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Ken Hinckley's blog exploring the savage frontiers of pen, touch, and mobile devices
The official blog of the InkSeine project at Microsoft Research
February 2008 - Posts
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I took some time today to try and collect up the articles, musings, reactions, and discussions about InkSeine that have hit the web. My goodness, when I saw them all together I couldn't believe how much stuff there was! A lot of people have been pretty excited. Even in posts where people have put together critiques, those comments have been very constructive and helpful in our further thinking about how to improve the application.
The most helpful thread of InkSeine feedback has come from the GottaBeMobile forums. I've gotten a lot more stuff in my email, but the breadth of comments, occasional bug reports, and feature requests there are quite impressive! I've also been participating in that thread to help troubleshoot issues and to post answers to common questions we've been getting. So, thanks to all of you who have contributed. There were too many great comments on the GottaBeMobile thread to single them out individually in this post, but we really listen to all of them and will be doing our best to improve the application, even though some things, I'm sure, will prove to be infeasible, or take a while to get to.
By the way, I gathered all these snippets together in OneNote - its great for aggregating text from a lot of different web sites and keeping track of the links to the original source, and as we have said before, InkSeine doesn't do anything with text at this time. I love the software we've created, but I'm also not a complete idiot, and I'm happy to use other tools that are better suited to a task, such as putting together this post 
General Information from Microsoft
Reactions from the Blogosphere
- Microsoft Invents a Reason to Buy a Tablet: InkSeine is interesting because of the audaciousness of its pen and paper centricity, and the invention of an entire new language of gestures and menu conventions.
- All I can say is that using this program has been some of best times I have had on my Tablet PC in a long time...
- It is such a joy to use an application where the box was built around the pen rather than making the pen fit the box. As such, InkSeine is quickly becoming my go-to application for ink note-taking.
- The program has a fairly extensive feature list, full of very innovative and intuitive ideas (Ars Technica)
- InkSeine is an innovate note-taking, organizing, annotation application that was designed and build with the idea that you'll be commanding, entering data, and manipulating content with a tablet pen and ink.
- What do I think? In a word: brilliant! ... An insanely fun -- yeah fun -- way to brainstorm, with an interface that gets out of the way so you can get things done.
- Ink Blot Award, "Best Tablet PC Software That Microsoft Is Holding Hostage and Needs To Be Released Today"
- This ink notes saving programs is something between Journal and OneNote with one very useful new feature: the possibility to link files and web pages to your note. [with video]
- check out what all the growing excitement is about this new program [jkOnTheRun]
- I've also done a 10 minute demo of InkSeine, a brilliant application for tablet PCs [with video]
- The Personal Search is really impressive and it seems very fast! This is the first feature that I really like about InkSeine... sadly?
- You can search the Web, your e-mail or your Tablet PC right from the "pad of paper" using pen gestures.
- InkSeine's Floating Tool Ring rocks! ... I've been really interested in InkSeine's tools and interfaces, so I could not resist downloading it to get the Floating Tool Ring.
- If you're like me (and a number of InkSeine users) one of my favorite features of this great pen enabled application is the Floating Tool Ring
- I rather like the radial menu concept - I suspect it's one that will translate well into touch interfaces as well as working with pens.
- All the GottaBeMobile.com blog posts tagged with "InkSeine"
Podcasts discussing InkSeine
Online Forums - Discussions, Feedback, Comments
Task Scenarios
Drooling with Anticipation
I wish I had a Tablet PC.
InkSeine Heard ‘round the World!
What do I do with this Strange Application?
Things that need work, bugs, confusions
Additional coverage of creative tablet PC fun...
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From the early returns, people seem to be excited about InkSeine's floating Tool Ring. This semi-transparent palette floats on top of all your windows. It lets you scroll by circling the pen, or take a snapshot by tapping the camera icon:
For example, here is a comment that "Hari" posted in the GottaBeMobile.com forum about InkSeine:
Search capabilities, stroke-friendly menus and the toolring: to me these are the three most innovative and powerful features of InkSeine.
I am already addicted to the toolring and strive to use it in all other applications.
Since people seem to like the Tool Ring, they often suggest additional features it could support:
- I wish i had your kool pie-menu on it to cut, copy, paste, get a keybord or ever better: run keystrokes I configured!
- Any thoughts on giving the Tool Ring an Auto-Hide option?
- It's such a great input device; why not make it available even when InkSeine is not running?
What features do YOU want to see on there? One of these? Maybe something to flip through applications - kind of like an Alt-Tab replacement? Something else?
Well, I was just pondering that question myself when another email floated into my inbox, from a user who had already figured out how to make the Tool Ring available when InkSeine is not running, all on his own!
Anyway, the part i love the most is the tool ring. Soooooo koooool! scrolling on anything with the pen is just addictive!
