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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
March 2008 - Posts
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GottaBeMobile.com forum member moneyburninhole conceived an ingenious InkSeine Tool Ring hack for flicking your way around on your Vista Tablet PC. It is so brilliant and useful that I just have to share it.
moneyburninhole posted this comment in the GBM forums:
I also love the Tool Ring and wanted to share an undocumented use I've found for it, namely, as a base for doing pen "flicks" when the screen you are on doesn't otherwise permit it.
An example: I use PDFRevu to markup PDFs and wanted a way to switch easily between highlighter and pen. The two standard ways are either using the toolbar or the keyboard shortcuts P and H. Neither were ideal. The toolbar is too far a "reach," and the keboard is unavailable in slate mode. So, I set up two editing flicks to trigger P and H. Diagonal up, right trigers P, Diagonal down,left triggers H. The problem is, flicks don't work when you have a markup tool selected, as the tool just draws a line, rather than triggering a flick. The solution: start your flick in the "crazy arrow" part of the tool ring. I'm now quickly flicking between pen and highlighter through the use of the unobtrusive Tool Ring. Great stuff.
I've adopted this hack on my Vista tablet. I love it. My productivity is once again on the rise. As I said to moneyburninhole, I never would have thought to try this.
Here's a Usage Scenario with Copy and Paste to OneNote
Let's say I want to copy some text from my blog into OneNote and jot down some more ink notes about it. I can start by sweeping out the text, then flicking up and to the right to copy. Here I've done the flick on the "crazy arrow" part of the Tool Ring. In the web browser I actually could flick directly on the page, but I've quickly gotten in the habit of just always doing it on the tool ring. That way I never have to even think about what mode the pen is in before doing the flick.
Now I'm inking in OneNote. I used the yellow highlighter on the OneNote page to show how the Paste flick (down and to the right) won't work when you're in the inking mode. You just get a diagonal stroke instead.
But now if I flick on that Tool Ring instead, I get my text pasted in - even though OneNote thinks the pen is in the inking mode!
This is fast and I don't have to hunt around for the teeny tiny little paste icon in the toolbar to make it go. (Just make sure that the OneNote window has the focus - tap on the window's title bar if necessary.)
Make the "Flick That Tool Ring" Hack Shine with Custom Flicks!
You can have great fun with this using just the standard flicks. But to bring the hack to its full fruition, you'll want to customize some of the flicks for your most heavily used applications and shortcuts, as moneyburninhole did for PDFRevu.
Here's how to do it:
- Use the start menu to open the control panel, and launch the Pen and Input Devices panel.
- Tap on the Flicks tab of the dialog. To get the most out of this hack, you'll want to tick off the Navigational flicks and editing flicks radio box, as I've done here.
- Tap Customize to bring up the Customize Flicks dialog. You'll have to decide which of the standard flick(s) you'll want to sacrifice for custom behaviors. I don't have much need for Forward, so I give it the axe. There are a bunch of canned behaviors, but I have something special in mind, so I tap on (add) to make a custom keystroke combination, like so:
- What to reprogram Forward to? I thought Alt+Tab would be nifty so I can flip back and forth between applications. I named this App Switch and I press the Alt+Tab key combination, causing "Alt+Tab" to appear in the Keys field. Be sure to hit Save. Then hit OK, then hit Apply in the Pen and Input Devices dialog to apply your custom flick settings.
- Now I can flick right on the tool ring to flip back and forth between OneNote and my web page! Now I whipsaw between my notes and my reference material at will. It's just like the good old days when people hit Alt+Tab on these strange devices called "keyboards" to be ultra-productive. I'll use this in InkSeine too when I want to take multiple screen clippings from the same web page.
- One more little tip. The Tool Ring lets me circle to scroll, and I like that for my short-distance scrolling needs, so I decide to sacrifice the Drag Up and Drag Down flicks as well. I map them to Toggle Shift and Toggle Ctrl to make the modifier key experience with my pen a little smoother. For example, now I can flick down to Toggle Shift, and multi-select files to drag them into InkSeine:
Take this as a point of departure and see how far you can take it for your heavy rotation apps. The App Switch flick to easily go back and forth from inking to the document I am working with is indispensable for me now.
