Every once in a while Microsoft comes out with great new programming competition to kick-start the development and promotion of the new emerging technology that Microsoft is pushing for. This is a very smart move, because developers get their feet wet with this new technology (and possibly love it and continue developing with them) and Microsoft benefits from the series of new third-party controls and products that they can use as a showcase of this new technology.
This was the case about two years ago, when Microsoft was still pushing the ".NET evolves around XML Web Services" campaign. Do you guys still remember the much-hyped .NET XML Web Services competition that Microsoft organized in the early .NET days? What ever happened to that competition? There was so much promotion regarding that competition, but yet I can't recall seeing any big announcements of the winners. I even remember other developers posting about the lack of announcement. Did we all miss it?
Anyhow, a couple of months ago Microsoft pushed another big competition for the new Tablet PC wave. The winner of the "Does Your Code Think in Ink" competition would win up to $15,000, a car, a fancy trip to Thailand or a home entertainment package. I am sure many developers submitted their Tablet PC user sample, and so did I for the first time.
Yet when the deadline has passed, there was another magical disappearance of a much-hyped competition. In 1984-style, Microsoft takes down the website (http://www.doesyourcodethinkinink.com), erases all mentioning of this competition and fails to announce the winners as it promised too. In addition, PC Magazine never made the winning apps available in its download section as advertised throughout the competition. Maybe I can't find it.
Why the secrecy, I wonder? Wouldn't it be smart to showcase all these applications? I'd love to see them. The competition also mentions that you can send them a self-addressed, stamped envelope to get a list of winners. I did, but to no avail.
After "Does Your Code Think in Ink", Microsoft just started a few weeks ago the "Does Your App Think in Ink" competition (http://www.doesyourappthinkinink.com/). This time, they target vendors, increased the winning price to $100,000 and gave more development time. In that competition, they even refer to the just-released Tablet PC PowerToys (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/downloads/powertoys.asp). Are those PowerToys the winning applications of the previous competition? Why re-do an almost identical competition? Was this all planned all along to use the winning apps of the previous competition to showcase in this competition? Or did the first competition failed to attract enough samples? What's the strategy here?
At any rate, since my application didn't win, I am making it publicly available here:
InkTalk is a PowerToy for the Tablet PC that allows you to chat with another InkTalk client over the internet using your natural handwriting. You can simply write your message and the other InkTalk client will see your message in your original handwriting.
You can copy and paste ink to and from other ink-enabled applications like Windows Journal and also save your messages as a GIF file or as text file provided that operating system has a text-recognition engine (a real Tablet PC does, while the Tablet PC SDK does not).
You can download the executable here:
http://www.enderminh.com/minh/inktalk.aspx
The entire source code here is also available here:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=33a09f30-e95e-4e1a-810b-1317308d6e1a
Have fun and let me know if you have any information on the winning applications. Congratulations to the mysterious winners. ;)