The AlpineInker

Rough Winter

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:35:00 GMT

I spent the weekend at Snoqualmie pass. Winter has certainly not yet relinquished its grip on the Cascade Crest. Here's some of the sights done AlpineInker style.

Here's a car that someone left parked for the winter. That probably wasn't a good idea. It's been crushed like an empty can of cheap beer. When this much snow piles up, it pancakes down - hard as concrete and twice as heavy.

Despite what these pictures suggest, quite a bit of the snow has melted. I could not see any daylight at all out my shattered kitchen window the last time I was there. The bottom of that window is about 15 feet above grade level. We lost a window on the north side of the house too. First time that ever happened...

It's been a rough winter in the Alpental valley.

Winter 2007-2008
Date of First Measurable snowfall 10/19/07
October snowfall           2
November snowfall      24
December snowfall    180
January snowfall        149
February snowfall        90
March snowfall          101
April snowfall              61
May snowfall               1
              Total         608

That's 50 FEET of snow kiddos!

Even the highway web-cams have suffered! "I fought an avalanche and the avalanche won. This camera was so badly damaged we can't repair it until this summer."

Mother's day was no exception. More snow.

Here's my wife taking the twins for a walk. Today they learned a new word: Snow!

Rule #1: No parking. Rule #2: NO PARKING!

This is, or rather was, my kitchen window...

...But there's no place I'd rather be.

Some Thoughts on Automatic Screen Rotation

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:41:00 GMT

Automatic screen rotation has been popularized by the iPhone but is also available on the OQO Model 02 thanks to Kenrick's Automatic Screen Rotator Utility (executable download). Just hold the device the way you want to use it. The screen flips to the correct portrait or landscape orientation in one second. You don't even have to think about it. What could be simpler? Kudos to Kenrick for putting this great utility together and making it available for free!

This is a program near and dear to my heart. I cobbled together custom sensor hardware, including an accelerometer to support automatic screen rotation, for my old Cassiopeia E105 Pocket PC back in the late 1990's:

Here's our video of the Sensing Pocket PC, with screen rotation and other fun stuff too.

Video: Sensing Techniques for Mobile Interaction

Later, I built sensors for the original slate Tablet PC prototypes that were floating around Microsoft. Many devices now include accelerometers for drop detection, but I'm pretty sure my prototype was the world's first Tablet PC with an accelerometer. It came with an extensive user manual: TILT ME.

That wad of electronics on the top is my sensor module. Here, I'm using the Tilt-a-Sketch application. You could draw on the tablet like an Etch-a-sketch by tilting it back and forth. Yes, it was really hard to sign your name this way, and yes, if you flipped it upside down and shook it, it erased the screen. Accelerometers can be a lot of fun.

But what was the most useful? Like Kenrick's utility, it supported automatic portrait/landscape switching depending on how you held the device. After all that hard work I had to put into building my own sensors, firmware, and software, it's mind-blowing to see this available in a free utility that I can download from the 'net for an off-the-shelf device!

My demo had a few tweaks, some never published before, that might be useful future embellishments to Kenrick's Automatic Screen Rotation utility. In essence these tweaks reduce accidental changes to the display orientation when you're working with your device. They also help to avoid rotation of the screen when you go to set your device down on your desk. Plus there's one bonus idea I tinkered with, described at the end - let me know if you like it or not.

Dead Bands for Increased Stability

Dead bands between the screen orientations made the device tend to stick to the current display orientation. This helped to avoid accidental changes to orientation.

Plot of tilt angles versus inferred instantaneous screen orientation.

To change display orientation, the tilt angles had to pass all the way through the gray ±5° dead bands, and stay within the same display region for 0.5 seconds. No screen rotation occured in the central "Flat" area.

Rotation Preview

Feedback for impending display rotations makes automatic changes to the display orientation more predictable and controllable. My Tablet PC demo displayed a "THIS SIDE UP" arrow at the center of the screen as soon as the tablet was tilted in a different direction. The change to the display format occurred one second after the arrow appeared, but only if the device was still tilted towards the new display orientation. This allowed the user to stop tilting the device to prevent an inadvertent switch.

