The AlpineInker : InkSeine, Pen

InkSeine Version 1.2.1720.0 Fixes XP Problem

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:42:00 GMT

Just a quick update that InkSeine version 1.2.1720.0, which fixes our bug with Windows XP, is now available. This build works on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

See the previous blog post for details on the new features of this build. The only change in this build is the fix for XP. If you grabbed 1.1.1714.0 and you're not on XP there is no reason to reinstall this one.

Also, the install has not yet been pushed out by the OfficeLabs auto updater, so the only way to get it right now is to install it manually. The OfficeLabs guys are helping us out and we will have it available via auto-update as soon as possible.

For the curious, our gaffe with the XP build was a side-effect of a work-around we developed for the Visual Studio 2008 problem with the Windows XP version of Microsoft.Ink.dll that I wrote about way back in January 2008. Our build was forcing use of the Vista / Win7 version of the dll, which has been fixed to avoid the Visual Studio 2008 issue. But if you installed the 1.1.1714.0 build of InkSeine on XP, it goes to look for the Vista verison and it's not there, so poof, it crashes with a failed load of the dll.

Anyway, sorry again for the gaffe... Sometimes I'm amazed that any software ever works...

InkSeine Update 1.1.1714.0 Now Available

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:13:00 GMT

We have an InkSeine update for you.

UPDATE: We have discovered that this build does not work on Windows XP. We are working on a fix (ready tomorrow?).
UPDATE #2: XP problem fixed! The build number on the update install will show up as 1.2.1720.0.

We'll be publishing it shortly via the OfficeLabs auto-updater, so if you have auto-updates enabled, leave InkSeine running for a couple of minutes, and when you exit InkSeine it should ask you if you want to install the update. (Update: the Office Labs auto-update has not yet been pushed out.)

If you do not see the auto-update for any reason, you can install the new version directly from our downloads site : InkSeine version 1.2.1720.0 1.1.1714.0 (but if you do it this way, you must first uninstall your old build of InkSeine).

This build addresses a number of issues that have been on our plate for a while now:

Windows 7 Support. InkSeine's search features now work on Windows 7.
Inking Performance.
We fixed some issues with our ink stroke capture and rendering that produces a much snappier feel for drawing in InkSeine. This is a significant improvement for most tablets; if you have a UMPC like the Samsung Q1 series or an OQO Model 02, the difference is dramatic.
New Page Viewing Options and Scrolling within Pages (see details below)
Hide / Show the Arc
The arc with all your pens and other tools on it now has a small +/- symbol on it. Just tap it to hide or show the tool arc. I find it's great to hide the arc when I'm really concentrating on a full page of notes, or projecting an informal presentation that I've sketched up in InkSeine.
Tool Ring in task tray. The InkSeine Tool Ring now resides in the system task tray. For the many people who run the "ScrollControl.exe" application separately from InkSeine, this will make it easier to manage.
Print margins bug fixed. Printing from InkSeine now always scales the page correctly so that the entire page will be visible on the printout; previously InkSeine would sometimes clip off the margins.
File loading bug fixed. We fixed an obscure bug that on rare occasions would cause opening of certain InkSeine files to fail. Thanks to everyone who helped us track this down!

New Page Viewing Options

Previous versions of InkSeine were limited to always show one whole page of your notes at a time. From the feedback we received, it became abundantly clear to us that this could sometimes be too limiting, particularly when switching between portrait and landscape screen orientations on your tablet.

InkSeine now supports a new Fit Page to Screen viewing option that scales the page to fill the current screen dimensions. For example, you can give this a try by creating a page in landscape format (step 1 below) and then switching your tablet to portrait orientation (step 2). InkSeine now applies the Fit Page to Screen mode by default whenever you switch screen orientations.

You can still view the entire page at once by choosing the Whole Page viewing option instead (step 3). The Fit Page to Screen / Whole Screen viewing option is a toggle found in the InkSeine Options menu, as shown below.