What flicks do you use? What are some other useful key combos to set up this way? What's the coolest set of things you've configured for your own Tool Ring hack?
Update: As Warner Crocker's post about this hack on GottaBeMobile kindly pointed out, I forgot to mention that the Tool Ring is an application that you can run independently from the rest of InkSeine. Check out my previous "Kick Start that Tool Ring!" post on how to add the Tool Ring to your Startup group, or to the quick-launch area on your taskbar. (I do both, myself - currently, if you exit InkSeine, it also closes down the Tool Ring, so it's handy to have it in your quick-launch to fire it back up at a moment's notice. As some commenters in the GottaBeMobile.com forum have pointed out, there really should be an option to leave InkSeine's Tool Ring up after you exit InkSeine, so you can continue using it in all your other apps if desired. We'll look to add that feature as soon as possible.)
Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:
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Distressed books from forgotten decades, documents battered by time, and postcards from the distant past hold a deep charm for me. Perhaps it was because my grandfather was an insatiable reader and his shelves were always brimming with volumes dating as far back as the 19th century. Maybe it was because my great-uncle was an avid stamp collector and gave me heaps of aged stamps and letters when I was a young boy.
Whatever the reason, Wal-Mart can keep their shiny rows of bestsellers. I'll settle into my armchair with a yellowed tome, during the darkest recesses of the night, to read eldritch tales of mystery and imagination.
The same is true, I believe, for writing and sketching. Just look at all the amazing and beautiful personal touches that artists and writers add to their moleskine notebooks.
So I decided to join in the fun with InkSeine on my Tablet PC. I scanned in a few books, papers, and found objects to personalize my inky reflections.
Below are few examples that I came up with. So that you can have fun too, I've made most of these backgrounds available as download of blank example InkSeine notes (ZIP archive, 10MB) from the InkSeine webpage. More details on how to use the samples later in this post.
Inking after Midnight
These custom pages come from a book printed in the 1930's that belonged to my grandfather. This makes the perfect foil for my creativity.
In a dream-vision I transcribe the legendary Codex Inkseinus, a grimoire of arcane and forbidden Tablet PC knowledge, originally penned by the mysterious Mad Inker of Redmond:
Next, I scan in some blank pages. The anachronism of yellowing paper on my venerated NEC VY11F/GL-R slate sets the proper tone:
Of course, I begin my narrative with a distressed "letter" from the unfortunate author to add a ring of authenticity - with due homage to H.P. Lovecraft, who often employed the epistolary literary device with great success.
Want to see the rest of the Codex? Well, I should not to reveal too much of this cryptic treatise at once. You'll just have to keep following this blog. The AlpineInker often gets ideas for posts by paying visits to the sole known surviving copy of the Codex, which resides under lock and key at Miskatonic University.
Inking with a Splash
For my next project I wanted a lighter mood, so I scanned in one of my watercolor boards. I grew up close to the ocean. This backsplash makes we want to pen an epic tale of men and the sea:
Rough Drafts & A Library for my Notes
I mentioned my envy of Ript the other day. With very little work I produced a similar effect by scanning in a ratty piece of paper. I sized it to make a nice title area for my note. I rotated it by 90 degrees to make rough edges for my artwork.
I played with this a little more to produce a front page for my library. All I need to do is add InkSeine hyperlinks to my "note books" and I'm good to go. As you can see I'm having great fun with the mostly-working-but-not-bug-free rotation feature we've been working to add to InkSeine.
Hello from UMPC Land
My UMPC screen is about the size of a postcard, so I might as well use it to write one:
Download Example InkSeine Custom Backgrounds
I've produced four sample InkSeine notes with blank custom pages. The download is a WinZip archive (.ZIP, 10MB) that contains:
- book-2up-stationery.iks: A two-up note format for Landscape orienation on your tablet, based on the old book style shown above.
