We can finally announce the first winner of a copy of my book, How to Do Everything with Your Tablet PC. Our first winner was Todd K. Malan, MD. We're attempting to contact the second winner now.

For this week's article, we have Part 1 of a two-part tale. Thanks to their mobility and usability, Tablet PCs are important new tools for gathering and managing information. This week I want to tell you more about a powerful tool for managing and organizing information. There was a discussion in the TabletPCBuzz forum about this subject a few weeks ago.

Mind Mapping and Tablet PC Users, Part 1
By Bill Mann

As a Tablet PC user, you're almost surely some sort of knowledge worker. That is, you make your money not from the sweat of your brow or the productivity of your fields, but from applying your knowledge and manipulating information. For people who work with information today, the biggest problem is often organizing and managing the vast quantities of the stuff that are available. Tablet PCs can help us deal with information by allowing us to carry it with us. But there's still the problem of managing and organizing the information. That's where mind mapping comes in. Mind mapping helps millions of people organize masses of information in ways that make sense to them. Mind mapping is also a powerful tool for note taking, where it engages the visual side of your brain to help you remember.

A mind map is a visual representation of chunks of information and the relationships between those chunks. Starting with a central topic, idea, or theme, you create a mind map by writing a phrase that identifies the central theme in the center of a piece of paper. Next, you write words or phrases identifying key topics on the page, arranging them around the central theme. Then you draw lines between the topics and the central theme to show that they're related. You can also connect topics directly to each other.

Branches (topics and their connections to other topics) graphically indicate the relationships between the information in the mind map. This representation is one of the significant benefits of mind mapping, as such relationships are seldom clear in more traditional means of note taking.

Once you've created the first level of branches, you can add more detail to your mind map by repeating the process. Treat each topic as if it were the central theme, and create branches containing information related to that topic. By continuing in this vein, you progressively add more and more detailed information to your map, until you have a mind map containing all the important information related to the central theme.

Some of the benefits of creating a mind map include:

• Because it's a diagram, it engages the visual part of your brain in understanding and organizing information.
• The relationships between chunks of information are explicitly stated.
• By mapping short phrases that represent larger chunks of information a simple mind map allows easy recall of large amounts of information.

This wraps up the "Mind Mapping" part of the story. Next time around, I'll address the, "and Tablet PC Users" part.

Welcome to the third issue of the TabletPCBuzz newsletter, for the week of April 20th. We are bringing this newsletter to you a couple days late this week, as we took sometime off to enjoy the Easter weekend with family. Hope you all had a great weekend. Thanks for inviting us into your inbox, see you on the site!

Keith Holden is Quality Assurance and Food Safety consultant. He says his Compaq TC1000 has changed his whole way of working in the three weeks since he got it. His job involves a lot of audit work and note-taking. He also needs access to client manuals, ISO 9000 standards and food safety standards. His TC1000 lets him do all this right on the spot. A perfect example of the power of the Tablet.

And that's this week's story. We're looking for more brave volunteers to share their experiences with the TabletPCBuzz community. Please email me at bill@techforyou.com and share your experiences.

Got a question about the Tablet PC OS? A specific Tablet PC? Wondering how to do something with your Tablet PC? Whatever your question, send it to Ask the Buzz at spg@tabletpcbuzz.com. Thanks!

For all TabletPCBuzz members, we are holding a contest this week on the site. We will be giving away a couple of TabletPCBuzz shirts from our logo store. If you haven't already, you can check out our logo store at - http://www.cafeshops.com/tabletpc. To enter the contest or for more details, see this forum post - http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3394

Get Rid Of The Tablet Input Panel (TIP) Button On The Taskbar
The TIP button on the taskbar takes up a good deal of space, which you may want to free up. If you would like to remove the button, providing access to the TIP via its gesture or hardware button, you can do so with the following instructions. Go to a command prompt and type:

regsvr32 /u "c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\ink\tipband.dll"

Be sure and keep the quotes as you will need them because there are spaces in the file path name. This command will unregister the dll. After doing this, reboot your machine. The TIP button should be gone. To undo your changes and restore the TIP button permanently, go to a command prompt and type:

regsvr32 "c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\ink\tipband.dll"

This week's poll question:
Are you considering/waiting on the second generation Tablet PC devices?
Vote now at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com!

Some interesting statistical findings by In-Stat/MDR here -

"Tablet PCs...are, according to Brian O'Rourke, a Senior Analyst with..(In-Stat/MDR)... "A solid technology that is showing some early promise." Vendors claim that initial sales of these products have exceeded expectations. "However, decreased corporate IT spending is expected to lead to slow adoption by thelarge enterprises that are expected to be the biggest purchasers of Tablet PCs," says O'Rourke. Initial sales have been promising in some vertical applications and overall growth will be solid in 2003 and 2004, with more rapid growth expected in 2005.

In-Stat/MDR has also found that:

-- In 2003 and 2004, Tablet PCs will make up 1% to 2% of notebook PC shipments, but will break out in 2005, increasing to 3.5% of notebook PC sales. By this point, it is expected that Tablet PCs will begin to put a serious dent in the market for ultraportable notebook PCs, which are targeted at the same market as Tablet PCs.

-- North America, particularly the US, will dominate early Tablet PC shipments. Europe will be second in the early years, with Japan third, due primarily to a long recession that is depressing corporate spending levels. However, over time, shipments in Japan and Asia will pick up. One significant reason is the advantage of the pen-based Tablet PC in accommodating East Asian character-based languages."

More information is available in the press release, click the link below.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK5.story&STORY;=/www/story/04-14-2003/0001925338&EDATE;=MON+Apr+14+2003,+08:07+AM