To foreshadow a change to the display orientation, an arrow appeared immediately when the user rotated the tablet.

Of course, the arrow should not be there all the time. The arrow vanished when:

The screen changed orientation. The arrow remained visible for a couple of seconds after the switch to provide continuing feedback.
The instantaneous screen orientation returned to the current display orientation for a couple of seconds. This case occured if a user acted on the feedback to avoid an accidental change.
The user set the Tablet down flat without changing screen orientation.

I used black color-key transparency (in a layered window) for the actual bitmap used in the code.

Motion Detection

Movement of the device serves as a secondary indicator of when to switch the display format. To avoid accidental changes to the screen orientation, my Tablet PC implementation waited for motion to stop before rotating the screen. For example, this made the device less likely to change screen orientations as you set it flat on a desk.

The OQO Model 02 supports only about a 4 Hz sampling frequency on the accelerometer, so it might not be feasible to implement good motion detection at present. Nonetheless it seems worthwhile to mention it, in the hope that an increased sampling rate becomes possible in the future.

One hack to detect motion is to calculate how much the tilt values are changing, as follows:

Δx = tiltX - prevTiltX

Δy = tiltY - prevTiltY

sampleEnergy = √(Δx² + Δy²)

signalEnergy = signalEnergy*(1-α) + sampleEnergy

In the final equation, α is a decay rate. I used 0.25, with the tilt values in degrees, and signalEnergy initialized to 1.0. Motion "begins" when the signal energy rises above an onset threshold for a few samples and "stops" when the signal energy drops below a termination threshold.

Movement helped to control switching of the display format as follows:

When movement stopped, if the physical screen orientation did not match the inferred instantaneous screen orientation, a 1 second time-out began, after which the software switched the physical display orientation.
If movement began again during this time-out, the time-out for the physical display switch was cancelled.
If the instantaneous screen orientation changed again during this time-out, the time-out was restarted at its full one-second duration.

Orientation-specific Tasks

Here's one other nutty idea I experiemented with. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not.

I assigned specific applications to specific orientations of the screen. For example, here's a screen shot where I set up Excel to appear in the landscape format, and Windows Journal in the portrait format. Flipping my Tablet PC between the two would switch between the applications, rather than just rotating the screen.

Switching orienations can switch between sets of applications as well...

This offered a simple way to partition applications into task-specific sets for each screen orientation. Unfortunately my prototype of this feature never really worked all that well. You could check off windows as belonging to each screen orientation. The prototype would hide and show the windows as you rotated your tablet. But it had some bugs. Sometimes it would hide the windows permanently, never to be seen again. That's not terribly useful. So I never did usability testing on it, but I found something about it intuitively appealing. What do you think? Would you want this feature on your tablet or mobile devices?

Summary

My experience is that the devil is in the details with sensing techniques. Small touches here and there go a long way to keep the interaction invisible in the background, rather than becoming a focus of attention when things happen that the user didn't intend. Ultimately, the goal should be to create the best possible user interface. What is the best possible interface, you might ask?

The best possible user interface is the one that you don't even notice is there at all.

Resources:

Kenrick's blog: Teaching, Technology, and Learning
Kenricks' Automatic Screen Rotator Utility, download for the OQO Model 02
Ken Hinckley's UIST 2000 conference paper and follow-up journal article on sensing techniques.
Video of the Sensing Pocket PC

My New Favorite Flick Pad

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

I just received an OQO-style moleskine in the mail!

When I opened it up, it was full of arcane tricks for using InkSeine's Tool Ring as a flick pad. This topic has come up before but now it seems that perfect combination of custom flicks has been discovered.

This is the new set of Flick gestures that I've adopted for the OQO. Show Desktop is especially handy!