- book-stationery.iks: Single-page old book stationery formatted for Portrait orientation.
- postcard-umpc.iks: Landscape UMPC format using the postcard.
- splash-stationery.iks: A sample Portrait orientation note based on the watercolor backsplash.
Before you go too crazy with these, be aware that InkSeine has no explicit support for custom page backgrounds. As a result it is kind of hacky at the moment and resulting notes can become bloated, but you can still have quite a bit of fun with these samples. If there's enough interest and we can figure out a good way to make it work "for real", we'll look to better support custom InkSeine page styles in the future.
I've set up the pages so that lasso-selecting your ink will never select the background bitmap by accident, but if you tap-select you may hit the background and move it around accidentally. Just hit Undo if that happens. In the currently available release of InkSeine, there is no way to "lock down" a bitmap in the background.
To make new pages that still have the fancy background, use Copy Page from the page menu, then use Paste from that menu to insert your page with the custom background. It's best to copy and paste some blank pages before you add any ink. That way you can make more pages without having to select and cut the ink from each page as you go.
Here's How to Make Your Own Custom Backgrounds
With a bit of hackery, you can make your own backgrounds, even though InkSeine currently has no "custom page" features.
Once you have a suitable scan, here's what you can do. If you don't have a good book or a suitable scanner, I recommend appropriating one of the aforementioned moleskine photos from Flickr, or see if any of the Wikipedia codex scans strike your fancy.
- Make sure you save your scan in a resolution and format where the resulting file is 50-100 KB at the most. I scaled mine down using Microsoft Paint to about 50% of their original size, and saved the scaled-down versions as JPG files to get them as small as possible. You'll lose some quality this way, but if you use huge bitmaps on all your InkSeine pages, you'll quickly bog down InkSeine and overwhelm the memory of your poor tablet. I also used Alias Sketchbook's airbrush to touch up some of the scans to suit my needs.
- Double the height of your bitmap (plus about 25-50 pixels to spare) and flood-fill it with black or whatever background color works best. This will allow you to import the bitmap into InkSeine and expand it so that the scan fills the screen, but the center of the bitmap will be off-screen. Since InkSeine selects a bitmap only when the center of the bitmap falls within your selection lassos, this will allow you to ink and lasso-select any of your writing on the page without selecting the bitmap too. You'll definitely want to set up your custom pages that way or it quickly becomes annoying to work with them.
- Drag this doubled-height bitmap from your file folder onto your InkSeine page. Drag it so that the upper-left corner of the bitmap lies at the upper-left corner of your page. Then take the bottom-right corner of the selection and drag straight to the right. This expands the page as much as possible. This is what this step looked like when I started with my book scan:
- Depending on the aspect ratio of your scan, you may want to further scale your bitmap just vertically, or just horizontally, to fill the screen. With my book, I stretched it a bit horizontally to make it fit the screen completely. It looked fine since the stretch was not extreme. You'll probably have to pan your bitmap around until you can see the desired selection resizing handle on-screen. Resize it as needed and then pan it back to align to the top-left corner.
- Voila, you are done! You have a bitmap that fills the page completely, but which will not be accidentally selected while you are lasso-selecting ink on the page.
Have Fun and Report Back!
Give the samples download or your own scans a try. Do you want the option to use custom pages for your notes? What kinds of custom stuff do you find you want to do? What kind of features or capabilities would you want around custom pages if we were to add them to InkSeine?
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One of the things we are trying to get fully functional for an update is to enable rotation of objects in InkSeine. We have it mostly working; pretty much the only thing left to do is to add some snapping so the 90-degree orientations are easier to achieve.
I've got a debug build of this on my tablet and I'm finding the new capabilities fun and useful in ways that I hadn't originally anticipated. And of course I had to put it through its paces to test it out, and maybe have a bit of fun along the way, so here is an InkSeine document where I have totally spun out of control:
We've also made it possible in this version to scale something down until it flips in the other direction. This enables cute reflection effects as well.