Scrolling within Pages - without a Scroll Bar

The new Fit Page to Screen view implies the need for scrolling. But InkSeine has no scroll bar. That would just be wrong. A concept car for pen computing can't have scroll bars on it.

But now, InkSeine does allow you to scroll within pages. Here's another example where I'm using my tablet in landscape mode to view a page I originally created in portrait mode. I can now circle my pen starting on the InkSeine tool ring to scroll the page up and down.

Note that InkSeine still has an underlying model of discrete pages, so if you continue to scroll, it will not scroll you through all the pages in your note.

You might even notice that InkSeine now adds a subtle effect so you can tell when you've scrolled to the edge of a page. Do you see what it is? What do you think?

Still a Work in Progress...

I had really wanted to get custom pen and highlighter colors (and thicknesses) into this build, but we didn't make it. We believe there are a lot of subtle issues with supporting that well, and we didn't want to include a half-hearted attempt just to check off a new feature. But this is a new capability that I'm desperate to add myself.

There's also a couple basic usability requests that we didn't get to, such as having both Personal Search and Web Search available as top-level options in the context menu which appears after lasso selecting an ink phrase. I have a particular solution in mind for that which we didn't have time to complete.

I currently have three kids at two years old or less, and Raman (our developer extraordinaire) is currently managing our group's entire dev team, so we've both been running on limited cycles this year. But we are still pounding away and looking to introduce more new features and innovations for future InkSeine releases. Definitely be sure to let us know of any new requests, bugs, or reflections that you have on your use of the new features in this update.

The Microsoft Research Codex: Are Dual Screens the Future of Mobile Devices?

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:17:00 GMT

Never buy one of anything. That's advice you should stand by when you're buying unusual gadgets. The advice was good when Randy Pausch offered it to me some 15 years ago, and it's still good now.

Of course, with 18 month old twin girls at home, this has become second nature to me. Two boxes of diapers. Two gallons of milk. Two Elmo plush dolls.

Oh, and yes, of course. Two screens for my tablet computer.

Dual-screen devices have become the subject of increasingly elaborate internet fantasies. Now, rumors about an Apple "Brick" device have stirred up dreams of future tablets, such as the alluring One Laptop Per Child v2.0 concept photos, which now orbit the internet once again.

My interest in dual-screen devices goes back a lot further, though, and was really spurred on by the University of Maryland dual-screen e-book reader project. That effort is led by Francois Guimbretiere, who is a long time collaborator and friend. I had some ideas to build on what his team had done, but also to take things in a different direction.

First of all, I wasn't interested in an ebook reader. I wanted a device that was all about writing. Sure, reading and writing go hand in hand - you encounter cool ideas and search out reference material on the web-but what I wanted to build was a tool for thought. To me that means a tool with writing, sketching, and annotating as the core of the experience.

I'd been thinking for a long time about picking up an OQO Model 02 computer. My team has an extensive code base for pen-and-tablet functionality resulting from InkSeine, and the OQO runs it out of the box. It's got an active digitizer for high fidelity pen input, and it's the smallest slate Tablet PC that money can buy. That's a pretty good start on a small form-factor tool for thought.

So when it came down to it, just how many of those OQO Model 02's do you think I purchased?

Project "Codex" was born.

Twice the Screen at Half the Size

Here's the Codex packed up for mobility. It folds up quite nicely and has a moleskine-style knitted elastic strap to hold it securely shut. There's a loop for the pen and a mesh pocket so you won't lose small accessories, business cards, or receipts that you collect in your travels.

Sure, it's a bit of a brick at present. The whole thing weighs just over 2 pounds. The OQO's are considerably thicker than I'd like. But my goal is to prototype the future as quickly as possible and start living it. The OQO offers a handsome, jet black time-travel machine in that regard.

Don't underestimate the ability to quickly pack up with the screens protected. Folding the Codex in half makes it comfortable to carry and easier to stuff into my gadget bag. It's a self contained kit for ultra-mobility.

