If you're a fan of inking on your Tablet PC or UMPC, you better really treat your significant other to a great date on Valentine's day, because you'll be spending Feb. 15^th with your tablet.

I'm happy to announce that Microsoft InkSeine will be available as a research prototype, courtesy of Microsoft Research, that you can download via research.microsoft.com on February 15^th, 2008.

We have a number of improvements, bug fixes, and some nifty new features that we are rolling into the program. One of the coolest is InkSeine's newfound ability to automatically capture "backlinks" for screen shots that you take from Internet Explorer or Office 2003 and 2007 documents (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, or Outlook emails), as pictured below. These "backlinks" are shortcuts that you can open to revisit web and Office documents that you've taken a screen capture from. All you have to do is stroke down on one of the round icons in your notes to open the document or web page.

Here's a sample document I generated with a search for "InkSeine" at the top. I opened a series of documents that I found in my search, and took a clipping from each of them. You can see the backlinks sitting at the top left corner of each clipping. The clippings you see there were taken from PowerPoint, Word, Excel, an Outlook email, and an Internet Explorer web page, respectively.

A sneak preview of Microsoft InkSeine is available courtesy of Matt Faulkner over at GottaBeMobile.com. And let me take this opportunity to offer a special thanks to Rob, Warner, and Matt at GottaBeMobile.com for their helpful early encouragement and feedback on the program. Tablet PC MVP's Steve Seto and Frank Garcia have also been super helpful in trying out different versions of some features we've been working on.

InkSeine works on Vista or the Tablet PC version of XP, but we definitely recommend installing InkSeine under Windows Vista for the best experience. InkSeine's handwriting recognition is superior under Vista because it uses your email corpus to augment the recognizer's word list. So be sure to get yourself a Vista tablet or UMPC ready for the 15^th if you really want to get the most out of InkSeine. But it works pretty well on XP too, you just have to take some extra time to install Windows Desktop Search (WDS 3.01) if you don't already have it.

Note that Microsoft InkSeine is not a supported Microsoft product. It is a research prototype being deployed by Microsoft Research in order to help showcase some of what the Tablet PC can do, and of course to collect feedback, ideas, and comments from people who try it out. I'll be the first to admit that InkSeine isn't perfect, and has its warts and quirks, but it is pretty cool for what it does. We're doing our best to beat all the bugs out of it, but if you use it enough you'll probably find some glitches. Nonetheless InkSeine has a great set of functionality for handling ink on your tablet PC. You can definitely do a lot of fun stuff with it. It also automatically saves a backup file just in case you mess up, or encounter a crash.

We'll have more details and feature descriptions as the release date gets closer. Stay tuned for updates.