the TIP: (the link is here, but you may need to subscribe to their yahoo group to see it)
About integrating MEOK with TIP: we have asked Microsoft about this and their answer (so far) has been that they do NOT want third party keyboards to integrate with TIP. (Maybe the feedback of some of our users canconvince them otherwise).
This means that these application developers have to duplicate functionality just to get their applications to be as easy to call-up as the existing TIP. In particular, I would like to be able to make use of MessagEase in the floating TIP button that keeps getting in my way when I’m trying to work (In the mean time, I can probably work out how to turn it off, but I haven’t as yet).
So basically, I’m putting this up here to ask Robert Scoble, Tablet PC Evangelist (amongst other things), why can’t I use my preferred input method in the TIP?
UPDATE: I’ve sent an email instead of in addition to hoping Robert would notice this in his PubSub feeds.
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