The AlpineInker : InkSeine, Fun

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.

Great Visit with Tablet PC MVP's

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:28:00 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.

Jump Start your Creativity with Custom InkSeine Notebooks

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:18:00 GMT

Distressed books from forgotten decades, documents battered by time, and postcards from the distant past hold a deep charm for me. Perhaps it was because my grandfather was an insatiable reader and his shelves were always brimming with volumes dating as far back as the 19^th century. Maybe it was because my great-uncle was an avid stamp collector and gave me heaps of aged stamps and letters when I was a young boy.

Whatever the reason, Wal-Mart can keep their shiny rows of bestsellers. I'll settle into my armchair with a yellowed tome, during the darkest recesses of the night, to read eldritch tales of mystery and imagination.

The same is true, I believe, for writing and sketching. Just look at all the amazing and beautiful personal touches that artists and writers add to their moleskine notebooks.

So I decided to join in the fun with InkSeine on my Tablet PC. I scanned in a few books, papers, and found objects to personalize my inky reflections.

Below are few examples that I came up with. So that you can have fun too, I've made most of these backgrounds available as download of blank example InkSeine notes (ZIP archive, 10MB) from the InkSeine webpage. More details on how to use the samples later in this post.

Inking after Midnight

These custom pages come from a book printed in the 1930's that belonged to my grandfather. This makes the perfect foil for my creativity.

In a dream-vision I transcribe the legendary Codex Inkseinus, a grimoire of arcane and forbidden Tablet PC knowledge, originally penned by the mysterious Mad Inker of Redmond:

Next, I scan in some blank pages. The anachronism of yellowing paper on my venerated NEC VY11F/GL-R slate sets the proper tone:

Of course, I begin my narrative with a distressed "letter" from the unfortunate author to add a ring of authenticity - with due homage to H.P. Lovecraft, who often employed the epistolary literary device with great success.

Want to see the rest of the Codex? Well, I should not to reveal too much of this cryptic treatise at once. You'll just have to keep following this blog. The AlpineInker often gets ideas for posts by paying visits to the sole known surviving copy of the Codex, which resides under lock and key at Miskatonic University.

Inking with a Splash

For my next project I wanted a lighter mood, so I scanned in one of my watercolor boards. I grew up close to the ocean. This backsplash makes we want to pen an epic tale of men and the sea:

Rough Drafts & A Library for my Notes

I mentioned my envy of Ript the other day. With very little work I produced a similar effect by scanning in a ratty piece of paper. I sized it to make a nice title area for my note. I rotated it by 90 degrees to make rough edges for my artwork.

I played with this a little more to produce a front page for my library. All I need to do is add InkSeine hyperlinks to my "note books" and I'm good to go. As you can see I'm having great fun with the mostly-working-but-not-bug-free rotation feature we've been working to add to InkSeine.

Hello from UMPC Land

My UMPC screen is about the size of a postcard, so I might as well use it to write one:

Download Example InkSeine Custom Backgrounds

I've produced four sample InkSeine notes with blank custom pages. The download is a WinZip archive (.ZIP, 10MB) that contains:

book-2up-stationery.iks: A two-up note format for Landscape orienation on your tablet, based on the old book style shown above.
book-stationery.iks: Single-page old book stationery formatted for Portrait orientation.
postcard-umpc.iks: Landscape UMPC format using the postcard.
splash-stationery.iks: A sample Portrait orientation note based on the watercolor backsplash.

Before you go too crazy with these, be aware that InkSeine has no explicit support for custom page backgrounds. As a result it is kind of hacky at the moment and resulting notes can become bloated, but you can still have quite a bit of fun with these samples. If there's enough interest and we can figure out a good way to make it work "for real", we'll look to better support custom InkSeine page styles in the future.

I've set up the pages so that lasso-selecting your ink will never select the background bitmap by accident, but if you tap-select you may hit the background and move it around accidentally. Just hit Undo if that happens. In the currently available release of InkSeine, there is no way to "lock down" a bitmap in the background.

To make new pages that still have the fancy background, use Copy Page from the page menu, then use Paste from that menu to insert your page with the custom background. It's best to copy and paste some blank pages before you add any ink. That way you can make more pages without having to select and cut the ink from each page as you go.

Here's How to Make Your Own Custom Backgrounds

With a bit of hackery, you can make your own backgrounds, even though InkSeine currently has no "custom page" features.

Once you have a suitable scan, here's what you can do. If you don't have a good book or a suitable scanner, I recommend appropriating one of the aforementioned moleskine photos from Flickr, or see if any of the Wikipedia codex scans strike your fancy.