It is such a good tool i put it to run at startup.
Now that's a great idea! Heck, why didn't we ever think of that!
The Tool Ring lives as its own little application called ScrollControl.exe that is completely independent of the rest of InkSeine. If you run ScrollControl.exe without InkSeine active, it still lets you scroll, and it places any snapshots you take on the system clipboard.
If you want to make your tablet setup as cool as this user's, here's how to add InkSeine's Tool Ring to your Startup folder:
- Open the InkSeine install folder, which defaults to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\InkSeine
- Right-click on ScrollControl.exe and choose the Create Shortcut command:
- Under Windows XP, the shortcut will be created in the same folder. Under Vista, you'll receive a prompt; tap Yes to create the shortcut on the desktop instead.
- Now we need locate the Startup folder so you can put the ScrollControl.exe shortcut in there.
- If you've got your whole hard disk indexed with Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search, you can use InkSeine's Personal Search command to quicly locate that Startup folder. Here, I've also tapped on the folder filter in the bottom right corner of the search panel to narrow my results down:
- Otherwise, you can take the old-fashioned slow way and plow through your folders to find the Startup folder:
Vista: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
- Once you've got your Startup folder opened, just drag the ScrollControl shortcut into it:
- The next time you log on, the Tool Ring (a.k.a. ScrollControl.exe) will appear, without InkSeine in the background.
Raman, InkSeine developer par excellence, mentioned this tip to another user who wrote to us about the scroll ring, and we received this reply back:
Raman,
That's a great tip! Thanks. I've added it to my quick launch.
Well there's another great idea! You can put it in your quick launch so you can fire up that Tool Ring at any time with one tap of your pen. Once you've created a shortcut to ScrollControl.exe in steps 1-3 above, all you have to do is drag it to your quick launch area. This illustration shows how I did this from my Windows XP tablet:
So there you have it. May these tips make the Tool Ring your constant companion in all your Tablet PC travels!
Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:
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We have a fix for the serious localization bug that has plagued many of our InkSeine friends outside of the United States.
The worst symptom of this bug is that some users who use non-American ways to write decimal numbers or dates are unable to load InkSeine notes that they have saved. The fix does NOT make it possible to load any files that this bug caused to be saved in the "bad" format, but any new ones that you create going forward will not have this problem. The other symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, and a few other features will not work. Please accept our sincerest apologies if you have been stricken by this bug.
The new build is Microsoft InkSeine Beta version 1.1.222.0, and it fixes the localization bug, and a number of other minor ones that have been reported that were easy to fix at the same time.
Our automatic update server is not yet on-line, so to get this fix:
- Uninstall InkSeine (this will NOT cause you to lose any of your options settings, etc.)
- Run InkSeine and start inking away! To repeat, if you experienced the original bug and were unable to load files that you saved, the fixed version cannot read the unloadable files, but new files that you create can be saved and loaded, and Copy/Paste and Undo/Redo will work.
- Please let us know if you find any other localization issues, even minor ones! Our internal tests at Microsoft did not have enough international users, which is why we missed this bug in the first place. If you notice other things that can be improved to make InkSeine work better for your language or other local settings, definitely let us know!
For full details of the localization bug, see the summary in our previous post annoncing the presence of the localization bug.
Here is a complete list of all the bugs and other issues that are fixed by Microsoft InkSeine Beta build 1.1.222.0:
- Fix for number formatting problem that causes loading saved files, Copy/Paste, and Undo/Redo to all fail for some users outside the US.
- Fix for unexpected date format causing the Tutorial to not load.
- Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog appearing. InkSeine should no longer require any multi-lingual recognizer packs to be installed.
Installer correctly creates file association for .iks files (InkSeine notes). Update: our attempted fix for this does not actually help, upon further deliberation. Sorry about that, we're investigating this further. We believe we're doing the right thing in the installer, but it's not getting applied for some reason that defies explanation at the moment  .
- The work around for this is to manually specify the file association by right-clicking on an .iks file, pick the Open With... command, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\InkSeine, pick InkSeine.exe from the folder, and check off the "always use this program" option before hitting OK.
- Additional file extensions added to notes filter (OneNote icon in search panel), including .onecache, Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK).
- The .TXT file extension has been removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion.
- Icons dragged out from search results now drop where you lift the pen.
- Option to skip auto-update checking added to the installer.
- Checkbox for auto-update feature added to the Options panel.
Thanks so much to those of you in the International InkSeine Community who have tried out InkSeine, contributed bug reports, and tested various issues on our behalf. We haven't received any feature requests or problem reports from Antarctica or the International Space Station, yet, but I hope some will come in soon!
It's really exciting and very rewarding to see fans of the Tablet PC across the entire global community embrace what we are trying to do with InkSeine.
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UPDATE: bug fix now available!