Right flick mapped to Alt-Tab - great for flipping between two windows. This one you need to manually configure by choosing the (add) option from the drop down.
Down flick mapped to "Toggle Ctrl" which is one of the standard choices in the drop-down. I use Ctrl with the ToolRing's scroller to zoom.
Diagonal-upper-left flick mapped to Right Click. Also a custom combo, just hit the right-click soft key on your TIP to add this one. (It shows up as "Application" when you press it).
Up flick mapped to Show Desktop - my absolute favorite! A quick flick up on the Tool Ring always gets me to my desktop, which is a handy place to stash all your shortcuts on a tablet. This is also a custom combo consisting of "Windows + D", where Windows is the Windows logo key.

Here are my notes... flick up to Show Desktop:

Voila! There it is! But even better... doing Show Desktop again... puts me right back where I was!

I'm also debating whether I want to replace Undo with Enter instead. It's handy for opening selected files without double-tapping. I guess I'll have to see. But I'm keeping Copy, Paste, and Back for sure - unless I find something better the next time I flip back to this idea!

Here's the return address label on the back cover. I have no idea who this is. And it's been a long time since two cents cut it for postage. It's all a bit mysterious. But whoever you are, keep the tips coming!

Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:

InkSeine Update, InkSeine Featured on OfficeLabs.com!

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:05:00 GMT

InkSeine is one of the projects featured on the new Microsoft Office Labs web site. There are some cool prototypes available there, so I recommend you swing by to check them out, and to learn more about Office Labs. We're honored that Office Labs invited the InkSeine Team to participate in this launch.

If you are new to InkSeine, welcome to the fold! Check out the Twelve Days of InkSeine to see some of the ways that you can use InkSeine to take notes, illustrate ideas, and gather information on your tablet.

This InkSeine update (version 1.1.425.0) is primarily a maintenance release to address a few easy-to-fix bugs. However, we also have our new rotation feature working, so we decided to include that as well. We'll look to tackle many more of the requests and ideas that we've received in future releases.

Our AutoUpdate feature (thanks to Office Labs!) is also now ready to go. If you run InkSeine on your Tablet PC while connected to the internet, you won't even have to grab the download for this update. You'll see an invitation to upgrade to the new version the next time you exit InkSeine (see details below). UPDATE: I may have spoken too soon; it seems that our AutoUpdate will only get applied to subsequent releases, after this one. If you don't see the AutoUpdate invitation, just uninstall InkSeine, head over to the InkSeine download link, and install it the old-fashioned way. We'll try some more stuff tomorrow to see if maybe we can get AutoUpdate working.

InkSeine Version 1.1.425.0 Release Notes

Rotation and Reflection: InkSeine now supports rotation of any lasso selection. Just grab the little green rotation handle and spin away. You can also reflect the selection in any direction by grabbing a resize handle and dragging it through the opposite side of the selection.

Antialiased Page Thumbnails: It's now much easier to recognize pages from their thumbnails. Note: If you load an InkSeine note from a previous version, the page thumbnails only update when you make a change to a page. For example, draw an ink stroke and then erase it to force the page thumbnail to refresh, and you will see the improved version. Here's a comparison showing the improvement, with the old version on the left and the new version on the right:
Search for & Open OneNote sections. Previous builds of InkSeine only handled OneNote pages that were saved into individual .one files. InkSeine now returns OneNote sections with its search results, and you can open them and insert hyperlinks to them in your InkSeine notes.
File association fixed: The association for InkSeine files (.iks extension) now installs correctly. InkSeine files have a little notebook icon, and when you Open them from file folders or shortcuts on your desktop, they now will launch InkSeine.
Saves the last Pen and Highlighter: InkSeine remembers which pen and highlighter you were using so they are ready to go when you next launch InkSeine, or open another note.
Performance improvements, particularly while dragging selections.
Improved Stroke Eraser: It no longer leaves "debris" on the screen on occasion.
Tool Ring bug fix: The Tool Ring will no longer activate the camera or the close icon if you happen to end your pen stroke over them while circling-to-scroll or while using the tool ring as a flickpad on Vista.
AutoUpdate server is online! With the launch of the Microsoft Office Labs site, the Office Labs AutoUpdate server is also now online. We're very grateful to Office Labs for helping us to offer this service for InkSeine.

