The Apple Tablet is real???

There were lots of disappointed faces when at the recent MacWorld 08 Keynote address, when Steve Jobs presented yet another skinny notebook to the market, and not a stylish, functional, tablet PC. I was also disappointed.

It seems, though, that Asus are actually working with Apple to build one.

Is the Tablet PC market too small for Apple to actually release this any time soon? I’d buy one, but that’s only because I have a Tablet (a Toshiba R400) and don’t ever see that I would go back to normal computing again. Tablet PCs are only worth about 1.4% of the global computer market, which is probably why Apple is standing back for the moment. But when projections in mid 2005 suggested that Tablets PCs could be worth $5 USD billion by 2009, I wonder why Apple doesn’t give it the same good ol’ try they did with their iPod and iPhone products?

M

Making blog posts with Microsoft OneNote

I was fiddling around with OneNote 2007 today and stumbled across the function ‘Send to > Blog’

If you briefly saw a very strange and jumbled post it was the result of my playing with this feature. Now having messed around with this discovery, it seems that OneNote, via Word 2007, does indeed play nicely with XMLRPC and WordPress hosting.

Once you’ve finished writing a piece in OneNote, just select Send To > Blog.

OneNote will then open Word for you to polish up the document. If you’ve just used OneNote’s inking pen to do this (which I normally am using given I have a Tablet PC), then this process converts your handwriting to text (and it does a pretty good job at it too, assuming that your handwriting is at least legible).

Just as an aside, I think it is most strange that Word’s dictionary doesn’t recognise the word Blog, even though it’s written in the toolbar

Once in Word, you can then publish directly to your WordPress hosted blog site. It just asks you for the address, name, password etc.

You can publish the content as a draft, or as a complete publication.

Amazingly enough, you can even open existing posts in order to edit and update them!

You might need to tweak the image links in WordPress if you’ve put pictures into the document from Word. And I did find that some of the paragraph formatting was weird, but largely it worked a treat, even allowing you to identify the category for the post.

For someone like me who is often on the road, this is a great feature Microsoft have added to this product. I can now manage all my posts on my tablet rather than feeling their sort of at arms length inside WordPress.

Moblogging? Here I come!

M

Will my Toshiba R400 work with the new wireless dock?

When Toshiba started to show the R400 at shows in the US I was immediately attracted to it and its funky accessory — a wireless dock. The guys demonstrated its zero configuration capability by moving the R400 into range and showing how it automatically connected to the dock with all its goodies (keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc ) attached. It was way cool.

Now that I’ve purchased an R400 I’ve been wondering whether it will work with the new wireless dock? Fortunately,the Gagetress seems to have some of the answer:

“…Toshiba’s new dock only works with its new Portege laptops: Portégé R400-S4834, the Portégé R400-S4835 and the Portégé R400-S4933″

My only question now is, how do I find out what model of R400 I have?!

M