My humble apologies to users outside the US who have encountered some problems with InkSeine. The good news is that this is the only major bug that has come up in our InkSeine deployment, and we already have the problem fixed on our internal testing build. The bug results from a localization issue that we missed in our internal testing.
This issue only affects installs for users who are not using the American way to view numbers and dates.
The main symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, loading the Tutorial, and Loading files that you have saved all will not work. That failure to load saved files is the really bad one. A couple of people have written to me out of frustration after they were unable to load content that they saved, and for that I am truly sorry. We had very limited testing outside of the US before our external release, and we missed this bug.
We will deploy our fix for this bug soon, hopefully early next week. Raman, the ace InkSeine developer, is back in town and has already coded up a fix. We just need to do some additional testing to make sure we didn't break anything else, and deploy it through the Microsoft Research downloads process. All that will take a few days, so it will be not be available on the research.microsoft.com downloads area until early to middle of next week.
What went wrong? Well, basically if decimal numbers appear on your system as 4,5 instead of 4.5, when InkSeine writes its data to a file, it gets a stream of number that look like (4,5, 2,8, 7,5). But what it should look like is instead (4.5, 2.8, 7.5). So when our parser reads in that data, it gets confused because it finds more numbers than it was expecting, and it blows up. Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, and Saving/Loading all pass through common routines to turn data into a textual representation, so that is why all of those end up being broken. There's some similar issues with dates in different formats as well. If you really need to recover a file you've lost, you can edit those commas back to decimal points. I know, yuck! Our fix will not convert files saved in the "bad" format back into property formatted files. But any new files you create going forward will work correctly.
There are a few other small problems that we have already fixed and will be rolled into the next update as well:
- Fix for broken InkSeine file association. If you double-click on an InkSeine (.IKS) file, it will open up inside of InkSeine without forcing you to manually perform the association to InkSeine. Fixed!
- Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog that some international users have encountered when doing a search. This can be worked-around now by installing a language pack, but we believe our localization fixes will remove the need to install any language packs. Fixed!
- Option to disable automatic checking for updates has been added to the installer and to the InkSeine Options panel. We hope you'll take advantage of this great feature to get future updates & bug fixes, but we understand that some people don't like to be prompted for automatic updates, so now you can turn that off if you like. Fixed!
- Missing Notes file types added to the notes filter (looks like the OneNote icon). New extension supported: .onecache (shared OneNote notebooks are cached in these; you also may need to add this extension to Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search for the indexer to pick it up), Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK). Fixed!
- .TXT file extension removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion for some people. Fixed!
- Probably also a fix for the annoyance where icons that you drag out from the search results list don't drop directly under the location where you lift the pen, and maybe a couple of other little things.
I'll get an announcement out when the fix is ready for download... It's fixed now, here it is.
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Well, InkSeine is finally out the door, and you can install it here. The Microsoft Research web site also has posted a feature story about InkSeine.
We're getting a ton of helpful feedback, particularly in the GottaBeMobile forums thread for InkSeine. Keep it coming! It is really helpful to us to see what parts of the application people get excited about, or frustrated with.
My inbox is also quickly piling up with layer upon layer of comments, questions, and ideas. Feedback is accumulating fast and deep, and I like it that way!
In fact, Mother Nature has provided me with a perfect analogy for this situation:
What is that, you might ask? Well, that is all that's left of my poor cabin. That snow berm on the peak of the roof is about 12-15 feet high. It has been a very wild, stormy winter on the Cascade Crest. In a previous post, I reported 234 inches of snow in 40 days. Well, after brief respite in January, another 90 inches fell in six days. And then another 95 inches piled on top of that.
These non-stop storms led to the best excuse I have ever seen for a webcam not functioning correctly:
So there you have it. I want my InkSeine Inbox to feel just like that-- with ideas, reflections, questions, and complaints about what we could do better -- all piling up as much as possible!
But if you get an out-of-office message from me that looks like this error message, then you'll know all those great emails floating down from the sky have finally avalanched out of control on me!
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I'm happy to see that InkSeine is generating some fresh Tablet PC buzz in the blogosphere. Apparently, offering a new inking application to a crowd of pen computing enthusiasts is like tossing a fish into a crate full of starving cats! 
But seriously, we've worked hard on InkSeine, and it's good to see that people have some interest in what we are trying to do. Heck, it looks as if we might help to sell a Tablet PC or two, just because people want to try it out.
However, let me be the first to point out that InkSeine is not perfect. Far from it.
I wouldn't be spending my time on InkSeine if I didn't believe that it is a very cool and very useful application that is well worth your time to check out. But instead of further fanning the flames of InkSeine-induced-tablet-lust, this may be the ideal moment to throw just a little bit of water on the fire. It's very important to me to set expectations appropriately and give people an honest assessment of where the application has shortcomings.