The Codex is Not a Container for Dead Trees

A codex is just an archaic term for a bound book. But this Codex is unlike any book that you've ever read. It's not a long linear text that you flip through. To me, there's no use in going to all the trouble to build a dual-screen tablet prototype and write elaborate software just to mimic a traditional book. This is the 21^st century and it's about time we moved past containers for dead trees.

We have lots of information sources. We have multi-tasking. We have hyperlinks. We have split attention. We have a left brain and a right brain and we rarely do one thing at a time any more.

A Separation of Concerns

The Codex has two screens, it's designed to be used that way, and you won't find any half-apologetic demos that try to mash them back together into one big screen. Instead, it's all about the intelligent partitioning of tasks and interface elements across the screens.

Above is one example where I'm working on a blog post that I've had planned for a while. On the left I have a whole bunch of cool photos that I found tagged with moleskine on Flickr. I was browsing through these as inspiration for our InkSeine digital note-taking software. On the right I'm organizing bits and pieces from these photos along various themes. So I just take a snapshot from the collection on the left screen and it appears in my notes on the right screen, where I can arrange it and mark it up as I see fit. I can scroll back and forth on the left screen to find a photo that meets my current needs, while the page that I am authoring on the right screen always remains visible. The two screens are invaluable because I always have the reference material in the context of what I am working on, instead of feverishly flipping between them on a single screen.

Can I do this on a single large screen? Well, sure, I could monkey with the window placements and get everything arranged just so. But that takes a lot of effort and the temptation to expand windows to take over the full screen is hard to resist if I have to expend effort to do so. A dual-screen device that understands the partition between the screens gives a much simpler experience where I don't have to constantly manage the set-up of the windows.

Navigate without Losing the Big Picture

Here's another example. I'm further along with authoring my blog post now, and I have a bunch of material floating around in my notes. I create a page that is a Table of Contents, with links to several themes that I've identified in my Flickr moleskine investigations. If I open a link, such as my Creative Collage page, it opens on the opposite page. I don't even need a "back" command to return to where I was - I still have my navigational structure on the left, side-by-side with my content page on the right.

Unlike a traditional dead-tree book, I have no physical restriction that forces me to view consecutive pages - The Codex lets me follow links or flip through the screens separately to view any two pages together.

Working Big and Small

We can draw some inspiration from traditional media as well. In magazines and books, sidebars are a distinct section of a page that augments the main text with auxiliary information. Well, the Codex has sidebars on steroids. I can take any chunk of my notes, make it into a sidebar, and then arrange a bunch of these on a page. Here, I've made a storyboard page consisting of six sidebars. When I tap on a sidebar in one of the storyboard cells, it expands to full size on the opposite screen. I can plot out the broad sweep of my story on one screen, while maintaining full access to the zoomed-in details on the other.

Your Mother Was Right - Posture is Important!

Perhaps the coolest property of a dual-screen device is that the compact, mobile form-factor encourages shifting the device around. I can orient the screens with respect to one another, stand the device up, look at the screens in portrait or landscape, and so forth. In fact, the Codex supports about a dozen different configurations. We call these postures. (A colleague, Michael Miller, coined this term).

Add two cups of accelerometers, a dash of flex sensors, and bake with some simple software to fuse it all together. Out of the oven pops an intelligent dual-screen display system that configures itself depending on how you arrange it.

For example, if I want to work in landscape, I can flip the device into the laptop posture, as opposed to the book posture that I've been showing so far. Now I have one screen that's angled for easy reading, plus another screen that's horizontal for easy writing.

Or I can use the laptop posture to hook up one of my screens to a projector. I put the public part of my presentation on the top screen, while the controls to drive the presentation and my private notes are confined to the bottom screen.

Now perhaps I meet a friend in a café and I want to show him what I'm up to. I can just lift up on the binding of the Codex to angle the screens so that one is facing me and one is facing my friend (below, left). We call this the battleship posture - as in "You sank my Battleship!" Each person has one screen with a private view. The Codex automatically configures the software for shared whiteboarding so the collaborators can mark up the screens, pass notes back and forth, and other such foolishness.

