A Tablet search tool

Here’s another one of those hard-hat projects I’ve been working on that you might want to try out. It’s a web page that contains a TIP in which you can launch a search. I call it SearchTIP. Here’s the link.

If you go to the above link it’ll take you to the following page:

The page is really simple. It contains an inkable control (shown in yellow) in which you can handwrite a query and buttons that launch one of three search types.

To use the SearchTIP, simply handwrite what you want to search for in the yellow area and click on the appropriate button.

(Note: This page is meant for Tablet users and currently only supports .NET 1.1. You’ll also need Internet Explorer when visiting the page. And sorry, the control in the web page performs handwriting recognition so it’ll only run on the Tablet OS. Finally, you may need to add the url to the SearchTIP page to your trusted sites list in IE too.)

Why did I write this? It’s a long story, but in a nutshell it’s one of those projects that I had long convinced myself was not worth doing. The TIP (Tablet Input Panel) in Service Pack 2 is simply good enough for most of my ink-input needs.

However, recently I was helping Lan’s seven-year old niece get up to speed with her new slate Tablet. I wanted to explain to her how to search the web without a keyboard. There was one catch: She lives several thousand miles away in Taiwan and I was finding it a challenge to describe how to do things. Unfortunately my Mandarin is basically non-existant and her English is good enough to be frustrating. The issue wasn’t IE or the Internet itself. Like many seven-year olds she’s very adept at the Internet and browsers. She was having trouble though searching the Inkernet with her new Tablet. And I was finding it difficult to explain how to use the TIP within IE. Seeing the difficulty we were having I figured I needed to program up something to help her. I also decided it needed to be something she didn’t have to install. It needed to be browser based.

I settled on building a TIP that embeds in a web page.

SearchTIP is my first attempt at such a utility.

Let me know what you think or what you’d like to see.

As with other projects, this is a work in progress, but there is enough there that you might find it useful as is. I’ll describe in a future post what features are supported and which ones are pending.

Try tapping and sliding on the white recognized words, for instance, and you’ll see some immediate differences with the Tablet’s TIP. SearchTIP allows you to join words or “commit” to a particular recognition as you are handwriting new words. This is an approach I’m experimenting with to see if I can handwrite function names more easily.

Anyway, this is just a beginning and here are some problems I know of:

1. Sometimes the ink stops being recognized. Erase or scratch out a word and it’ll start up again.
2. There’s no correction UI. Yeah, I need to work more :-).
3. The first time you visit the SearchTIP in a new IE window there’s a five second or so hit–even on a broadband connection. I’m guessing it’s the .NET framework getting set up.