I've been using these features to play with some other fun ideas. I'll post up about those in the next couple of days when I can find a little time.
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Tonight I stumbled across a piece of artwork that I did many years ago. And I thought, “Hey, I still really like that!” Plus I figured the blog could benefit from an artistic interlude, so here it is:
This is from a brief period of colorful geometric abstractions that I did in the early to mid 1990’s. I have very few surviving pieces like this. Untitled, colored pencil on paper.
The main drawback of this piece is that because it doesn’t exist as stroke data on my Tablet PC, I can’t use the handwriting recognizer to name it. Hence the dreaded “Untitled.”
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I am having some great fun this week modding up one of my slate Tablet PC's. I have a nutty little idea that I am working towards, but mums the word on that for now... Either it will take the Tablet PC world by storm, or I will prove once and for all that I am a complete kook. Perhaps even both!
While I was thinking about this top-secret project, I rediscovered a great Channel 9 video. In the video Bert Keely shows how he has modded up his slate, delivered with his typical firehose of enthusiasm. Bert is an architect on the Tablet PC team and has been there since the very start. Even though this video is a few years old now, his advice is still bang-on, and his enthusiasm gets me excited about the Tablet PC all over again.
I could find nary a mention of this video, save to ask about it, in any the forums, haunts, or other dark corners of the blogosphere frequented by Tablet PC Illuminati. So I've uploaded the video to MSN Video and now you can play it right here in your browser (or get the Channel 9 MSDN Video download).
The video player that I am able to embed in this blog is a little lame. Apologies for that. Click on the link immediately below if you'd rather view it in MSN Video instead - that offers a better experience in my humble opinion.
 Format: wmv
Duration: 03:35
Video: Bert Keely on Souping Up the Tablet PC (2004)
Bert is only just scratching the surface of tablet PC mods that are possible. Cestfiu has been posting about his quest to find the ultimate combination of buttons'n'stuff for his Lenovo, while e-gadgetjunkie seeks the ultimate stealth pen button settings. FeralBoy had the stroke of genius to throw small rubber door wedges in his travel bag, to prop up his tablet as needed.
Tablet stands are another popular "mod," but I have two really big beefs with those:
(1) Most importantly, they don't involve cutting, epoxying, melting, dremel-tooling, or otherwise risk bodily harm, carcinogenic vapors, or fatal impacts to your tablet; and
(2) They typically aren't suitable for my mobile kit. But here's a recent stand that looks useful, if not mobile.
If you're not just mobile but ultra-mobile, be sure to deck out your UMPC with a cool case and stuff.
While you're at it, don't forget to mod up your pen with felt-tip nibs and spring-loaded stroke nibs. Ordering these from Wacom is only slightly more difficult than gnawing your own foot off. But at least Mobile Maestro Steve S over in the GottaBeMobile forums has kindly posted the magic link.
I hope you have great fun with these ideas. Be sure to report back on your most clever, useful, or downright extravagant tablet mods!
Maybe you'll even soup up your tablet with something hotter than what I've got cooking on the back burner here at Microsoft Research...
PREVIOUS: Post #1 in the AlpineInker's Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity Series!
NEXT: ???
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I just stumbled across the IOGEAR Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N announced today, which strikes me as yet another digital pen capture technology. But I’d love to be proven wrong and discover that it is that perfect magical solution that everyone seems to be waiting for. 
IOGEAR claims this is the “first device ever to capture natural handwriting from any surface, and store it in the receiver for future use” but I believe that about as far as I can throw my gigantic 21” Wacom Cintiq display tablet. That thing weighs a metric ton and is connected by a cable suitable for a boat anchor, so trust me, it’s not very far.The main advantage of this gadget is that it writes on ordinary paper (once you clip the receiver to it) and the stylus uses a standard ballpoint pen refill. But there have been many products in the past that employed ordinary paper, such as the ill-fated CrossPad. The
EPOS / DaneElec Z-Pen is another recent example, but from what I've heard on the GottaBeMobile forums discussion of digital pen solutions, people have had trouble actually getting their hands on one of those. So maybe this is the "first one that you can actually buy as a consumer, since the CrossPad, which didn't actually store stuff in the pen but kind-of gave the same user experience." That doesn't sound quite a slick in the marketing brochure though, I'm sure.