To get updates, your computer must be on the internet. Start InkSeine and make sure that it has been running for a few minutes. When you exit, you will be prompted to install the update (build 1.1.425.0). ~~Note: Make sure that "Automatically check for updates" is checked in the upper-right corner of the InkSeine options dialog. You can~~ ~~open the options from the check-mark menu. You may disable checks for automatic updates by unchecking this option, or by opting out during your initial installation of InkSeine.~~
~~Alternatively, you may install the new release of InkSeine manually. Uninstall InkSeine, and then~~ ~~download and install the new build~~.
UPDATE: Raman says that AutoUpdate may not yet fire for this release because of the way our installer was configured on our last external release. But it should allow us to auto-deploy subsequent releases. If you don't see the invitation to upgrade, uninstall InkSeine, grab the InkSeine download, and install it the old-fashioned way.

Thanks and be sure to let us know if you find any bugs, or if you have any ideas for improvements and new features. You can also discuss InkSeine and ask questions in the GottaBeMobile forum for InkSeine, or visit their general forums if you have questions about Tablet PC hardware, software, or just want to see some great tips about using your Tablet PC.

-- The InkSeine Team

A Review done InkSeine-style

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:01:00 GMT

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

Photographic Interlude #1

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:23:00 GMT

I snapped this photo years ago near Shaefer Lake in the glorious Cascade Range.

The needles of the larch incandesce with the sunlight of an entire alpine summer in the days before they must fall dead to the ground.

Portrait Inking on the OQO Model 02

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:19:00 GMT

The OQO Model 02 is almost the same size as my Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook. I suspect this is no accident. To illustrate the point, I scanned them side-by-side. The OQO is slightly narrower, which is necessary to make it fit in my shirt pocket given its 1" girth. By the way, don't let this scan fool you - the screen on the OQO is gorgeous. It's just really hard to scan properly. The other photos below give a better sense of what the screen really looks like.

I set up a custom cover page for my OQO in InkSeine to make it feel just like a new moley fresh out of the shrink wrap. Now I feel like writing important stuff in here.

I also scanned my pocket Moleskine to use for the inside pages. I love having this page style on the OQO - it just seems right.

I prefer inking on the OQO Model 02 in the portrait orientation. I can grip the device more comfortably in this orientation, and there is more room to plant my hand on the screen. This also keeps the touch-scrollers out from underneath my hand. I've experimented some with using the "secondary portrait" orientation, to flip those touch scrollers over to my left hand. That feels great, but since the keyboard rotate function only flips between the primary landscape and primary portrait orientations, it's inconvenient to go to the options panel and hunt for the command to flip to the secondary portrait orientation.

There's one other tip I have for working in the portrait orientation on the OQO's small screen. I was thinking about why it seemed easier to draw in my pocket Moleskine, even though it has nearly identical dimensions as the OQO. It's not so much the small screen size of the OQO, as it is the thickness.

So I slide out the keyboard, and I rest the meat of my palm on that. This feels more like resting my hand on the desk while I draw in my (thinner) pocket Moleskine. The OQO keyboard keys are fairly stiff so I never trigger them by accident while I'm doing this. Typically I do this while holding the OQO in my left hand; the photo below shows me doing this on the desk because I was out of hands to hold the camera, and no tripod was handy :-)

The keyboard is also convenient for hitting the Enter key, modifier keys, or the special OQO hardware hotkeys (such as the screen rotation, brighteness, and keyboard backlight) when the occasion demands.

That closes the book on this post. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts and ideas about using the OQO as I continue to work with it.

Related Posts:

My very first impression of the OQO Model 02

Make a faux-OQO to see if the size is right for you

Dig for Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity with the INTELLIMOLE

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:38:00 GMT

A conversation with the Tablet PC MVP's this week reminded me of a productivity hack I constructed for my tablet a while back. I guarantee that you will either absolutely love this hack, or think it is the stupidest thing you've ever heard. In my experience, there is little gray area when I mention this idea to people.

It's no secret that buttons are in short supply when you're working with a tablet PC, particularly in the slate mode. Most tablets offer a paucity of buttons along the bezel. But even tablets that do have decent bezel buttons infuriate me because nearly all tablets place them on the right side of the screen - the same side where some 75% of users are holding the pen. So I have to fumble with the pen to use the buttons. Why they are not on the left by default is beyond my ken.

