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.