The IOGEAR web site is pretty thin on any technical detail as to how this thing actually works, but according to another story the Mobile Digital Scribe is tracked via an infrared sensor. I also found no mention of the critical detail of how the pen knows that you’ve flipped to a new page of notes. Pens based on the Anoto technology employ a special paper encoded with a unique identifier so that the computer knows which page you’re writing on.
Don’t sell the page-identification feature of the Anoto technology short. It is essential for trouble-free note taking.
On the old CrossPad, for example, you had to press forward/back page buttons, and if you forgot to press the button, or made a mistake somewhere along the way, all of your notes henceforth until you sync’ed with the computer would be seriously messed up, with pages mixed together willy-nilly. I would bet good money that the IOGEAR device has this same problem. If they've figured out a way to solve that without special paper, then I will be first in line to plunk down my hard-earned cash for this thing, but I rather doubt that's the case.
To me trouble-free note taking is well worth the price of special paper. Without special paper, I just don’t see any way to solve this issue, technically. If you have to stop and tap madly on some page turning button or whatever every time you want to flip back a few pages in your notes to make a quick correction, it will quickly drive you insane. I did this in the old days on my CrossPad, and look what happened to me. You have been warned!  The Agilix Capturx device is a recent example of an Anoto-based technology that for my money appears to be a better way to go. It avoids the page-turning problem and offers tight synchronization with Microsoft OneNote.
The IOGEAR Mobile Digital Scribe does come with software to download your strokes, convert handwriting to text, and also seems to have a real-time streaming mode if you use it while it is connected to your computer. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there is some way to set it up to get the stroke data into OneNote, but it doesn’t appear to have the nice integration that the Capturx does.
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A lot of ink blogs are just a vile mess.
But there are a few, like Sumocat, who really get it right.
Partly it is just because his handwriting is so beautiful, but also, the interesting content is there to back it up. When ink blogging is done right, the format can be extremely engaging and offers a personal touch to communication that is just not possible with text. And, of course, you can freely intermingle sketches and diagrams, since the pen is not confined to ascii characters on Cartesian coordinates.
But how can ink and sketching best be used in web design in general?
I was perusing the weblog of Richard Banks, of Microsoft Research Cambridge, where I stumbled across Richard's post about an article in Smashing Magazine on the role of sketching and drawing in web design. The article is a visual smorgasbord, with dozens of examples. The eye candy ranges from fairly traditional pages with a smattering of hand-drawn elements, to artistic web forays in sketching. Others can only be described as bizarre experiments in Flash that are not for the faint of heart. It's definitely worth checking out, both for inspiration and as examples of "what not to do!"
Not surprisingly, many of the best examples come from photographers, artists, and designers. Here is one example that I found both visually appealing, and usable as a web site that you just want to spend time at:
 Not Your Average Joe
Sadly, they didn't include Sumocat's site. He does more than just pure ink posts. Sumocat recently wrote about how Build 52 can be combined with Ript to produce some cool posts. I like the results - two great tastes that go together!
 Sumocat's Scribbles
Of course, I've taken my own best crack at using ink and sketching in an effective manner. The entire InkSeine tutorial is formatted as a comic book. I found Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics to be quite a helpful resource when I was putting this tutorial together. I've gotten quite a few comments from people who tell me they (and their kids) love it.
 InkSeine Tutorial
But to be 100% objective, I also have received one comment from someone who absolutely hated it. This person wrote to me:
The comic book turned me off from ever trying Ink Seine. It was clutter ridden and didn't provide a good impression on the product.
Oh well. I guess sketchy web sites just aren't for everyone. But they're definitely for me.
Here's ink in your eye!
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