The AlpineInker : InkSeine, Design

JasonJ's InkSanitorium

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:07:00 GMT

GottaBeMobile.com forum member JasonJ is a prolific inker. He’s been at the avant-garde of InkSeine for some time now. He’s offered us lots of great feedback and has a flair for illustrating his points. For example, he’d like us to add a sizing tab to make it easier to resize the InkSeine application window. He often uses it like this to make it easier to drag files and links into his notes:

Well, you just can’t make the point any better than this. After seeing a posting like that, how could we not do it? We’ll have to change some things to get this to work, but this kind of feedback gets the feature on the task queue for sure J

He’s also argued against using pressure or additional tablet buttons for pen functionality. As researchers, those are the kinds of additional input channels that we sometimes ponder as routes for tablet innovations, but as JasonJ argues so well, a general tablet and stylus interface can’t require those as building blocks:

I still think zany ideas in this vein are worth exploring as options or alternatives. They can make for good research papers, even if they are not suitable for deployment in InkSeine. I also agree with JasonJ that they need to be approached with caution as they can potentially detract from the pure pen and ink experience.

Another thing JasonJ desperately wants is custom pen and highlighter colors. This is something we’ve been planning to add to InkSeine since well before our initial release, but we haven’t had the opportunity to implement it yet. JasonJ offers another great illustration for how this might work:

This kind of sketch is very interesting for us because it reveals JasonJ’s vocabulary and structure thinking about the task workflow: select the nib type, then select the color. Maybe these could be done as interchangable steps. Even if we don’t follow the exact UI design he’s sketched out, that kind of feedback is really helpful when we are making decisions about how the UI should really work. We do conduct usability tests occasionally to vet our designs and test for problems that we’ve overlooked, but in my experience such tests usually aren’t very helpful to come up with a good design in the first place. But sketches like this from a person who is really using the software to do stuff out there in the really world certainly do!

Jason also has some fun with InkSeine. He experimented with the custom page backgrounds download that we posted. He thought it would be cool to take it one step further and show the pages flipping. Now wouldn’t that be cool?!?

One JasonJ sketch even made the front page of GottaBeMobile. He likes to put hyperlinks to folders and applications in his notebooks so that he can quickly launch them while sketching out his thoughts and taking notes on his ideas. I do this all the time with InkSeine myself – it’s great for things that you use frequently in the context of a project or topic in your notes that you revisit from time to time – but I have to say that JasonJ’s version just looks cooler and more fun than my own versions of these:

Putting them in the canted gold picture frame lends them a wonderful touch of class and personality. It’s certainly more fun to work this way with a tablet than to pull down some soulless drop-down menu with a monotonous list of textual favorites.

JasonJ also kindly sent me a selection of some of the cool note pages that he’s generated in the course of his daily work. This stuff is like solid gold to us – it really shows us what someone is doing with our tool on a daily basis. Even when people write to us that they like InkSeine or that they are using certain features to do fun stuff, we rarely get to see what really happens in those secret journals. This gets us excited all over again about great software for inking on a Tablet PC. It also gets us thinking about more stuff we could do to make this kind of usage more fluid and more expressive by adding new capabilities or by simplifying the program.

JasonJ’s notes are just beautiful and a lot of fun, so I’ll let this selection of pages from the highlights file he sent me speak for themselves:

The final page of this particular notebook is a sketch that JasonJ did that shows how a feature for summing lists of numbers might work in InkSeine. I’m not sure if this is a feature that we will have the cycles to implement, but I love the design he sketches for how it could work. In fact, I often do exactly this sort of ink-plus-screen-capture mashup to sketch out my own ideas for InkSeine (and other projects). It’s a great way to lay it out there and see if the idea really could work, or if it has problems that weren’t obvious at first.

Any way you add it up, JasonJ’s InkSanitorium shows how InkSeine can a fun, productive, and eye-grabbing way to hash out your ideas.

...and on Day #13? I use OneNote!

Ken Hinckley — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:45:00 GMT

It would be criminal of me to do this 12-day series without out also confessing that, like many Tablet PC users out there, I am also a big fan of OneNote. InkSeine is not, and will never be, a replacement for it.

I still remember a meeting a few years ago where my manager invited Chris Pratley to talk about this whacky new prototype he was working on called... OneNote! Chris described how they were trying to make this great tool where you could pull all kinds of stuff together, and type up your ideas really quickly without having to worry about formatting and fonts and all that stuff. Just click and start typing anywhere. Outlines, bulleted lists, and numbered lists were handled in a smart way to make them a breeze. I was hooked! I was working on completely different stuff at the time, but Chris' demo and discussion of what they were trying to do really stuck in the back of my brain. In retrospect I wish I'd dropped whatever it was that I was doing at the time and started doing OneNote-related stuff immediately. Oh well.