Make sure you save your scan in a resolution and format where the resulting file is 50-100 KB at the most. I scaled mine down using Microsoft Paint to about 50% of their original size, and saved the scaled-down versions as JPG files to get them as small as possible. You'll lose some quality this way, but if you use huge bitmaps on all your InkSeine pages, you'll quickly bog down InkSeine and overwhelm the memory of your poor tablet. I also used Alias Sketchbook's airbrush to touch up some of the scans to suit my needs.
Double the height of your bitmap (plus about 25-50 pixels to spare) and flood-fill it with black or whatever background color works best. This will allow you to import the bitmap into InkSeine and expand it so that the scan fills the screen, but the center of the bitmap will be off-screen. Since InkSeine selects a bitmap only when the center of the bitmap falls within your selection lassos, this will allow you to ink and lasso-select any of your writing on the page without selecting the bitmap too. You'll definitely want to set up your custom pages that way or it quickly becomes annoying to work with them.
Drag this doubled-height bitmap from your file folder onto your InkSeine page. Drag it so that the upper-left corner of the bitmap lies at the upper-left corner of your page. Then take the bottom-right corner of the selection and drag straight to the right. This expands the page as much as possible. This is what this step looked like when I started with my book scan:

Depending on the aspect ratio of your scan, you may want to further scale your bitmap just vertically, or just horizontally, to fill the screen. With my book, I stretched it a bit horizontally to make it fit the screen completely. It looked fine since the stretch was not extreme. You'll probably have to pan your bitmap around until you can see the desired selection resizing handle on-screen. Resize it as needed and then pan it back to align to the top-left corner.
Voila, you are done! You have a bitmap that fills the page completely, but which will not be accidentally selected while you are lasso-selecting ink on the page.

Have Fun and Report Back!

Give the samples download or your own scans a try. Do you want the option to use custom pages for your notes? What kinds of custom stuff do you find you want to do? What kind of features or capabilities would you want around custom pages if we were to add them to InkSeine?

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #10: Scrapbook Fun

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:19:00 GMT

Well, there was just no way I could present this series without sneaking in a picture of my beautiful twin girls. I recommended that you should always wear extremely dark cute-polarized sunglasses whenever visiting the site way back in the inaugural post of The AlpineInker, and this was not an idle warning!

This picture is rather out of date, because the girls are almost a year old now. The cat is no longer quite as perplexed about the new additions to my family, but he wisely remains wary of becoming the twins' latest plaything. Since this photo was taken, the cat had an unfortunate encounter with what was probably a coyote, but miraculously he survived and is still with us, although he is getting rather old. At this point not only has he used up all nine of his lives, but he is also down to three legs!

It is quite a hoot to use ink to lend a personal touch to pictures of friends and family. Of course you don't need InkSeine to do this, but I find it a makes a great place to have scrapbook fun.

Application of this technology to mark up photos of your pointy-haired boss is left as an exercise to the reader.

Previous Post: Day #9: Messy Desk - with Search!

Next Post: Day #11: Dish out a Little UMPC Love

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #2: Web Surfing

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:05:00 GMT

Yesterday I showed you how I use InkSeine to Make a Project Binder. Well that's great for work and challenging projects. But with infant identical twin girls in my household, I need a severe coffee infusion when I arrive at work before my brain begins to function. So of course I multitask and do all my web "research" while I'm getting going.

InkSeine makes it easy and fun to collect visual shortcuts to web pages. It is just a zillion times better than looking at a stupid scrolling menu or sidebar that is overflowing with textual shortcuts that all look the same.

With InkSeine, I can lay out all my information spatially on a page of my notebook. I place web sites that I use together in the same area of the page. I collect and annotate interesting posts underneath the shortcuts that I keep to the main sites. Web sites that I don't visit often stay out sight on other pages of my notebook.

The page pictured below is the "front page" of my web notebook, which I use as my main launching pad for surfing. To you this probably looks like a mess, but to me it makes perfect sense, and I know exactly where to stroke my pen to open up any of the web sites that I visit frequently. Even with a dense page of shortcuts like this, there's still room to collect new links and jot down notes at a moment's notice.

Since I took this snapshot I have cleaned up my "launch pad" a bit. I've cut sites that fell into disuse or disfavor (e.g. Gizmodo after their juvenile CES prank). I also had to archive my ever-growing list of "cool GottaBeMobile.com blog posts" to a subsequent page in this note where I keep links to Tablet PC-related tech articles. I have other pages where I archive Surface Computing related stuff, a list of all the InkShows on GottaBeMobile.com that I want to check out (complete with my notes on the ones I've already watched), or my page of online videos that I like to keep handy.

To me, the information super-highway is a notebook page with plenty of wide open space. There's no speed limit on how fast I can fly around with my pen.

Previous Post: Day #1: Make a Project Binder

Next Post: Day #3: Sketching Designs

Inveterate Doodler

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:16:00 GMT

I have a confession to make.

I'll bring my Tablet PC to most meetings that I attend. But I don't like to take detailed notes about meetings and I can't stand to sit there doing nothing. So I often populate the margins and headers of my notes with sprawling squiggles and arabesques. I just think better if my hand is in constant motion on the screen. If you witness me scrawling furiously, then I'm either taking detailed notes on something important you said, or I'm thinking about what you're saying while I doodle.