Next I drop the binding back flat. Now both of us can view the screens, but one screen is oriented towards each person.

Don't Get Too Attached

Something that turned out to be surprisingly useful is that the Codex allows me to pull each screen right out of the binding. A firm pull pops it out, a firm press pops it back in. This is really handy for laying out the screens to suit my work, or to review a video while I jot down some notes. I can even hand the screen to another person to show them something - without actually giving them an electronic copy of the information.

What? You Still Have a Desktop Computer?!?

The Codex is just another wireless device so of course I can connect it to my desktop computer. Now, any screen capture that I take from my desktop screen shows up in my Codex notes right where I left off. For web pages, the snapshot comes across with a hyperlink back to the source, so I can easily revisit it later when I'm reviewing my notes on my Codex. This makes it the perfect companion no matter how I'm working.

A Parting Shot at Text Entry

The Codex is designed around doing most things with a pen, but I'm no idiot. When it comes to text entry, a keyboard is a good thing.

And that, in part, is why I'm puzzled that so many of the dual-display concept designs that I've seen take up a whole screen with a virtual keyboard. I'm sure people in focus groups ask for this. But I still think it's a really bad idea. What is the point of having two screens if you are instantly going to cover one of them with a picture of a keyboard? Your hands immediately occlude it from sight anyway. At that point I'm basically using a single screen again, so I might as well just grab my laptop to get a decent keyboard.

The Codex offers a solution for text entry that I much prefer, by virtue of the OQO Model 02's mechanical keyboard. I just slide the screen up and that reveals the keyboard when I need it. Works great. No dorky touchscreen keyboard. I still enjoy the full benefits of partitioning my work between the two screens. That's the way I like it.

When Can I Buy One?

The Codex is a prototype-- and a rather flaky, cobbled-together one at that. But it uses off-the-shelf devices, and there's nothing magical about the software. So the crass answer is that you can have one now if you are willing to spend some dollars, build yourself a custom binder, and write a little bit of code. That's how I started. My first prototype was a repurposed day-planner with Velcro holding the screens in there. Install a shared clipboard utility and you can start copying and pasting between screens. That will give you just enough of the experience that you will hunger for more.

What would you want out of a dual-screen device? What capabilities would make it most useful to you? How do you see dividing your own work between two screens?

In the meantime, the trajectory of ultra low-power "e-ink" displays bears watching. Check out the recent Plastic Logic device, for example. Right now e-ink is an abomination for anything interactive, but eventually some display technology will get where we want it to go. Low-cost, low-power screens are crucial to make dual display devices a practical consumer device, rather than a research lab curiosity.

The sheer number of concept devices that have popped up in the last 6 months suggests that dual-screen devices are poised to take off in the near future. My hope is that our research on the Codex can help in some small way to unearth the full promise of such devices. I, for one, am convinced that dual-display devices have a well-motivated role to play in a future ecosystem of mobile devices.

In my office, at least, that future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following key contributors to this project:

Morgan Dixon
Raman Sarin
Francois Guimbretiere
Ravin Balakrishnan

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.

Rough Winter

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:35:00 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.

My New Favorite Flick Pad

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:30:00 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 12:05:00 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 04:01:00 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.

Portrait Inking on the OQO Model 02

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:19:00 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

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.

Flick that Tool Ring!

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:30:00 GMT

GottaBeMobile.com forum member moneyburninhole conceived an ingenious InkSeine Tool Ring hack for flicking your way around on your Vista Tablet PC. It is so brilliant and useful that I just have to share it.

moneyburninhole posted this comment in the GBM forums:

I also love the Tool Ring and wanted to share an undocumented use I've found for it, namely, as a base for doing pen "flicks" when the screen you are on doesn't otherwise permit it.