Because InkSeine is a research prototype, we sought to create a sandbox for ourselves where we could have free reign to try out silly ideas and crazy things that wouldn't necessarily provide a clean fit into Microsoft's existing products.
So we've taken some shortcuts in the development or avoided adding some fairly obvious "standard features." Often the clean, spartan design is a blessing, but sometimes a desirable feature just isn't there when you need it.
Below we've listed some of the known deficits of the application. There are many things that could be improved, features that could be added, performance that could be optimized, file sizes and memory consumption that could be reduced. If we spent all our time on those things, we would never get to the good stuff! At this stage, we are most interested in learning what really is "the good stuff" when we put the application in people's hands - that's where you come in!
- Bugs. We have done our best to beat all of the bugs out of InkSeine, but undoubtedly we have missed some. Our team does not have the dedicated testing personnel of a real product team. Please report any bugs or failed installations and give as much detail as you can (copy the dialog or error message, describe what you were doing with InkSeine at the time, and tell us what device and operating system you are running InkSeine on). InkSeine auto-saves to a recovery file every few minutes, however, if your machine goes down or if you are unlucky enough to encounter a serious bug.
- No text support. InkSeine has no support for text at all. You cannot paste text into InkSeine, nor can you type text into InkSeine. This is probably the biggest hole in the application's current functionality. We are going to explore pen-centric mechanisms for handling text so that we can try introducing text without ruining the great pen and ink experience of InkSeine, but we don't have a timeline for when that might be ready.
- No keyboard shortcuts. InkSeine does not support any keyboard shortcuts or harware navigation keys at this time. Even though InkSeine is a pen-centric application, we realize there are times when one is viewing notes with the keyboard at the ready, so we hope to add some shortcut keys in a future update.
- No scrolling, zooming, or "Insert Space" command. Although InkSeine often does quite well without added widgets for scrolling and zooming, this can be limiting at times. InkSeine always scales the page to fit the current dimensions of your screen, so for example, a page that you generated in the portrait display orientation will be scaled down so that the full page can be viewed in the landscape display orientation. This keeps with InkSeine's metaphor of a "real notebook," and can often remove the need for a lot of needless scrolling and zooming operations when you are going through your notes. On the other hand, the lack of scrolling is particularly limiting for small-screen devices such as UMPCs. Do you really miss having the ability to scroll, or do you get by fine without it? Let us know when you send in your feedback about the application.
- No equivalent of a "Print to OneNote" driver for InkSeine. This is a great feature of OneNote / Windows Journal that is missing from InkSeine. We plan to explore whether it is possible for InkSeine to piggyback on either the OneNote or Journal print drivers to make it easier to import entire documents into InkSeine, but we're not sure yet if that will be feasible. As a work around, you can select individual pages that have been printed to OneNote, copy them, and then paste them into InkSeine.
- Undo within a page only. The Undo command only works for operations that you have performed on the current page. Once you flip pages, or Save the file, the undo stack is purged. Also, all operations on pages (New Page, Insert Page, Delete Page, dragging pages to rearrange them, etc.) cannot be undone.
- Large file sizes. InkSeine files can get fairly large, particularly if you embed a lot of screen shots in your notes. We have a simple XML file format for rapid development. This also makes it trivial for our file type to be indexed by Windows. However, our encoding of ink strokes and bitmaps is very inefficient as a result, and supporting features like embedding files (rather than links to files) would be impractical due to ballooning file sizes. Also, this contributes to InkSeine consuming more memory than it really should.
- InkSeine has not been tested on non-English systems. InkSeine currently only explictly supports the English language recognizer. We've done some very limited cleanup of localization issues, but we've gotten some reports that InkSeine may crash when Windows is not set up for English language settings. We would like to support the other languages that the Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine supports, but haven't gotten around to this yet. If you run InkSeine on a non-English system configuration and it does not install or function correctly, please let us know about it.
- Unimplemented Commands. There are some permanently grayed-out commands in InkSeine's menus, such as the Import command on the File menu, Custom Pen and Highlighter settings on the Highlighter menu, or the different sized erasers on the Eraser menu. These are placeholders for functionality that we plan to add, but haven't gotten time to implement yet.
- Slow performance in some cases. Performance can get slow if you create huge notes (more than about 30 pages with a lot of content) or if there is a large number of strokes, bitmaps, and particularly highlighter strokes all on the same page. For "normal" notes that aren't ridiculously dense, the performance is usually quite good, however. Also, InkSeine does background recognition of all the strokes on a page (in order to make them available for the indexer for search). This can sometimes bog down InkSeine on older tablets or notes that are extremely dense. The way we do the background recognition is not particularly clever, but usually it works ok and does not noticeably degrade performance. If this does present a problem for you, use the Options panel to decrease the frequency of background recognition, or disable it altogether if you wish.