I do use the barrel button on my pen, but only begrudgingly so. It's a bit awkward, I hit it by accident, and it often messes up my pen strokes even when I do intend to hit it.

I was digging around for alternate solutions to this dilemma. I realized that I had to get everything off of the pen and tablet.

My solution? Kick that tablet into high gear with the INTELLIMOLE.

The INTELLIMOLE peeks out Tablet PC productivity running out of gas? Then step on it!

Here's what you'll need:

A wireless mouse, and a willingness to commit bodily harm to it.
A foot switch.
A soldering iron.
Black electrical tape.

Rip open your mouse (unscrew it if you are feeling humane) and just wire up the foot switch to the contacts for the wireless mouse's right-click button. Use the black electrical tape to cover up the optical mouse eye so it won't disturb the pen's cursor position. Throw the footpedal under the desk, and just make sure that the wireless mouse and the receiver are within range of one another. This is what my completed INTELLIMOLE kit looks like:

Now you can stomp your foot to right click whenever you like, without interfering with your pen or tablet. Use the Control Panel settings for the mouse to reprogram the right-button click to some other function if you like.

The downside is that you do have to plug the wireless mouse receiver into your tablet's USB port, so it's really only useful while you're using your tablet on a desk.

For that foot switch, if you want the best experience, I strongly recommend purchasing a round one. That way it doesn't matter which way it is oriented when you go to step on it. The Linemaster GEM V3 switch is a good choice, albeit a bit pricey at $50 from Allied Electronics. They do also have an assortment of cheaper ones (that aren't round).

Perhaps Tablet PC designers will finally take pity on us one day and sprinkle a button or two along the left edge of that tablet bezel as well. I'd dearly love to have a programmable "magic wand" button there that would be available for tablet PC applications to use as they saw fit.

Until then, I'll continue to tunnel through the netherworlds of Tablet PC productivity with the INTELLIMOLE.

Other Posts in the AlpineInker's Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity Series:

The OQO Model 02 Has Arrived

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:49:00 GMT

The cat dragged in an exciting new gadget today. Of course, my shiny new OQO Model 02 showed up on a day where I was pretty much booked solid with meetings, so I was able to do little more than turn the thing on. But I did take a moment to snap a couple of pictures.

I brought it to our group meeting to show it to Raman, and then the person next to him wanted to see it, and then the person next to him… it was a fretful round of musical chairs for my OQO before I had it safely back in my hands.

The early impression: The OQO Model 02 is the neutron star of computing. Jet black, dense, and it sucks in the attention of all who wander too close to it.

I’m looking forward to setting it up with all my stuff and tooling around on it with InkSeine.

Great Visit with Tablet PC MVP's

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:28:00 GMT

Sometimes great connections and friendships are forged over the internet without ever getting a chance to meet that person behind the keyboard. Well, I had great fun this week getting to meet Rob Bushway and Warner Crocker from the GottaBeMobile.com site, as well as MVP's Craig Pringle and WNewquay. Rob and Warner are every bit as friendly and personable as I imagined from our previous correspondences, and Craig and WNewquay are really great guys too. Really sharp insights, questions, comments, and most of all enthusiasm for all things tablet, touch, and pen were always in plentiful supply.

I also had an opportunity to meet many of the other Tablet PC MVP's and discuss InkSeine with them. What a wonderful opportunity for someone like myself who focuses a lot of my energy in the tablet PC space. I think we all could have easily talked for hours - but many topics will have to be left for another time.

The GottaBeMobile folks hosted a round-table discussion with myself, InkSeine ace developer Raman Sarin, and Craig Pringle. I only wish we could have recorded the whole day.

A Reminiscence of Randy - Eating Like Kings

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:12:00 GMT

My PhD advisor Randy Pausch continues to be on my mind a lot this week. His book "The Last Lecture" came out last Tuesday. It's already the #1 bestseller on Amazon. I was a bit tardy ordering my copy, but it's supposed to arrive on Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

In the meantime some fond memories of the time I spent working with Randy keep cropping up.