That's right, I'm an inveterate doodler.

It's something that I've always done, as long as I can remember. My third grade teacher told me that I would never amount to anything. I tended to look out the window a lot during class. And I liked to doodle on the reams of mind-numbing addition problems that she passed out, instead of completing them. I did the first page and after that I got it, so why waste everyone's time?

I never know what I'm going to scrawl. I just do it and sometimes I like the results. I tend to gravitate to abstract doodles with a knife-edged gestural rhythm, perhaps inspired by the work of Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock. But modern art pieces tend to have banal titles like "No. 5," "Composition VII," or the dreaded "Untitled."

This is where I depart from the masters and bring technology to bear: modern art meets surreal poetry, courtesy of the Tablet PC.

The Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine has a daunting problem to solve and I'm often amazed at how well it works. But if you toss it some random strokes and ask it to recognize them, by golly the Tablet PC will happily go off and hallucinate an answer for you.

For example, here's one of my recent Prize Winning Squiggles:

According to the recognizer, this doodle says "toe: Fatalities: faerie insignia." There was some other gobbledygook there too, but I just took a screen capture of the first few words to use as my title. This sketch has something of the menacing feel of a Mayan stelae to me. But it's only slightly menacing. It could very well be the "faerie insignia" for a long-forgotten elder god of toe fatalities. The ancients must have dropped a lot of boulders on their feet when building pyramids and ziggurats and all that cool stuff, so I can see where there would be a real need for such a deity in the good old days. So this title really works for me. Voila!

Here's another example:

In case you aren't fluent in doodle, according to my Tablet PC this one reads "initiative: 1 appointee." That sounds very business process oriented. I'll be sure to make it my action item for this week.

If you want to play this game at home, the only rule is that the title must be chosen from a contiguous string that appears in the recognized text.

In fact, I'll make a contest of it. Whoever submits the best doodle with a Tablet PC-hallucinated title to the AlpineInker will win a 100% genuine spiffy orange Microsoft polystyrene coffee cup, signed by yours truly. All entries will be judged by an international panel of jurists consisting of myself.

The highly coveted Doodle Cup '08. Who will win it?

Here's how to name all your masterpieces for the Museum of Modern Doodles, using some of your favorite inking programs:

I sketched the two pieces above with InkSeine. With InkSeine I can easily translate my handwriting-or doodles- to text by lassoing some strokes, picking the search command, and then taking a snapshot of the resulting query. InkSeine will be available for external release soon. If you are reading this blog post then you know that is February 15, 2008.
If you use Windows Journal, you can do the same by lassoing some strokes, and then from the Actions menu, choose Convert Handwriting to Text.
If you're using OneNote, the game is a bit harder to play because it's clever enough to realize that the strokes are probably a drawing. So you'll have to force OneNote to treat it as text. To do this, lasso-select your doodle and then go to the Tools menu. Pick the Treat Selected Ink As command and choose the Handwriting option. Then open the Tools menu again and choose Convert Handwriting to Text. This will replace your doodle with the text equivalent, but you can just copy the text and hit Undo to get your doodle back.

Here's one final example of this art form, where I've gathered a few smaller doodles together to create a triptych. These were sketched over the course of a long workshop so they ended up having similar colors and styles. I originally drew them in Windows Journal, but collected and framed them in InkSeine.

I have to admit that I wasn't quite as pleased with the recognizer-hallucinated names for these ones. "le tent it Emit it", "Itineraries is Eyeleted" and "Inapt Feral" didn't quite capture my intent. Oh well, handwriting technology still has significant room for improvement.

And I doubt it's ever been optimized properly for the avant-garde doodlers among us.

Update: Rob Bushway of GottaBeMobile.com has kindly promoted the Doodle Cup '08 contest for Inveterate Tablet PC Doodlers. I think this is a hoot - I wrote this post for fun and didn't really expect that I'd ever get any submissions. But when some good ones come in, I'll set up a Museum of Modern Doodles page with all of the submissions (modulo spam and inappropriate content [:-)]). The contest will remain open until someone wins.

Rob has also started a doodle contest thread on the GBM Forums where you can post your doodles. The GBM forums are a great resource if you have any tablet or mobile tech questions - people read them and usually respond very quickly! This thread make it easy for you to participate in the contest if you don't have a convenient place to host your own web content (you can also post a comment on this thread, with a hyperlink to your doodle). All comments on the AlpineInker blog are moderated, so just post once and I'll bless your comments as soon as possible.

I also recently discovered there have been some very famous "Inveterate Doodlers." For example, here is a page of doodles that John F. Kennedy made during a crticial meeting at the height of the Cuban missle crisis! One of his doodle tics was to repeatedly write the same word. Perhaps this crisis was averted solely because JFK wasn't paying attention to the military dudes [:-)]. He was a wise man. In my experience, patience and doing nothing cause most problems to go away on their own.