I didn't like some things in the user interface for the 2003 release of OneNote. In particular, I found the way it handled ink to be clumsy. But I have been very impressed with the 2007 release and find myself using it more and more. So kudos to the OneNote team for doing a great job and putting some amazing functionality in there. For example, I don't scan many documents, but in terms of sheer technological prowess, I am really impressed that they included the ability to automatically extract text from bitmaps for searching, etc. I have also observed that more and more people at Microsoft are using OneNote (mostly with text) to create shared notebooks and communicate status of projects with others.

I also have some colleagues, who shall remain nameless, that I simply cannot guilt into trying InkSeine. Why?

The idea of letting go of OneNote for even one second terrifies them.

I can hardly blame them though. OneNote is a great application. But of course these folks are missing out on some cool stuff in InkSeine too .

Even though I do virtually all of my inking with InkSeine, I do use OneNote to annotate shorter documents and to sign patent forms and stuff like that. The Send to OneNote feature is so handy and works so well for annotating documents that there's little point for InkSeine to even try to better OneNote in that area. As I said back in Day #5, I only use InkSeine to review longer documents where the goal of my reading is to synthesize the document and pull out key ideas, rather than just make minor mark-ups on top of it.

As I've inferred in the course of the "12-day" series, my research pipeline consists of (1) hunting and gathering information, (2) sketching design ideas, (3) tracking my progress, and (4) collaborating with another person, or even (5) making informal presentations, to further hone my ideas. For ideas that survive that gauntlet and seem to be worth pursing further, I reach a point where I'm ready to distill an idea into a more detailed write-up or specification.

This crucial distillation step is where OneNote really shines for me. I've already thought things through in some detail and have extensive notes. But I don't want to hand that messy ream to the developer who works with me and expect him to make sense of it. My notes are full of half-completed ideas. The good stuff is mixed up with not-so-good-stuff and downright bad stuff. I need to distill out all the good stuff.

To distill ideas with OneNote, I type in a detailed textual outline of the idea, how it is to be implemented, the next steps to pursue, and so forth. The way OneNote handles outlines, bullets, and numbering is just wonderful. I only wish Word and Powerpoint did it as well. Since I typically intend my distillations to be shared with others, I need high-bandwidth text entry via my keyboard to give detailed rationale and analysis. I don't want to hand people the cryptic descriptions of things that I've inked in my notes.

But I do intersperse the text outlines I produce with a generous dose of screen clippings from the sketches in my ink notes. Since I'm sitting at a desk and typing for this phase of my work, I'll use the handy Windows-S keystroke to trigger the OneNote screen clipping mode. Then I can sweep out the key image from a design sketch in InkSeine that illustrates exactly what I'm writing about. I paste it in and I'm back to typing my outline in nothing flat.

Here's an example of what a typical OneNote "distillation" entry looks like for me:

This particular snippet discusses a feature that I was kicking around, but doesn't exist in InkSeine at the moment. It was a fun idea that progressed to the point that I did a little write up on it, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be.

As much as I love the OneNote screen clipping facility, there is one thing about the way it works that drives me bonkers. If you invoke it using the Insert Screen Clipping command from the OneNote menus, the capture gets placed at the point in your notes where you are typing. If, instead, you use Windows-S, it launches a new instance of OneNote and just leaves the clipping on a page by itself in your unfiled notes. While I'm pounding out an outline, hitting Windows-S is so quick that I always do that. I then hit Alt-Tab and Paste it at the point in my outline where I've just been typing. Yet because I work this way, when I'm done, I end up with a zillion OneNote windows that I have to close.

Then there's also the matter of all those unfiled screen clippings. Deleting them or collecting them all together on one page in my OneNote tabs takes time and effort, so of course I don't bother and they end up just accumulating there. I end up with hundreds of these things polluting my notebook. And I can't just select them all and blow them away, because there is also stuff in there I want to keep.

Update: sweil in the comments thread below kindly sent me this capture showing how the default behavior of the Windows-S shortcut can be changed to only place the capture on the system clipboard, rather than also launching a new instance and placing it in the unfiled notes section. I still wish there was a way to make it do the exact same thing as Insert Screen Clipping but this is pretty close to what I want. This option, sweil tells me, is ONLY available from the OneNote icon in the system tray:

But in the end, all this screen clipping buisiness is a fairly petty irritation, and OneNote really works quite well for me.

For example, I also use OneNote's tagging features to help me keep track of things that I need to return to and work on more. I love the summary view that it can produce of all the tags in my notes. I wish I had a way to do that in InkSeine to summarize all the searches that I've created. In fact, a number of people who've tried InkSeine have requested exactly this feature. But everything takes time and we haven't gotten to that one yet.