An exciting time I remember is when Randy's original research group at the University of Virginia was right on the cusp of getting big time funding. For a long time we had been operating in what Randy always called the "eat what you kill" model of research funding, where we had to be content with devouring the various small fry we could catch when it came to dollars to fund our research.

But Randy had made some connections with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and from DARPA the real dollars flowed to support big, ambitious research efforts. Just the right Call for Proposals was out. Randy had schmoozed the principal decision maker and convinced him that he had the killer research project that would light the world on fire.

This project ultimately became Alice. I remember some students expressing concern that having funding from the Defense Department might torque the direction of the research in an undesirable way. Just to make the point, I remember Randy had one of the students design up a pink tank that shot out bunnies, or something cute like that. Alice was going to stay fun and playful.

But the big problem remained. The proposal was due the next day. It was subject to peer review so something just thrown together was not going to get the good reviews necessary for DARPA to fund it.

This proposal was about the big bucks. One of the students calculated that we could use the money to buy a fresh pizza once every five minutes for years on end. Randy took note of this and zipped a quick email to the entire research group to get everyone excited about working on the proposal: IF WE PULL THIS OFF, WE'LL EAT LIKE KINGS!

Somehow I had become known as "the writing machine" -- the best writer in Randy's research group. So Randy and I spent a long night where Randy emailed me a steady stream of points to raise in each paragraph. My job was to "turn them into real text" as fast as I could. Some of the other senior students were there as well, helping Randy to strategize the points while I pounded away to produce "the real text."

But we still had a big problem. We needed to deliver a paper copy of the proposal to the office in Washington, D.C. We were way past the FedEx deadline of 4pm, and indeed wrapping up the proposal went well into the early afternoon of the deadline day. But Randy had a solution for this as well. One of his students rode a motorcycle, and off he raced to DC with the proposal in hand. He burst into the DARPA office less than 5 minutes before the deadline and slapped it on the desk.

We had pulled it off. The proposal was accepted. We got the funding. Randy's research group had officially hit the big time. We ate like kings.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:14:00 GMT

I mostly write this blog for fun, but today I have something important to share.

To the extent that I am a good researcher, I owe a tremendous debt to Randy Pausch. Randy advised my PhD studies at the University of Virginia. Randy is a great guy, always brimming with humor and enthusiasm. Randy is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is 47 years old, has a beautiful wife, and they have three children ranging from 2 to 6 years old.

Randy will die soon.

Randy has pancreatic cancer. Randy is doing everything possible to raise awareness while he still can. Time is short. As Randy says, "We don't have a Michael J. Foxx because people die too fast." Randy recently gave absolutely riveting testimony before Congress (YouTube video) to help raise research funding for pancreatic cancer. Join in and help us fight the good fight by donating to the Lustgarten foundation, and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).

As Randy summarized his situation in the video, "I've metastasized to my liver and spleen, which means there's a 100% chance that I will be dying."

Randy tells it like it is. He has always been known for this. I've heard people say that he has no tact. But typically this was said by people who didn't like being told how it is. It's a pity because the only way to better yourself is to listen to constructive criticism from smart people around you. And the most constructive criticism is that which is brutally honest.

Pancreatic cancer is absolutely lethal. A friend of my family saw his father diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; the man was dead six weeks later. Median survival from diagnosis is 3 to 6 months. Seventy-five percent of patients are dead by one year. 5-year survival is 4%.

And, as Randy noted in his testimony to Congress "It is one of the only cancers you can point to and say, in the last 30 years, we've made no progress." That is shameful.

It's been given up as too hard. But Randy has an answer to that too.

"I don't believe in too hard."

Back in my graduate days of working with Randy, whenever someone was stuck and said they couldn't figure out a problem, or that they didn't think something would work, Randy would never accept that kind of answer. "That's proof by I'm not smart enough," he would say. Randy was serving notice: that was not going to cut it in these parts.

This gets to gist of why pancreatic cancer research needs serious governmental support. And it needs your help too.

