Enabling Your Application

Overview of guidelines to enable your applications for the Tablet PC.

These guidelines are meant to ensure a consistent, usable end-user experience across applications developed for the Tablet PC. Follow these guidelines to enable your application on a Tablet PC.

A pen needs to emulate the mouse on a Tablet PC. The table of system gestures specifies the system-level pen gestures that map to mouse events. To ensure consistency within your application when it is used on both a desktop and the Tablet PC, make sure that your application responds to these pen gestures the same way it responds to the equivalent mouse event. For more details, see Gestures.

• Within an ink-enabled surface in your application, ink should flow naturally, without delay or interruption by other operations.
• Within an ink-enabled surface in your application, ink should be rendered as smoothly and precisely as possible by using antialiasing. However, if the processing power required to render antialiased ink interferes with real-time use of ink, focus on real-time use of ink as a priority. Repaint to generate antialiasing, if possible. To support antialiased ink, see the AntiAliased property of the DrawingAttributes object.
• For cut, copy, and paste operations, your application should support ink on the clipboard. For more information, see Ink Interoperability.

The Tablet PC supports both landscape and portrait orientations. Because your application may be active in either portrait or landscape orientation, you must take this into consideration when designing your screen layout algorithms. For example, on a Tablet PC display with a resolution of 1024x768, your application needs to present a positive user experience with as little as 768 pixels in either direction. Further exacerbating this problem is the potential for 120 dots per inch (dpi) and higher pixel densities, which reduces the amount of text visible in a line. Review the content that is related to your application: websites, online documentation, tutorials, and so on. Often this content is optimized for an 800-pixel screen width, resulting in a negative user experience when viewed on a Tablet PC in portrait mode. Test your applications user interface layouts in both orientations to ensure that when orientation is changed on the fly, no functions, tools, or information presented is cut off and made inaccessible to the end user (for example, positioned off screen).

Follow the Windows accessibility guidelines and requirements to ensure that your application is accessible.

We strongly recommend that you test your application on a Tablet PC to get an understanding of the design challenges and constraints of the form factor and pen. If you do not have a Tablet PC, you can use a graphics tablet input device such as those manufactured by Wacom Co. Ltd. for testing.