An example: I use PDFRevu to markup PDFs and wanted a way to switch easily between highlighter and pen. The two standard ways are either using the toolbar or the keyboard shortcuts P and H. Neither were ideal. The toolbar is too far a "reach," and the keboard is unavailable in slate mode. So, I set up two editing flicks to trigger P and H. Diagonal up, right trigers P, Diagonal down,left triggers H. The problem is, flicks don't work when you have a markup tool selected, as the tool just draws a line, rather than triggering a flick. The solution: start your flick in the "crazy arrow" part of the tool ring. I'm now quickly flicking between pen and highlighter through the use of the unobtrusive Tool Ring. Great stuff.

I've adopted this hack on my Vista tablet. I love it. My productivity is once again on the rise. As I said to moneyburninhole, I never would have thought to try this.

Here's a Usage Scenario with Copy and Paste to OneNote

Let's say I want to copy some text from my blog into OneNote and jot down some more ink notes about it. I can start by sweeping out the text, then flicking up and to the right to copy. Here I've done the flick on the "crazy arrow" part of the Tool Ring. In the web browser I actually could flick directly on the page, but I've quickly gotten in the habit of just always doing it on the tool ring. That way I never have to even think about what mode the pen is in before doing the flick.

Now I'm inking in OneNote. I used the yellow highlighter on the OneNote page to show how the Paste flick (down and to the right) won't work when you're in the inking mode. You just get a diagonal stroke instead.

But now if I flick on that Tool Ring instead, I get my text pasted in - even though OneNote thinks the pen is in the inking mode!

This is fast and I don't have to hunt around for the teeny tiny little paste icon in the toolbar to make it go. (Just make sure that the OneNote window has the focus - tap on the window's title bar if necessary.)

Make the "Flick That Tool Ring" Hack Shine with Custom Flicks!

You can have great fun with this using just the standard flicks. But to bring the hack to its full fruition, you'll want to customize some of the flicks for your most heavily used applications and shortcuts, as moneyburninhole did for PDFRevu.

Here's how to do it:

Use the start menu to open the control panel, and launch the Pen and Input Devices panel.

Tap on the Flicks tab of the dialog. To get the most out of this hack, you'll want to tick off the Navigational flicks and editing flicks radio box, as I've done here.
Tap Customize to bring up the Customize Flicks dialog. You'll have to decide which of the standard flick(s) you'll want to sacrifice for custom behaviors. I don't have much need for Forward, so I give it the axe. There are a bunch of canned behaviors, but I have something special in mind, so I tap on (add) to make a custom keystroke combination, like so:

What to reprogram Forward to? I thought Alt+Tab would be nifty so I can flip back and forth between applications. I named this App Switch and I press the Alt+Tab key combination, causing "Alt+Tab" to appear in the Keys field. Be sure to hit Save. Then hit OK, then hit Apply in the Pen and Input Devices dialog to apply your custom flick settings.

Now I can flick right on the tool ring to flip back and forth between OneNote and my web page! Now I whipsaw between my notes and my reference material at will. It's just like the good old days when people hit Alt+Tab on these strange devices called "keyboards" to be ultra-productive. I'll use this in InkSeine too when I want to take multiple screen clippings from the same web page.

One more little tip. The Tool Ring lets me circle to scroll, and I like that for my short-distance scrolling needs, so I decide to sacrifice the Drag Up and Drag Down flicks as well. I map them to Toggle Shift and Toggle Ctrl to make the modifier key experience with my pen a little smoother. For example, now I can flick down to Toggle Shift, and multi-select files to drag them into InkSeine:

Take this as a point of departure and see how far you can take it for your heavy rotation apps. The App Switch flick to easily go back and forth from inking to the document I am working with is indispensable for me now.

What flicks do you use? What are some other useful key combos to set up this way? What's the coolest set of things you've configured for your own Tool Ring hack?

