Dear Microsoft: Fix Windows Journal
So the key reason to upgrade to Vista only applies to tablet users: handwriting recognition. Vista’s tablet functionality is simply awesome. And Vista comes with Windows Journal, which lets you use your laptop as a virtual quire* of paper, and take notes as you normally would for any given purpose, as naturally as writing. The awesomeness comes in when you select your notes and convert them to text. It’s super-keen. I tend to think more clearly when I write things out longhand, and can draw (literally) [...graphically?] connections between different ideas, which helps me order things when I finally set them in print.
But Windows Journal has one problem: to change pages you have to use the fiddly scroll bar, which is just about useless, or the up-down buttons on the corner of the screen, which truly are useless. There’s a handy display of which page you’re on at the bottom of the screen that just begs to be a target for a menu, like the menus in ArtRage or SketchBook.
The control should work like a spring-slider. When you click on it, and drag the slider left or right (or up or down: my intuition was left/right), a bar should appear and the pages should tick down or up, depending on which way you drag and whether your Windows is running a right-to-left language (if it’s left/right dragging). The only downside is that dragging “further down” leaves you with little room for accelleration. Alternately, I was thinking you could turn the margin into a draggable region, where moving the cursor into it shows a little cartoon ‘draggy hand’. To get rid of the hand, you could scribble the pen until it disappeared with a poof of magic smoke, after which you could write and it wouldn’t appear so long as you came back into the margin within five seconds.
*I just learned this one. A quire is 25 sheets, a ream is 500 sheets.