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:

1. Use the start menu to open the control panel, and launch the Pen and Input Devices panel.

2. 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.
   
   
   
3. 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:

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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:

• Kick Start that Tool Ring!
• Flick that Tool Ring!
• Zoom that Tool Ring!