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Tablet users jump for joy over K-Sketch

Animation app euphoria

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K-Sketch, a new application for the Tablet PC platform, allows animations to be created from sketches just by dragging them around the screen.

Tablet PC users were teased with a video of the platform two years ago.

Most Tablet users never get round to twisting their keyboards under their screens, and truly keyboard-less Tablets are few and far between. But those who do use the third Windows form factor have long lamented the lack of software that makes use of its features.

Microsoft bundles OneNote with the Tablet edition of Windows, which takes some advantage of the form factor, and a few utilities are available in PowerToys, but in most cases the Tablet PC is relegated to being a keyboard short of a laptop.

K-Sketch was created by Richard Davis at the University of California as an experiment in pen-driven interfacing. It takes less than five minutes to learn and can create basic animations from the roughest outlines, which can then be exported as Shockwave files to be shared with the world.

It's no Director competitor, but if you're trying to illustrate simple data flows, or really impress a three year old, the free download is well worth it. ®

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Latest Comments
Anonymous Coward

Good enough for Stargate Atlantis

They seem to be the main type of computer in use in the Pegasus Galaxy. Perhaps the hefty price tag is holding things back here in the Milky Way

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Tablet PCs

I like to think tablet PCs will really shine in the so-called creative industries (not just visual arts) once PC makers stop putting 5 year-old CPUs in them. Beyond office use the keyboard+mouse method can be really limiting. I recommended to one of my friends who works in audio production to buy a cheap graphics tablet and he can't stop talking about how much more efficiently he can get stuff done now. I personally can't wait till we have OS's that support multitouch tablet PCs.

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No apps for Tablet???

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/tabletpc.mspx

My HP TC4400 has had these installed for a long while, you get bored of them after a while. Suffice to say theres a drawing and animating package in there.

.

After skimming thru the manual for K-Sketch it seems there are no physics in-built for autonomous gravitational and kinetics animation - you draw the paths yourself. A real shame as I thought it would have been natural to build physics into such a thing.

Theres a physics sim in the MS tablet powertools. Works pretty good but is simplistic.

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