Give Me a Side of Scrollbar. Supersized.

Let's say you finally got your hands on a multitouch laptop, whether a PDC laptop, HP TX2, or something else. With the smaller screens, you might say to yourself, "Hey, it's almost as if this scrollbar was made more for a mouse cursor than my fat greasy finger." You're kind of right, but fortunately some fine minds at Microsoft had already thought about that. Recall the Origami Experience 2.0 pack from Microsoft. This incredibly helpful bit of bytes will allow you to optimize the chrome on your apps for fat fingers, with taller title bars, bigger Min|Max|Close buttons, and wider scrollbars. There's an option to put the touch keyboard by the systray and enable a touch pointer.

Two other components of Origami Experience include Origami Now and Origami Central. Origami Now is kind of a gadget carousel that will let you create and rotate through tiles of things such as weather, clocks, calendars, email, lists, pictures, notes, and (pre-defined & out-of-date) RSS feeds. Origami Central includes a fat finger friendly media player, web browser, and customizable program launcher.

Keep in mind this is UMPC/Vista code. Mileage may vary, caveat emptor, etc., etc. But I've used it on the PDC laptop without a hitch.