In the research game, you learn the most by going after the hardest problems. That's where the big breakthroughs that have ripple effects throughout an entire discipline happen. You solve the hardest part first because that gives the most fundamental insights.

Let's not let pancreatic cancer fall on the floor by way of "We're not smart enough."

In his congressional testimony, Randy further laid out the case:

By funding pancreatic cancer research, we will be going after the hardest problem. If you go after the hardest problem, you can't go for the halfway solutions.

The trick is to seed the junior hotshots... this is going to be cracked by somebody younger... it's gonna have to be a breakthrough. They [the hotshot young researchers] need the strong sense that the funding is there. The smart people work on what there's money to work on.

Let's empower the best and brightest in the research community to set their teeth into this problem. But they need the dollars to make it happen. It won't come in time to help Randy, but it might come in time to help his children: research shows there's a genetic link to pancreatic cancer. Let your lawmakers know this is important. Donate to the Lustgarten foundation and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). I'll be donating a dollar for every InkSeine download this year, up to the maximum Microsoft matching contribution - so that will double the dollars.

The Last Lecture: How did Randy come to be delivering testimony to Congress?

Well, in the last six months Randy has become an "accidental celebrity." There's a tradition in academia of giving a "Last Lecture." Hypothetically, if you were going to die, what would you tell your students?

Randy got to do it for real. He has a reputation for being a great speaker, and he didn't disappoint.

Randy's last lecture was entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." Although hundreds of people attended, this is really a lecture that was delivered for three persons; Randy says "I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on a beach for my children." But six million people ended up watching the last lecture online. He's given a condensed version of it on Oprah. His story will be featured in a one-hour interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC this week ("the last lecture, a love story for your life," Wednesday April 9^th, 10 pm / 9 central).

But what I'm most eagerly awaiting is the publication of his book "The Last Lecture," which will be published on Tuesday, April 8.

Of course, Randy's main motivation for writing this book is again for his children. All he cares about are the first three copies. But Randy shared so many nuggets of wisdom with me over the years that I really look forward to savoring his gift of a few more. I remember Randy saying once in his early bachelor days that "I don't plan to have kids, but my students are my children..." and I think that is perhaps more true than he ever realized.

Resources:

Randy Pausch's page with his videos and information about pancreatic cancer
Web site for Randy's book, The Last Lecture (you can order it on Amazon)
Watch the interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC this week ("the last lecture, a love story for your life," Wednesday April 9^th, 10 pm / 9 central)
The last lecture on YouTube
Randy's day-to-day update blog

Zoom that Tool Ring!

Ken Hinckley — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:39:00 GMT

I received another cool email about InkSeine's Tool Ring this week. This user not only had one of his precious tablet hardware buttons programmed to open the Tool Ring, but he also sketched up a neat idea for a new feature:

_____________________________________________________________________
RE: inkseine is good

Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 12:34 PM

To: Ken Hinckley

_____________________________________________________________________

Ken,

I use Inkseine's crazy arrow for scrolling in many applications. I have one of the hardware buttons on my tablet programmed to open it. I really like the screen shot use of it too.

The only improvement I would like to see is a zoom in - zoom out feature too. When I'm on a desktop, I use ctrl + mouse scroll wheel to zoom all the time. I zoom on my tablet by using the zoom value drop down box in many apps.

If that is possible, and if there is a spare moment to build it, I would definitely use it!

Maybe something like this:

Hmmm, very interesting! The second I read this email, I realized I could zoom using the custom flicks that I set up on my Vista tablet the other day. I programmed one of them to be Toggle Ctrl (here's how to do it).

My Tool Ring already had zooming functionality, but I hadn't even realized it.

I just did my Ctrl flick on the Tool Ring:

...and then I circled on the crazy arrow. Zoom zoom zoom!

As far as your tablet is concerned, doing these actions is the same as Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel. The Ctrl mode is only turned on for one stroke of the pen, so as soon as you lift the pen, it's back to its regularly scheduled functions. If you circle again, you'll return to scrolling. For me, this works great since I don't need to zoom that often, but when I do, it's great to have a convenient and habitual place to reach for it.