Update: As Warner Crocker's post about this hack on GottaBeMobile kindly pointed out, I forgot to mention that the Tool Ring is an application that you can run independently from the rest of InkSeine. Check out my previous "Kick Start that Tool Ring!" post on how to add the Tool Ring to your Startup group, or to the quick-launch area on your taskbar. (I do both, myself - currently, if you exit InkSeine, it also closes down the Tool Ring, so it's handy to have it in your quick-launch to fire it back up at a moment's notice. As some commenters in the GottaBeMobile.com forum have pointed out, there really should be an option to leave InkSeine's Tool Ring up after you exit InkSeine, so you can continue using it in all your other apps if desired. We'll look to add that feature as soon as possible.)

Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:

Kick Start that Tool Ring!

Flick that Tool Ring!

Zoom that Tool Ring!

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?

Kick Start that Tool Ring!

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:01:00 GMT

From the early returns, people seem to be excited about InkSeine's floating Tool Ring. This semi-transparent palette floats on top of all your windows. It lets you scroll by circling the pen, or take a snapshot by tapping the camera icon:

For example, here is a comment that "Hari" posted in the GottaBeMobile.com forum about InkSeine:

Search capabilities, stroke-friendly menus and the toolring: to me these are the three most innovative and powerful features of InkSeine.

I am already addicted to the toolring and strive to use it in all other applications.

Since people seem to like the Tool Ring, they often suggest additional features it could support:

I wish i had your kool pie-menu on it to cut, copy, paste, get a keybord or ever better: run keystrokes I configured!
Any thoughts on giving the Tool Ring an Auto-Hide option?
It's such a great input device; why not make it available even when InkSeine is not running?

What features do YOU want to see on there? One of these? Maybe something to flip through applications - kind of like an Alt-Tab replacement? Something else?

Well, I was just pondering that question myself when another email floated into my inbox, from a user who had already figured out how to make the Tool Ring available when InkSeine is not running, all on his own!

Anyway, the part i love the most is the tool ring. Soooooo koooool! scrolling on anything with the pen is just addictive!

It is such a good tool i put it to run at startup.

Now that's a great idea! Heck, why didn't we ever think of that!

The Tool Ring lives as its own little application called ScrollControl.exe that is completely independent of the rest of InkSeine. If you run ScrollControl.exe without InkSeine active, it still lets you scroll, and it places any snapshots you take on the system clipboard.

If you want to make your tablet setup as cool as this user's, here's how to add InkSeine's Tool Ring to your Startup folder:

Open the InkSeine install folder, which defaults to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\InkSeine
Right-click on ScrollControl.exe and choose the Create Shortcut command:

Under Windows XP, the shortcut will be created in the same folder. Under Vista, you'll receive a prompt; tap Yes to create the shortcut on the desktop instead.
Now we need locate the Startup folder so you can put the ScrollControl.exe shortcut in there.

If you've got your whole hard disk indexed with Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search, you can use InkSeine's Personal Search command to quicly locate that Startup folder. Here, I've also tapped on the folder filter in the bottom right corner of the search panel to narrow my results down:
Otherwise, you can take the old-fashioned slow way and plow through your folders to find the Startup folder:
Vista: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Once you've got your Startup folder opened, just drag the ScrollControl shortcut into it:
The next time you log on, the Tool Ring (a.k.a. ScrollControl.exe) will appear, without InkSeine in the background.

Raman, InkSeine developer par excellence, mentioned this tip to another user who wrote to us about the scroll ring, and we received this reply back:

Raman,

That's a great tip! Thanks. I've added it to my quick launch.

Well there's another great idea! You can put it in your quick launch so you can fire up that Tool Ring at any time with one tap of your pen. Once you've created a shortcut to ScrollControl.exe in steps 1-3 above, all you have to do is drag it to your quick launch area. This illustration shows how I did this from my Windows XP tablet:

So there you have it. May these tips make the Tool Ring your constant companion in all your Tablet PC travels!

Posts in the Tool Ring Shenanigans series:

Kick Start that Tool Ring!

Flick that Tool Ring!

Zoom that Tool Ring!

InkSeine has its Limitations!

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:43:00 GMT

I'm happy to see that InkSeine is generating some fresh Tablet PC buzz in the blogosphere. Apparently, offering a new inking application to a crowd of pen computing enthusiasts is like tossing a fish into a crate full of starving cats!

