An InkSeine user, Anthony Chan, posted up a thoughtful review of InkSeine on his blog, written in InkSeine itself! With his permission, I'm reproducing it here. He has a lot of great comments and ideas for features. Let's discuss the points he raises.

Page 1: The table of contents

Anthony starts with a table of contents. It looks nice, doesn't it? Later he mentions that he wishes there were a way to make the entries active hyperlinks. That would be cool.

Page 2: Things That I Like about InkSeine

I'm glad to see InkSeine's search features rise to the top of Anthony's list. We expended a lot of effort on them. The the other features that people often mention include the tool ring, the radial menus, and the clean user interface with nothing but the page and the drawing tools.

Perhaps Bring to Front and Send to Back are trivial additions, but I find them indispensible when I use InkSeine to sketch out designs, draw mock-ups of user interfaces, or create presentations. In those situations I'm typically marking up a lot of screen clippings. It's essential to have some control over the layering. Other presentation / image manipulation features that I'd love to add to the program include non-rectangular clippings, cropping, translucent bitmaps, and possibly brightness/contrast controls. Rotation is coming in our next release.

By the way, in the screen capture above, you can also see an example of the high-fidelity page thumbnails that will be coming in our next release. Our current thumbnails don't look that great.

Page 3: Room for Improvement

InkSeine is a work in progress and we're always looking for ways to improve it as much as possible. It's really helpful when people let us know about areas where it doesn't meet their expectations.

1. The hover menus do occasionally fail to appear when expected, particularly for icons embedded in the note page. There is probably a bug around this. Also, menus won't pop up if you hold your pen perfectly still; this is an artifact of some special handling that we do for UMPC devices with passive touchscreens, so that menus or other hover information won't activate if the cursor gets left over an icon. We'll have to investigate this further.
2. A few people have asked for Sections, Tabs, and Folders. We're investigating a bookmark feature where you could create tabs to mark pages within a note. However, full hierarchical organization has a lot of attendant technical complexity so it will be a long while before we could take a crack at that. OneNote handles this kind of organization really well.
3. I'd dearly love to have custom page backgrounds. It is possible to create custom page backgrounds in InkSeine (samples available to try out).  Note that Anthony requests a new background for each page, rather than just having a single custom page that is used for every page of a note. This was my experience too - for example, my OQO sketchbook has a cover page, an interior page style, and a back cover. One custom page template for all pages does not cut it.
4. The InkSeine installer has a bug which causes the .iks file association for InkSeine files to fail. This will be fixed in our forthcoming release.

Page 4: Ideas for Future Versions

I always love to see people's ideas for future extensions. Even if they're things we've thought of, it helps us to prioritize which things are most interesting. The way that people talk about using new features also suggests how the resulting user interface should be presented.

Hyperlinks within a note and embedding HTML code (for videos and such) both make a lot of sense. I also like how Anthony draws the embedded video with an ink-stroke frame. That would be a nice touch to make it feel like a sketchbook, rather than a blah web browser.

Page 5: Ideas for Future Versions, Continued...

Anthony suggests the tool ring should scoot away if you're writing with the pen and you get too close to it. That's a neat idea, and in fact, that was the very first thing we tried. But it was very annoying to have it keep moving around. Several people have asked for an auto-hide option, where it would shrink down to an icon after a period of disuse, or if you tapped on a little arrow to shrink it. I think that would work.

Anthony also mentions publishing InkSeine pages on a blog. Several people have asked for the ability to export InkSeine pages as HTML image maps. There's a number of interesting ways that could be used, including posting the resulting image maps to create an ink blog entry. So that's a feature I would love to get in there as soon as possible.

Page 6: Ideas for Future Versions, Part 3.

On point (6), to have running section heads, InkSeine would have to know that you were inking an outline to do this. It would be pretty tough to make that happen. The InkSeine user interface avoids handwriting recognition and parsing as much as possible.

For (7) and (8) a system tray icon for InkSeine and/or the tool ring definitely would be handy. You can add the tool ring to your quick-launch area.

Page 7: About

Thanks, Anthony, for all your great comments and I'd be pleased to receive any more thoughts that you, or the other merry inkers out there in the Tabletscape, would care to send my way.

If you've read this far, I've also got one little nugget of info to reward Ye, O Faithful Reader. We are planning to release the InkSeine fixes and enhancements mentioned here, along with a few other things, in an update on Monday!  If all goes well I'll put up a post over the weekend confirming this, with a list of the exact features that make the cut. But think of this as a maintenance update - it' won't be a major new release.

Keep on inking and thanks for trying out InkSeine.