Maybe that will be a great post for "Day #14," if I ever pick up this series again!

I hope you have enjoyed it. This blog will probably be a little quiet for the next couple of weeks because I've exhausted my backlog of completed posts for now, and I have some other pressing concerns that I need to attend to.

There is also the small matter of wrapping up our release so you all can actually try out InkSeine!

Previous Post: Day #12: Tabula Rasa | Return to Day #1: Make a Project Binder

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #6: Hunt and Gather (and Doodle!)

Ken Hinckley — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:35:00 GMT

On page 186 of Bill Buxton's book Sketching User Experiences, he has a great section entitled "On Hunters, Gatherers, and Doodlers." Bill talks about how designers are "doodlers" who produce great volumes of design sketches. He also observes that designers are the modern-day embodiment of hunters and gatherers, because they collect a great deal of reference material to inspire and inform their designs. I've posted elsewhere about how I use InkSeine to meet my needs as an inveterate doodler, as well as to actually sketch designs, but it may be the best tool ever for the hunting and gathering part.

When we deployed InkSeine at Microsoft I received a large number of bug reports, requests for features, ideas, and general comments about the application. When the dust settled a bit, I did some searches to pull those emails out of my inbox, and I took snapshots of individual features or ideas from each and arranged them in my notes. The little round envelope icons in the note shown below are links back to the original email so that I could reference it again later. InkSeine made a great tool to hunt down and gather together all of these gold nuggets contributed by kind folks who sent me detailed feedback.

The sad part is that if you look closely, some very good ideas and improvements that people suggested have not been added to the application yet. We are just a small team, but we keep plugging away at the biggest holes, and InkSeine gets a little better with every release.

But for now I'm back off to the information jungle to hone my skill at hunting, gathering, and doodling!

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Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #4: Track Progress

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:02:00 GMT

I keep a big spreadsheet of things in InkSeine that I'd like to change, fix, or think more about. So when it comes time to work on a design sketch for some feature, I want to see everything on my list about it so I can be sure I haven't forgotten something.

Here I'm using a snapshot from my spreadsheet to keep track of all the things I need to resolve. I highlight the key phrases before I start so I can really zero in my attention on the important points.

I check off things as they're completed. I also add notes about new issues that arise as I'm working. I added most of the comments drawn with the thick red pen at a later time when I was reviewing all my design sketches and trying to distill them into specific things to implement. I use OneNote for that crucial distillation step; I'll write a blog post about how I use OneNote for that some time. (Update: Here is my post about OneNote- Day #13 of the 12 day series, of course).

Now, it would certainly be possible to do all of this by switching back and forth to Excel and typing notes or inserting text comments there. But then that totally pulls me away, as FeralBoy over on the GottaBeMobile forums would put it, from all the "inky goodness" of drawing my design sketches.

And I, for one, try to stay as far away as I can from the black gaping maw of text's "ascii badness" when I'm in the creative flow of sketching out a design.

Previous Post: Day #3: Sketching Designs

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Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #3: Sketching Designs

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:17:00 GMT

I love to use InkSeine on my Tablet PC to quickly sketch up ideas. I usually like to lean over my tablet on a desk for this, but sometimes I keep it on my lap, and I almost always sketch on my tablet in the "portrait" orientation when I'm involved with creative work.

To get started on a design sketch, I collect reference material (images) either as inspiration, or as actual pieces to use in my design sketch. I use InkSeine's floating camera capture feature very heavily to take screen clippings from existing applications, documents, or web pages. I also drag bitmaps from Windows Explorer folders into InkSeine. This imports them directly as images (rather than just creating a link to the file).

Now the fun starts. I throw them together, rearrange them, mark them up, and otherwise use them to explore the terra incognita of my design ideas. I like to sketch out every possible way I can think of to do something. I'll often have several pages of variations on an idea. Through this excercise, I unearth problems that I hadn't initially thought of. New ideas arise from the detritus of failed designs on page after page.

The great thing about this approach is that often the idea for a solution doesn't occur to me until after I have already completed my sketch of it. It sounds a bit like a time traveler's paradox, but for me it really works this way more often than not!

Here's an example where I'm sketching out some ideas that I have been thinking about for updates to the Tool Ring in InkSeine. Of course, many of the design sketches I have for InkSeine are drawn with InkSeine. It's a tool for designing itself. How's that for another mind-bending time traveler's paradox?!?

For my next trick, I think I'll sketch a picture of myself sketching a picture of the next version of InkSeine so that I can get it released quicker. I may just drop John Cramer a line and see how his retrocausal quantum nonlocal communication experiment is going. Receive Email from the Future would sure make a killer feature for Outlook 2010, wouldn't it?

Time travel paradoxes are cool. Sketching up ideas on my Tablet PC with InkSeine just might be cooler. [:-)]

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