But seriously, we've worked hard on InkSeine, and it's good to see that people have some interest in what we are trying to do. Heck, it looks as if we might help to sell a Tablet PC or two, just because people want to try it out.

However, let me be the first to point out that InkSeine is not perfect. Far from it.

I wouldn't be spending my time on InkSeine if I didn't believe that it is a very cool and very useful application that is well worth your time to check out. But instead of further fanning the flames of InkSeine-induced-tablet-lust, this may be the ideal moment to throw just a little bit of water on the fire. It's very important to me to set expectations appropriately and give people an honest assessment of where the application has shortcomings.

Because InkSeine is a research prototype, we sought to create a sandbox for ourselves where we could have free reign to try out silly ideas and crazy things that wouldn't necessarily provide a clean fit into Microsoft's existing products.

So we've taken some shortcuts in the development or avoided adding some fairly obvious "standard features." Often the clean, spartan design is a blessing, but sometimes a desirable feature just isn't there when you need it.

Below we've listed some of the known deficits of the application. There are many things that could be improved, features that could be added, performance that could be optimized, file sizes and memory consumption that could be reduced. If we spent all our time on those things, we would never get to the good stuff! At this stage, we are most interested in learning what really is "the good stuff" when we put the application in people's hands - that's where you come in!

Bugs. We have done our best to beat all of the bugs out of InkSeine, but undoubtedly we have missed some. Our team does not have the dedicated testing personnel of a real product team. Please report any bugs or failed installations and give as much detail as you can (copy the dialog or error message, describe what you were doing with InkSeine at the time, and tell us what device and operating system you are running InkSeine on). InkSeine auto-saves to a recovery file every few minutes, however, if your machine goes down or if you are unlucky enough to encounter a serious bug.
No text support. InkSeine has no support for text at all. You cannot paste text into InkSeine, nor can you type text into InkSeine. This is probably the biggest hole in the application's current functionality. We are going to explore pen-centric mechanisms for handling text so that we can try introducing text without ruining the great pen and ink experience of InkSeine, but we don't have a timeline for when that might be ready.
No keyboard shortcuts. InkSeine does not support any keyboard shortcuts or harware navigation keys at this time. Even though InkSeine is a pen-centric application, we realize there are times when one is viewing notes with the keyboard at the ready, so we hope to add some shortcut keys in a future update.
No scrolling, zooming, or "Insert Space" command. Although InkSeine often does quite well without added widgets for scrolling and zooming, this can be limiting at times. InkSeine always scales the page to fit the current dimensions of your screen, so for example, a page that you generated in the portrait display orientation will be scaled down so that the full page can be viewed in the landscape display orientation. This keeps with InkSeine's metaphor of a "real notebook," and can often remove the need for a lot of needless scrolling and zooming operations when you are going through your notes. On the other hand, the lack of scrolling is particularly limiting for small-screen devices such as UMPCs. Do you really miss having the ability to scroll, or do you get by fine without it? Let us know when you send in your feedback about the application.
No equivalent of a "Print to OneNote" driver for InkSeine. This is a great feature of OneNote / Windows Journal that is missing from InkSeine. We plan to explore whether it is possible for InkSeine to piggyback on either the OneNote or Journal print drivers to make it easier to import entire documents into InkSeine, but we're not sure yet if that will be feasible. As a work around, you can select individual pages that have been printed to OneNote, copy them, and then paste them into InkSeine.
Undo within a page only. The Undo command only works for operations that you have performed on the current page. Once you flip pages, or Save the file, the undo stack is purged. Also, all operations on pages (New Page, Insert Page, Delete Page, dragging pages to rearrange them, etc.) cannot be undone.
Large file sizes. InkSeine files can get fairly large, particularly if you embed a lot of screen shots in your notes. We have a simple XML file format for rapid development. This also makes it trivial for our file type to be indexed by Windows. However, our encoding of ink strokes and bitmaps is very inefficient as a result, and supporting features like embedding files (rather than links to files) would be impractical due to ballooning file sizes. Also, this contributes to InkSeine consuming more memory than it really should.
