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HardwareTablet PCwikiCalc beta available

wikiCalc beta available

Dan Bricklin is releasing today the first wikiCalc beta. He’s also announcing today a hosting, development, and distribution partnership with Socialtext. You can get wikiCalc here.

I’ve played around with the alpha version quite a bit. Works well. Dan and others are talking about the similarities and differences between wikiCalc and Google’s new Spreadsheets offering. Since others are putting together mini-reviews, let me take a minute to talk about some subtle issues that I notice with these apps as a Tablet user.

First, neither app supports ink or images for that matter. That’s not a surprise. Maybe when images are supported we can figure out a way to add ink support. Since wikiCalc is going to be open source, it might turn out easier to integrate ink into it first. Also, Dan Bricklin is a Tablet owner, so maybe he’ll see it as something of interest once he gets wikiCalc out and customers using it.

Anyway, without direct ink support, Tablet users need to either use a keyboard or the TIP to enter data. This isn’t bad, but I have noticed that wikiCalc appears to be just a little easier to enter TIP text with. Why? Because with Google Spreadsheets the user is required to “press Enter” in order to enter a TIP mode. Then you have to press Enter to commit any written text. The result is you wind up having to tap extra buttons. wikiCalc is a tad better, depending on the TIP settings. You still wind up having to commit values, however, one huge difference is that you can use the arrow keys when navigating between cells and handwriting text with the TIP. You can’t do this with the TIP. (Note: You can use the keyboard part of the TIP in Google Spreadsheets and everything works as smoothly as it does with a standard keyboard.)

Part of what’s going on here is the way the TIP works. I think there’s probably a mode missing where text is inserted as you write and it mirrors whatever is on the TIP. Maybe there’s more to it. I haven’t thought it completely through. I just know that using handwriting and the TIP quickly gets clunky in some grid-style web apps.

I’ve been thinking about creating a series of screencasts so people can see how the Tablet and “Web 2.0” apps play together.

Loren
Lorenhttp://www.lorenheiny.com
Loren Heiny (1961 - 2010) was a software developer and author of several computer language textbooks. He graduated from Arizona State University in computer science. His first love was robotics.

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  1. Have you tried any of the others :
    EditGrid, iRows, Numble, NumSum or Zoho Sheet?

    One of those might have the better support.

    regards
    Al

  2. Al, I’ve tried a few of them and am experimenting with a few things, but nothing great yet. Anyone else tried integrating ink into any “Web 2.0” efforts? I still think an ink-enabled Flickr client app would be cool, for instance.