You're Using a Q1 for that?

Last presentation of the day found me at a talk about the use of ink in Windows Presentation Foundation. This was a lovely presentation, not least because of what the speaker was using to run all the demonstrations.

He was running big chunks of the show on a lowly Samsung Q1. This is an ultra-mobile PC which you can just about fit in your pocket (if you have a big jacket). He swore that, over and above some slightly fancier hardware for the pen, his was a very standard machine, with only 512Mb of ram. Notwithstanding these limitations it proved quite happy to run all the demos, including the 3D one at the end, as well as Visual Studio, all sitting on top of Windows Vista.

This left me determined to put Vista on my Q1 when I get home. I don't have the fancy touch screen stuff, but I do have an extra 512Mb of ram, which should be interesting...

The talk itself was about how Windows Presentation Foundation supports ink. Unlike the original Tablet PC, which was forced to shoehorn ink in alongside all the other user interface gubbins, with WPF ink is an equal partner as far as the programmer is concerned. Couple this with the fact that all the WPF pages are rendered as vector items (no nasty size dependence and infinite scalability) and ink starts to look very viable in the future.