- Limited OneNote integration. You can copy and paste ink and highlighter strokes between InkSeine and OneNote. If you select both ink strokes and bitmaps from InkSeine, OneNote will only import the ink strokes. InkSeine places a bitmap representation of the selection on the system clipboard, but to our knowledge OneNote does not have a Paste Special command so that you can choose to paste this bitmap. OneNote always takes the ink strokes representation from the clipboard if ink is there. You can paste into Microsoft Paint or other applications to get at the bitmap representation if necessary. We support this to make it easier for people to experiment with InkSeine, yet still know they can move their notes into OneNote if that is what they use as their central repository for everything. Integrating other features of InkSeine into OneNote is currently beyond the scope of our research project.
- Sharing or Syncing InkSeine notes. There is no support for zipping up an InkSeine note, with all of the files that it may hyperlink to, for sharing or sync'ing with someone else or to another computer. OneNote has excellent sharing and synchronization features; unfortunately, these would be too time-consuming to reproduce for InkSeine. We may eventually support exporting InkSeine pages to HTML, as one mechanism to share your notes with others.
- Accessibility/DPI settings. InkSeine currently does not respect system DPI settings for menu sizes, etc., so it has accessibility and readability limitations if you have customized your system's settings for that.
- Limited interoperation with non-Microsoft products. InkSeine will return search results for any file type that gets indexed by Windows Vista Search or Windows Desktop Search on XP. Some non-Microsoft file types require you to install plug-ins for search in order for the files to be indexed properly.
InkSeine also provides a number of advanced features for Microsoft products and file types, such as the ability to open and link to Outlook emails. These features may not work for other mail programs. Similarly, features such as automatically attaching a hyperlink to image captures currently only work for Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. They will not work for PDF files or web pages viewed in Firefox, for example.
- No custom search filters. You cannot change the file types accepted by InkSeine's existing file type filters for personal (desktop) searches of your local hard disk(s). We also do not support defining additional filters for other file types. Also, you cannot change the search engine used for InkSeine's web search feature. We may add some limited support for customizing searches in a future release.
Despite the limitations of InkSeine listed above, we think you will find that on the whole it functions well enough to use if for "real work," and to give you a glimpse of what the future of Tablet PC software might hold. If you do find areas where InkSeine doesn't meet your expectations, be sure to send us your candid feedback. Even for known issues, it really helps us to prioritize our updates if we know that lots of people are tripping over the same problem.
And if you happen to really like InkSeine or certain features of it when you try it out - heck, we'd like to hear that too!
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A while back I came up with a hardware invention to make me more productive with my tablet when I'm using it on a desk. I figured why not give a boost to the sagging global economy by unleashing this little gem on the world now, even though it's still at what we might call the "early prototype" stage.
Here's everything you'll need to send your productivity off the charts:
Alright, now here's how you can build your very own INTELLISCROLLER © ® TM
- Flip the mouse upside down like a turtle.
- Stick the post-it over the optical mouse eye on the bottom and tear off any excess paper. Don't stare at the light!
a. Use a little scotch tape to help secure it in place during heavy use.
b. I've written "NO CURSOR!" on my Post-It with a heavy black marker. It was more fun that way and I really wanted to tell that mouse take its little pointy arrow and go stick it somewhere.
- Use another Post-It to add a decorative touch to the top. This makes your INTELLISCROLLER look different from other mice. A crude scotch-tape job on the curved surface also makes it bumpy, giving your INTELLISCROLLER it a nice tactile distinction as well. Here's what mine looks like:
- Now, if you're right handed, point with the pen in your right hand while you use the INTELLISCROLLER in your LEFT hand for scroll, right click, left click, and double click. Since the buttons are new separated from the pen, you'll get much less interference.
a. This is where having the optical eye covered comes into play. This "mouse" won't accidentally disturb your pen position while you use INTELLISCROLLER to click, scroll, etc.
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Use the Control Panel for the mouse to customize all of its buttons.
a. I have the wheel-click on my INTELLISCROLLER mapped to CTRL. This makes it a breeze to use my pen for CTRL-tap multiple-selection or CTRL-drag to copy files.
b. At times I've also had it set up to switch to the next application when I click the wheel. This way, you won't miss ALT-TAB so badly when you're using your pen. I've decided CTRL is more useful to me though.
I'm thinking about proceeding directly from this prototype to the "INTELLISCROLLER 2.0." That one will instead use a small notebook-sized wireless 5-button mouse. That would make it easier to lug this thing around as part of my mobile kit. If truth be told, my INTELLISCROLLER has been getting left out of my travel bag more often than not. Having yet another wire in there, which inevitably ensnares everything else in the pouch into one gargantuan Gordian knot, is a major limitation of this first prototype.
