Chad Essley's Tablet Pc SketchBlog

In an earler article, I wrote about less than stellar use of Flash on the Tablet PC. The culprit? The process "tabtip.exe". Tabtip.exe has had it's share of problems, but for the uninitiated, and uninformed Tablet Pc artist, running specifically, Macromedia Flash on one of these devices can prove to be very frustrating for the average user. Although JK (congrats on your Microsoft MVP award!), of http://jkontherun.blogs.com, suggested perhaps I needed a tablet with dedicated video memory. (true) Yet, I came up with the following solution for this problem that I've experienced on no less than three different brands of Tablet PC. (Motion, Gateway, & Acer)

Enter AutoHotKey, and my compiled .exe / script TabTip-Tamer. AutoHotKey is an amazing application, that can control almost any aspect of your PC with an easy to learn scripting language.

When Tabtip-Tamer.exe is run, it runs, and sits active in the system tray waiting for a window with Flash, Painter, Illustrator, Photoshop, Alias, or Expression in it's title to come into focus. When said window is active, autohotkey does it's job of boosting the priority of tabtip.exe to HIGH, allowing for smooth drawing / motion in Macromedia Flash. (And possibly these other apps mentioned.) One problem that autohotkey solved, was moving tabtip.exe back to normal priority when any other window came into focus. (When tabtip.exe is boosted to high, there are problems with the handwriting recognition engine stalling and acting improperly when it's given too much cpu time.)-So if you say, switch out of flash to write an e-mail using the TIP, you are out of luck unless you go into the task manager and again manually switch tabtip.exe back to normal priority.

-HERE- is a link to download my Tabtip-Tamer.exe (Use at your own risk!)
-Drop this into your startup folder, so's it runs every time your machine starts up..

Here is the code I used for my AutoHotKey script, in case you want to modify it for yourself.
------copy text below-------
#Persistent
FlashWinTitle = Flash, Alias, Mirage, Painter, Photoshop, Illustrator, Expression

SetTimer, WatchFlash, 2000 ;Checks the window every 2 seconds

WatchFlash:
WinGetActiveTitle, ActiveTitle
If ActiveTitle Not Contains %FlashWinTitle%
{
Process, Priority, tabtip.exe, normal
}
Else ;it is the active window so make it high priority
{
Process, Priority, tabtip.exe, high
}
Return
----------------copy text above-------------------

Thanks to "invalid user" at the autohotkey forums! I owe you that cartoon..
:-)
-C