All Tablet Pc's have a digitizer, the part of the tablet that tracks the pen input using some sort of stylus. If a user has a tablet that contains a Wacom digitizer, a user must install the "penabled" driver to enable pressure sensitivity in most drawig applications that support it. The problem? The Wacom driver competes with Microsoft's "tabtip.exe" tablet driver, and the result is horribly slow and laggy response times in all of these drawing apps! A total nightmare for most graphic artists who count on this feature! In fact, this lag is noticable even when dragging any type of window, or using firefox!
An early solution I had dreamed up, was to play with the priority settings of tabtip.exe, whenever using a drawing appliation, in order to smooth things out. However, this usually had the negative effect, of severely crippling the smoothness of the built in handwriting recognition panel, (the TIP) unless I manually went in and adjusted the priority of tabtip.exe back to normal.
Enter AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey is an amazing application, that can control almost any aspect of your PC with an easy to learn scripting language. It was a natural to try with my meager understanding of programming, to try and create something that did all of this automatically, taming the tabtip once and for all! After hacking away on my own bits of semi working, broken code, I signed up at the autohotkey forums, and started my plea for help.
Original idea, versions 1.0, 2.0: Chad Essley & many members of the AutoHotKey forums. Thanks guys!
Version 3.0: (problem SOLVED! Read below..)
Credit for authoring version 3.0 goes to the amazing Ian Weiner, creator of the must-have tablet centric firefox extensions GeckoTIP & Grab and Drag! Go install a copy of these great extensions, you be glad you did.
When Tabtip-Tamer.exe is run, it runs, and sits active in the system tray waiting for the TIP to come into focus. When it does, the process priority of tabtip.exe is lowered to normal status, but at all other times, it's process is set to HIGH, smoothing out pen input operations. Really, this program should be run, each time your tablet starts!
Here's a screenshot of how it looks:
I went ahead and created an original icon for V3 and re-compiled the script, however, if you'd like to customize your own icon, Ian's original code will pull one out of shell32.dll for you. (I imagine if you specify a different numeric value in that line, you'll end up with a different icon. This can also be done using AutohotKey's .ahk converter, pointing out the windows icon of your preference from your drive.)
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| Sitting happily in the system tray... |
Thanks and happy tableting!
-Chad Essley | www.cartoonmonkey.com