FIXED! ~~InkSeine has not been tested on non-English systems.~~ InkSeine currently only explictly supports the English language recognizer. We've done some very limited cleanup of localization issues, but we've gotten some reports that InkSeine may crash when Windows is not set up for English language settings. We would like to support the other languages that the Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine supports, but haven't gotten around to this yet. If you run InkSeine on a non-English system configuration and it does not install or function correctly, ~~please let us know about it~~.
Unimplemented Commands. There are some permanently grayed-out commands in InkSeine's menus, such as the Import command on the File menu, Custom Pen and Highlighter settings on the Highlighter menu, or the different sized erasers on the Eraser menu. These are placeholders for functionality that we plan to add, but haven't gotten time to implement yet.
Slow performance in some cases. Performance can get slow if you create huge notes (more than about 30 pages with a lot of content) or if there is a large number of strokes, bitmaps, and particularly highlighter strokes all on the same page. For "normal" notes that aren't ridiculously dense, the performance is usually quite good, however. Also, InkSeine does background recognition of all the strokes on a page (in order to make them available for the indexer for search). This can sometimes bog down InkSeine on older tablets or notes that are extremely dense. The way we do the background recognition is not particularly clever, but usually it works ok and does not noticeably degrade performance. If this does present a problem for you, use the Options panel to decrease the frequency of background recognition, or disable it altogether if you wish.
Limited OneNote integration. You can copy and paste ink and highlighter strokes between InkSeine and OneNote. If you select both ink strokes and bitmaps from InkSeine, OneNote will only import the ink strokes. InkSeine places a bitmap representation of the selection on the system clipboard, but to our knowledge OneNote does not have a Paste Special command so that you can choose to paste this bitmap. OneNote always takes the ink strokes representation from the clipboard if ink is there. You can paste into Microsoft Paint or other applications to get at the bitmap representation if necessary. We support this to make it easier for people to experiment with InkSeine, yet still know they can move their notes into OneNote if that is what they use as their central repository for everything. Integrating other features of InkSeine into OneNote is currently beyond the scope of our research project.
Sharing or Syncing InkSeine notes. There is no support for zipping up an InkSeine note, with all of the files that it may hyperlink to, for sharing or sync'ing with someone else or to another computer. OneNote has excellent sharing and synchronization features; unfortunately, these would be too time-consuming to reproduce for InkSeine. We may eventually support exporting InkSeine pages to HTML, as one mechanism to share your notes with others.
Accessibility/DPI settings. InkSeine currently does not respect system DPI settings for menu sizes, etc., so it has accessibility and readability limitations if you have customized your system's settings for that.
Limited interoperation with non-Microsoft products. InkSeine will return search results for any file type that gets indexed by Windows Vista Search or Windows Desktop Search on XP. Some non-Microsoft file types require you to install plug-ins for search in order for the files to be indexed properly.

InkSeine also provides a number of advanced features for Microsoft products and file types, such as the ability to open and link to Outlook emails. These features may not work for other mail programs. Similarly, features such as automatically attaching a hyperlink to image captures currently only work for Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. They will not work for PDF files or web pages viewed in Firefox, for example.
No custom search filters. You cannot change the file types accepted by InkSeine's existing file type filters for personal (desktop) searches of your local hard disk(s). We also do not support defining additional filters for other file types. Also, you cannot change the search engine used for InkSeine's web search feature. We may add some limited support for customizing searches in a future release.

Despite the limitations of InkSeine listed above, we think you will find that on the whole it functions well enough to use if for "real work," and to give you a glimpse of what the future of Tablet PC software might hold. If you do find areas where InkSeine doesn't meet your expectations, be sure to send us your candid feedback. Even for known issues, it really helps us to prioritize our updates if we know that lots of people are tripping over the same problem.

And if you happen to really like InkSeine or certain features of it when you try it out - heck, we'd like to hear that too!

...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