The Inaugural AlpineInker Post

Ken Hinckley — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 10:20:00 GMT

I’m Ken Hinckley, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where I conduct research on new techniques and approaches to human-computer interaction. This is a longwinded way to say that I try out cool new stuff, throw it at the wall, and see if it sticks. Usually it doesn’t, but that is what makes my job fresh and fun every day.

The AlpineInker is a new forum where I will discuss developments in pen, touch, mobile devices, and anything else in my field that strikes my fancy. I’m blessed? jaded? by a researcher’s perspective, so anything I say here is personal opinion and does not represent the Microsoft corporate perspective. My thoughts and ideas should be taken with a big grain of salt, particularly if you work in a cubicle, and buy, sell, manage, or process anything as part of your daily work. But if you want to see fun stuff, are open to new ideas, and want to see some of the thinking that goes into the kind of research that I do, then this might be the place for you.

At least to start, I’ll be posting things here somewhere between every so often and when I feel like it, so subscribe to the RSS feed if you don’t want to miss anything. But when I do get around to it I plan to make substantive posts with something worth reading, rather than reporting the banal trifles of my daily life. But be forewarned, it’s likely that I won’t be able to resist occasionally posting photos of my irresistibility cute identical twin daughters (currently 11 months old), so I recommend wearing extremely dark cute-polarized sunglasses whenever visiting the site, just to be on the safe side.

My main project right now is a prototype inking application known as InkSeine. It is designed for the Tablet PC and UMPC’s (ultra-mobile PC’s). It is not a Microsoft product. That means we have free reign to try out whacky ideas without being forced into the regression-to-the-mean compromises dictated by mareting, focus groups, and the pragmatic realities of shipping a large commercial product.

The goal of the InkSeine project is to innovate the user experience for pen-operated devices. InkSeine has fantastic search functionality built-in that makes it easy to find information that you need off of your hard drive or by searching the web. This makes it really fun to quickly throw together mixed-media notes with links to files, web pages, documents, and emails, snapshots from stuff you’ve seen, and of course your notes, sketches, and annotations mixed in with all of this. It is kind of the ultimate designer’s notebook on steroids. And it is also the winner of the prestigious Third Annual Life On The Wicked Stage Ink Blot Award for the “Best Tablet PC Software That Microsoft Is Holding Hostage and Needs To Be Released Today!”

To avoid winning this award again in the future, we will be making InkSeine available as a free download from research.microsoft.com in the first quarter of 2008. Stay tuned for news and developments on that front as we make the final push to get it out the door. You’ll hear about it here first.

Got things you want me to discuss? Nifty projects I should comment on? Ideas for the coolest new things you'd like to see in future user interfaces? Well post a comment or zip me an email and I'll take a look at it.

The AlpineInker : Hardware, Software

The Inaugural AlpineInker Post