I find zooming this way to be a lot of fun. Now I can drill down into my tablet screen whenever I need to with just a few turns of the pen. No safety glasses required!

Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:

Kick Start that Tool Ring!

Flick that Tool Ring!

Zoom that Tool Ring!

InkSeine doesn't work with the Windows Search 4.0 Preview... via the Best Bug Report Ever!

Ken Hinckley — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:35:00 GMT

One way to think of InkSeine is that it is nothing but a glorified pen-computing-on-steroids interface to Windows Desktop Search. We rely on Windows Search to deliver some of the most innovative and useful functionality that we have to offer in InkSeine. The Windows Search tream has been hard at work on the next version of desktop search for some time now. It has many improvements and offers significant performance upgrades.

I have two bits of news, both important to all you InkSeiners out there:

The Windows Search 4.0 Preview is out.
InkSeine doesn't work with it. But there is a very simple workaround: don't install the preview if you want to keep using InkSeine.

A report of this problem came across my inbox this week, in my favorite InkSeine bug report ever:

That obtuse Error in Query Engine message will appear whenever you do a Personal Search if you've installed the Windows Search 4.0 Preview.

And yes, I can confirm that this user was indeed insane to try a search on "duct tape." But there is little the InkSeine team can do about that problem.

There is also little we can do about the Windows Search 4.0 Preview problem. The way InkSeine retrieves results triggers a bug in the preview. The Windows Search team is aware of this bug, and plan to have it squashed when they release the product.

So, if you want to keep the inky goodness rolling, you'll need to uninstall the Windows Search 4.0 Preview. If you're on XP, reinstall Windows Desktop Search 3.01 to get back on your feet. I don't believe you have to reinstall anything on Vista, but I haven't been able to test that myself.

Finally, a big thanks to everyone who reported this problem and worked with us to help isolate the issue. We appreciate your contributions to the project.

Faux-OQO with origami

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:17:00 GMT

It's been a very busy couple of weeks for me, so I haven't had time to attend to the blog, or much of anything else for that matter.

But one thing that has been on my mind from time to time is the OQO Model 02 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). It's an intriguing device but I have wavered for some time now on whether or not it is the right device for me, and whether it will offer the right fit for the projects I have in mind for it. I don't know anyone who owns one, so taking one for a test drive has not been an option.

The active digitizer on the device is extremely appealing to me. Obviously, I want to use InkSeine on it. The passive touchscreens that I've tried on other devices are rather unsatisfactory for inking.

But yeah, I keep hearing the screen is small on the OQO. But how small is it? The entire device measures 5.6" by 3.3" and is 1" thick. It weighs just one pound. Some people like the OQO's diminutive stature because they can slip it in their pocket. Others don't much care for it, because their big meaty hands just cannot write on such a small screen.

Got it. But how big is that really? How would that feel to me? Would it be useful in my nutty research project ideas? I just can't decide!

What to do, what to do?!?

Finally I could stand the waffling no more. I had a bit of time today, so I made a scale model "OQO origami" by using InkSeine and PowerPoint together. Then I printed the origami, cut it out, and folded it up into my own little "Faux OQO" device. I taped it to some cardboard to make it a little more rugged, and I carried it around with me during the day. It looks surprisingly realistic. Maybe, just for kicks, I should try to fool my co-workers with it. Tomorrow I'll have to pretend to drop it down the stairs, or fumble it off the railing of the four-story atrium that we have here in the new Microsoft Research building.

This bitmap probably won't print out to scale, but my OQO origami PowerPoint will. I've attached the file to this post so you can join in the fun. It's attached as a .zip file because I can't directly post .ppt files on this blog. Just open up the zip and you'll see the ppt file in there. The attachment also appears as a link at the very end of this post.

Now you can make your own Faux OQO and truck it with you in your travels. See if it stirs your gadget lust as well. Better yet, have some fun and pretend you are using it in meetings, on the bus, or on the subway. Fake out some gullible rubes. Go ahead.

If they get mad when they discover your ruse, just tell ‘em the AlpineInker made you do it.