On a 5 button mouse, I'm thinking I'd probably use one of the extra buttons for Ctrl (to get it off the wheel button- it's too easy to roll while clicking, which sometimes leads to errors) and the other I might use for switching to the next app window, or maybe SHIFT, or something else?
Now in all honesty, I am not really expecting this device to become an overnight internet sensation. But there is a real grain of truth to its utility.
Why is such a thing useful, even if marginally so? Well, with all the standard apps that don't really treat a digital pen with the respect it deserves, actions like right-clicking, Ctrl-clicking, or double tapping are critical to be able to get things done quickly.
And as we all know, these can be really frustrating at times when you're using a pen.
Now I'm well aware that there are standard options in the control panel to customize this stuff, set up the pen button for right click, or to use tap-and-hold to activate context menus. But these things are band-aids to the fundamental problem that a pen doesn't have good buttons in the first place. On a mouse, you can press the buttons without disturbing the cursor position. On a pen this is just not possible. No matter how you set up all those crazy options, to some extent they interfere with the pure joy of knowing that every time you set your pen to the screen, you will leave digital ink, AND NOTHING ELSE.
I hope there is a more clever solution to all of this, and maybe ultimately it means that every app there ever was really should be re-written to understand the pen better.
But for now the INTELLISCROLLER is the most salient symptom of my desperation.
Update: sumocat over on the GottaBeMobile comments thread recommends:
pick up a gaming keypad, like the Belkin Nostromo, to do this. It's already designed to do these things and can also execute commands like cut, copy, and paste.
Well I think that's a great suggestion. I hope to get myself one of these and try it out! But I'm a little bit sad to hear that the INTELLISCROLLER 2.0 may already be obsolete before it could hit the market. On the other hand, a hidden virtue of the 30-second hack is that it is really easy to rip the NO CURSOR! Post-It off of the INTELLISCROLLER if you find you need an actual mouse (in emergencies only, of course).
NEXT: Post #2 in the AlpineInker's Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity Series!
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It would be criminal of me to do this 12-day series without out also confessing that, like many Tablet PC users out there, I am also a big fan of OneNote. InkSeine is not, and will never be, a replacement for it.
I still remember a meeting a few years ago where my manager invited Chris Pratley to talk about this whacky new prototype he was working on called... OneNote! Chris described how they were trying to make this great tool where you could pull all kinds of stuff together, and type up your ideas really quickly without having to worry about formatting and fonts and all that stuff. Just click and start typing anywhere. Outlines, bulleted lists, and numbered lists were handled in a smart way to make them a breeze. I was hooked! I was working on completely different stuff at the time, but Chris' demo and discussion of what they were trying to do really stuck in the back of my brain. In retrospect I wish I'd dropped whatever it was that I was doing at the time and started doing OneNote-related stuff immediately. Oh well.
I didn't like some things in the user interface for the 2003 release of OneNote. In particular, I found the way it handled ink to be clumsy. But I have been very impressed with the 2007 release and find myself using it more and more. So kudos to the OneNote team for doing a great job and putting some amazing functionality in there. For example, I don't scan many documents, but in terms of sheer technological prowess, I am really impressed that they included the ability to automatically extract text from bitmaps for searching, etc. I have also observed that more and more people at Microsoft are using OneNote (mostly with text) to create shared notebooks and communicate status of projects with others.
I also have some colleagues, who shall remain nameless, that I simply cannot guilt into trying InkSeine. Why?
The idea of letting go of OneNote for even one second terrifies them.
I can hardly blame them though. OneNote is a great application. But of course these folks are missing out on some cool stuff in InkSeine too  .
Even though I do virtually all of my inking with InkSeine, I do use OneNote to annotate shorter documents and to sign patent forms and stuff like that. The Send to OneNote feature is so handy and works so well for annotating documents that there's little point for InkSeine to even try to better OneNote in that area. As I said back in Day #5, I only use InkSeine to review longer documents where the goal of my reading is to synthesize the document and pull out key ideas, rather than just make minor mark-ups on top of it.
As I've inferred in the course of the "12-day" series, my research pipeline consists of (1) hunting and gathering information, (2) sketching design ideas, (3) tracking my progress, and (4) collaborating with another person, or even (5) making informal presentations, to further hone my ideas. For ideas that survive that gauntlet and seem to be worth pursing further, I reach a point where I'm ready to distill an idea into a more detailed write-up or specification.
This crucial distillation step is where OneNote really shines for me. I've already thought things through in some detail and have extensive notes. But I don't want to hand that messy ream to the developer who works with me and expect him to make sense of it. My notes are full of half-completed ideas. The good stuff is mixed up with not-so-good-stuff and downright bad stuff. I need to distill out all the good stuff.
