Tablet PC and Summer of Code

[Corey Burger]

On 3/21/07, Charlotte Curtis <curtisc at uoguelph.ca> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Corey forwarded my previous message about a Tablet PC related project for
> Summer of Code (thanks Corey), but I thought I would try to rephrase my
> request a little more clearly:
>
> 1) Are there many people who actually use Tablet PCs and would like to see
> improvements to Ubuntu's Tablet useability?
>
> 2) What is the most important aspect that needs work?  Some ideas I've had
> are:
>     - A handwriting input tool (similar to Windows' TIP)
>     - A tool to easily configure screen rotation and hardware buttons
>     - Handwriting recognition in the background (for searchable handwriting,
> although that is probably beyond my abilities)
>     - An annotation plugin to Evince/xpdf
>     - Improvements to Xournal
>
> This would be a pretty ambitious project if I tried to do all of it, so I'd
> like to just focus on one subcomponent.  Also, if I don't get accepted to
> Summer of Code, I'd still like to do this, so I'd really appreciate your
> input.  Thank you,
>
> Charlotte

As an observer from the previous two SoC's, I can say the biggest
problem is students biting off more than they can chew. One of the
biggest issues with tablets is that GNOME often barfs on the screen
rotation, primarily the panel layout. As such, you possible place
would be work on some new panel work, but that might be best done
upstream. Another option and somewhat more general, is to do an X
config gui, likely porting fedora's system-config-xfree86 to Ubuntu.

Cheers,

Corey