The AlpineInker : InkSeine, Software

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.

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.

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!

InkSeine Spinning out of Control!

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:38:00 GMT

One of the things we are trying to get fully functional for an update is to enable rotation of objects in InkSeine. We have it mostly working; pretty much the only thing left to do is to add some snapping so the 90-degree orientations are easier to achieve.

I've got a debug build of this on my tablet and I'm finding the new capabilities fun and useful in ways that I hadn't originally anticipated. And of course I had to put it through its paces to test it out, and maybe have a bit of fun along the way, so here is an InkSeine document where I have totally spun out of control:

We've also made it possible in this version to scale something down until it flips in the other direction. This enables cute reflection effects as well.

I've been using these features to play with some other fun ideas. I'll post up about those in the next couple of days when I can find a little time.

InkSeine Localization Problem FIXED!

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:37:00 GMT

We have a fix for the serious localization bug that has plagued many of our InkSeine friends outside of the United States.

The worst symptom of this bug is that some users who use non-American ways to write decimal numbers or dates are unable to load InkSeine notes that they have saved. The fix does NOT make it possible to load any files that this bug caused to be saved in the "bad" format, but any new ones that you create going forward will not have this problem. The other symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, and a few other features will not work. Please accept our sincerest apologies if you have been stricken by this bug.

The new build is Microsoft InkSeine Beta version 1.1.222.0, and it fixes the localization bug, and a number of other minor ones that have been reported that were easy to fix at the same time.

Our automatic update server is not yet on-line, so to get this fix:

Uninstall InkSeine (this will NOT cause you to lose any of your options settings, etc.)

Get the updated build of InkSeine from the Microsoft Research downloads site and install it.

Run InkSeine and start inking away! To repeat, if you experienced the original bug and were unable to load files that you saved, the fixed version cannot read the unloadable files, but new files that you create can be saved and loaded, and Copy/Paste and Undo/Redo will work.

Please let us know if you find any other localization issues, even minor ones! Our internal tests at Microsoft did not have enough international users, which is why we missed this bug in the first place. If you notice other things that can be improved to make InkSeine work better for your language or other local settings, definitely let us know!

For full details of the localization bug, see the summary in our previous post annoncing the presence of the localization bug.

Here is a complete list of all the bugs and other issues that are fixed by Microsoft InkSeine Beta build 1.1.222.0:

Fix for number formatting problem that causes loading saved files, Copy/Paste, and Undo/Redo to all fail for some users outside the US.
Fix for unexpected date format causing the Tutorial to not load.
Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog appearing. InkSeine should no longer require any multi-lingual recognizer packs to be installed.
~~Installer correctly creates file association for .iks files (InkSeine notes).~~ Update: our attempted fix for this does not actually help, upon further deliberation. Sorry about that, we're investigating this further. We believe we're doing the right thing in the installer, but it's not getting applied for some reason that defies explanation at the moment .

The work around for this is to manually specify the file association by right-clicking on an .iks file, pick the Open With... command, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\InkSeine, pick InkSeine.exe from the folder, and check off the "always use this program" option before hitting OK.

Additional file extensions added to notes filter (OneNote icon in search panel), including .onecache, Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK).
The .TXT file extension has been removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion.
Icons dragged out from search results now drop where you lift the pen.
Option to skip auto-update checking added to the installer.
Checkbox for auto-update feature added to the Options panel.

Thanks so much to those of you in the International InkSeine Community who have tried out InkSeine, contributed bug reports, and tested various issues on our behalf. We haven't received any feature requests or problem reports from Antarctica or the International Space Station, yet, but I hope some will come in soon!

It's really exciting and very rewarding to see fans of the Tablet PC across the entire global community embrace what we are trying to do with InkSeine.

Localization Problem with InkSeine - Fix Coming Next Week

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:17:00 GMT

UPDATE: bug fix now available!

My humble apologies to users outside the US who have encountered some problems with InkSeine. The good news is that this is the only major bug that has come up in our InkSeine deployment, and we already have the problem fixed on our internal testing build. The bug results from a localization issue that we missed in our internal testing.

This issue only affects installs for users who are not using the American way to view numbers and dates.

The main symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, loading the Tutorial, and Loading files that you have saved all will not work. That failure to load saved files is the really bad one. A couple of people have written to me out of frustration after they were unable to load content that they saved, and for that I am truly sorry. We had very limited testing outside of the US before our external release, and we missed this bug.

We will deploy our fix for this bug soon, hopefully early next week. Raman, the ace InkSeine developer, is back in town and has already coded up a fix. We just need to do some additional testing to make sure we didn't break anything else, and deploy it through the Microsoft Research downloads process. All that will take a few days, so it will be not be available on the research.microsoft.com downloads area until early to middle of next week.

What went wrong? Well, basically if decimal numbers appear on your system as 4,5 instead of 4.5, when InkSeine writes its data to a file, it gets a stream of number that look like (4,5, 2,8, 7,5). But what it should look like is instead (4.5, 2.8, 7.5). So when our parser reads in that data, it gets confused because it finds more numbers than it was expecting, and it blows up. Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, and Saving/Loading all pass through common routines to turn data into a textual representation, so that is why all of those end up being broken. There's some similar issues with dates in different formats as well. If you really need to recover a file you've lost, you can edit those commas back to decimal points. I know, yuck! Our fix will not convert files saved in the "bad" format back into property formatted files. But any new files you create going forward will work correctly.

There are a few other small problems that we have already fixed and will be rolled into the next update as well:

Fix for broken InkSeine file association. If you double-click on an InkSeine (.IKS) file, it will open up inside of InkSeine without forcing you to manually perform the association to InkSeine. Fixed!
Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog that some international users have encountered when doing a search. This can be worked-around now by installing a language pack, but we believe our localization fixes will remove the need to install any language packs. Fixed!
Option to disable automatic checking for updates has been added to the installer and to the InkSeine Options panel. We hope you'll take advantage of this great feature to get future updates & bug fixes, but we understand that some people don't like to be prompted for automatic updates, so now you can turn that off if you like. Fixed!
Missing Notes file types added to the notes filter (looks like the OneNote icon). New extension supported: .onecache (shared OneNote notebooks are cached in these; you also may need to add this extension to Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search for the indexer to pick it up), Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK). Fixed!
.TXT file extension removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion for some people. Fixed!
Probably also a fix for the annoyance where icons that you drag out from the search results list don't drop directly under the location where you lift the pen, and maybe a couple of other little things.

I'll get an announcement out when the fix is ready for download... It's fixed now, here it is.

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

The Inaugural AlpineInker Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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