To distill ideas with OneNote, I type in a detailed textual outline of the idea, how it is to be implemented, the next steps to pursue, and so forth. The way OneNote handles outlines, bullets, and numbering is just wonderful. I only wish Word and Powerpoint did it as well. Since I typically intend my distillations to be shared with others, I need high-bandwidth text entry via my keyboard to give detailed rationale and analysis. I don't want to hand people the cryptic descriptions of things that I've inked in my notes.
But I do intersperse the text outlines I produce with a generous dose of screen clippings from the sketches in my ink notes. Since I'm sitting at a desk and typing for this phase of my work, I'll use the handy Windows-S keystroke to trigger the OneNote screen clipping mode. Then I can sweep out the key image from a design sketch in InkSeine that illustrates exactly what I'm writing about. I paste it in and I'm back to typing my outline in nothing flat.
Here's an example of what a typical OneNote "distillation" entry looks like for me:
This particular snippet discusses a feature that I was kicking around, but doesn't exist in InkSeine at the moment. It was a fun idea that progressed to the point that I did a little write up on it, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be.
As much as I love the OneNote screen clipping facility, there is one thing about the way it works that drives me bonkers. If you invoke it using the Insert Screen Clipping command from the OneNote menus, the capture gets placed at the point in your notes where you are typing. If, instead, you use Windows-S, it launches a new instance of OneNote and just leaves the clipping on a page by itself in your unfiled notes. While I'm pounding out an outline, hitting Windows-S is so quick that I always do that. I then hit Alt-Tab and Paste it at the point in my outline where I've just been typing. Yet because I work this way, when I'm done, I end up with a zillion OneNote windows that I have to close.
Then there's also the matter of all those unfiled screen clippings. Deleting them or collecting them all together on one page in my OneNote tabs takes time and effort, so of course I don't bother and they end up just accumulating there. I end up with hundreds of these things polluting my notebook. And I can't just select them all and blow them away, because there is also stuff in there I want to keep.
Update: sweil in the comments thread below kindly sent me this capture showing how the default behavior of the Windows-S shortcut can be changed to only place the capture on the system clipboard, rather than also launching a new instance and placing it in the unfiled notes section. I still wish there was a way to make it do the exact same thing as Insert Screen Clipping but this is pretty close to what I want. This option, sweil tells me, is ONLY available from the OneNote icon in the system tray:
But in the end, all this screen clipping buisiness is a fairly petty irritation, and OneNote really works quite well for me.
For example, I also use OneNote's tagging features to help me keep track of things that I need to return to and work on more. I love the summary view that it can produce of all the tags in my notes. I wish I had a way to do that in InkSeine to summarize all the searches that I've created. In fact, a number of people who've tried InkSeine have requested exactly this feature. But everything takes time and we haven't gotten to that one yet.
Maybe that will be a great post for "Day #14," if I ever pick up this series again!
I hope you have enjoyed it. This blog will probably be a little quiet for the next couple of weeks because I've exhausted my backlog of completed posts for now, and I have some other pressing concerns that I need to attend to.
There is also the small matter of wrapping up our release so you all can actually try out InkSeine!
Previous Post: Day #12: Tabula Rasa | Return to Day #1: Make a Project Binder
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The joy of a blank page ready to hold my thoughts is tough to beat.
A blank page is also a great way to start your own list of ideas and projects. Many of the things I've shown in this series can be done with other Tablet PC software as well; I've simply been illustrating some of the ways that InkSeine has fallen into my patterns of daily use. However, I also strongly believe that what is easy with a tool strongly shapes how one uses it. I am certain that I do many more searches (both desktop and web searches) and include many more hyperlinks to web pages and documents in my notes than I ever did while using OneNote or Windows Journal in the past.
What would you like to do on your Tablet PC that is just too clumsy or difficult now? What are the biggest stumbling blocks that prevent you from doing more with it?
For example, the AlpineInker's virtual Tablet PC friend, and one and only official heckler, feralboy, left a very insightful comment on Day #10 of this series:
Just wrote a post on GottabeMobile lamenting the quirkiness of Ink Desktop, and it got me thinking...wouldn't it be cool if you could like institute a "transparent" mode for Ink Seine, so that you could use it on the destop too. Okay, that probably makes no sense, and stinks of desperation, but i really do want to be able to ink right on my desktop and have that ink behave (:
Perhaps this does stink of desperation, but so did "InkSeine" when I first started sketching out ideas for it in my notes, some 2 years ago now. Desperation, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
I happen to think the transparent layer idea is a really nice one, and perhaps something can be done along those lines. I'm not sure yet. That might make a great summer intern project, though. I'm currently trying to identify a PhD student who is both smart and crazy enough to attempt a truly "inkseine" research project like this - perhaps something along these lines, or something else completely? - for a research internship this summer.
So there's one idea. What else could be done? Maybe the dual-display inkable ebook? Something else?
What is it that really gets you excited about the Tablet PC or UMPC devices, and working with pen and ink?
Previous Post: Day #11: Dish out a Little UMPC Love
Next Post: ...and on Day 13.... ???
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I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC. Originally I borrowed this to see if InkSeine would work correctly on the device, but I have more or less inherited it on a permanent basis. So I have started using it to play around from time to time.
Here's a capture of what InkSeine looks like on this device:
Here's another shot that shows InkSeine's search panel and the help tips on the UMPC screen. We spent about a weak tweaking its layout and design to accommodate the limited screen dimensions when you launch it on a UMPC. Admittedly it's a tight squeeze, but 480 vertical pixels are not a lot to work with!
To be honest, I am still trying to figure out where a device like the Samsung Q1 can really fit into the way I live and work. I actually like the size of it and the heft of it in my hands, although it is about twice as thick as I'd like it to be.
I am also the lucky owner of one of the old NEC VersaPro YV11F/GL-R tablets. Now that name has a real ring to it, doesn't it? I think they must have chosen a Tablet PC hallucinated title based on their designer's doodles. The VersaPro weighed in at 1.98 lbs, was a scant 11 mm thick, and was only ever sold in Japan. Talk about a wonderful slate. Even people in Microsoft Research, who are used to seeing strange devices (not to mention eccentric researchers) roaming the hallways, would stop me in my tracks to ask what it was and drool over it. The processor and hard drive capacity were a bit anemic, but it felt like carrying around a legal pad. I knew it was a qualitatively different device when I observed that I would leave it piled up with the papers and magazines on my messy desk - I have never done that with the Toshiba M400 that is my main tablet right now...
Anyway, if I could get me a UMPC as "wafer thin" as my old NEC, I think we'd really have something. That's partly why the dual display e-book project at the University of Maryland has me excited.
I do have difficulty getting used to the passive touchscreen on my UMPC while inking. I just cannot train myself not to touch the screen while I am holding the pen. This is deeply ingrained not only from my heavy tablet-inking addiction, but also from a lifetime of sketching on real paper.
But don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of touchscreens. I plan to get a multimode pen + touch device when I get my next Tablet PC. Throughout graduate school, I worked daily on a system that had a touchscreen. Even though the mouse and keyboard were always at the ready while I was working, some operations were wonderfully convenient with touch. I set up my X11 window manager (now I am really dating myself) to immediately switch the focus window as soon as I clicked anywhere in a window. Now I could just swipe at the screen with my hand to switch windows. That was fun, fast, and reliable. I remember hacking up a quick demo where almost the whole screen was a button, and I could activate it by head-butting my screen. Now that was utterly useless!
I see wonderful opportunities for touch interactions on my UMPC. But there really is not any software on the device that takes advantage of touch. I tried using InkSeine with my finger, and it actually works pretty well with touch. The radial menus that we use have a wonderful feel when driven via touch - I find that just sliding my finger in a direction to get a command is oddly rewarding. However, I must confess that InkSeine really hasn't been optimized for touch; our menus and buttons should probably be a bit larger so it is easier to land on them with your finger. We'll look to improve this in the future. Also, the ink that results if I try to finger-paint on the Samsung Q1 UMPC is utterly horrible, so touch is only useful for navigating through ink content that I have previously generated with the stylus.
I also have to say that my experience on the UMPC was the first time that I really missed scrolling in InkSeine. InkSeine has a discrete page model, where all pages are always scaled to fit the current screen size. The UMPC screen is so small that scrolling feels necessary so that I can paste larger bitmaps, etc. on the page.
My biggest disappointment on the UMPC? The ribbon UI model of Office 2007. It's been growing on me for my desktop and tablet usage, but it is a complete joke on the UMPC. I can only see a tiny fraction of my document if I leave the text at a reasonable size:
Overall, there are some things I don't particularly like about the Samsung Q1, but using this UMPC has been a bit of an eye opener for me and I am becoming more interested in the platform, both for "real work" and also as a target for research projects. Many of you have probably seen LucidTouch, the see-through device demonstration by Patrick Baudisch. Well, Patrick is part of my team and I talk to him almost every day. I think doing more with a Lucid-Touch type of UMPC device could be very interesting indeed.
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But I've also concluded the Samsung Q1 is not the UMPC for me.
To this end I'm seriously considering picking up an OQO Model 02. The ultra-portability without serious compromise on performance is appealing. And the active digitizer on the OQO is a must have for me.
For now, though, I am struggling to contain my device lust for the OQO 02, and the many intriguing new Tablet PC options hitting the market of late, until InkSeine is out the door. Otherwise we would never finish it!
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Next Post: Day #12: Tabula Rasa
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