The AlpineInker : OneNote

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

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!

...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

Inky Goodness between InkSeine and OneNote

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:59:00 GMT

An exciting development today. We finally have copy/paste of ink strokes between InkSeine and OneNote doing something reasonable. So this is looking more likely to get into our initial release, provided we don't find any severe landmines with it during further testing!

This three-part capture shows the original content in InkSeine, the strokes appearing "selected" after doing a Paste in OneNote, and then the final look of the strokes in OneNote after tapping to clear the selection.

The fidelity of our stroke thickness conversion isn't perfect, but it's close enough that it shouldn't matter for most practical uses.

The only catch right now is that if you select ink strokes and bitmaps or other stuff from InkSeine, we only paste the ink strokes into OneNote so that you can get at their inky goodness. However, it is a simple matter to grab a screen capture of your ink strokes mixed in with bitmaps if that is what you want instead.

My only remaining wish is that 'FeralBoy' will forgive me for appropriating his signature "inky goodness" catchphrase [:-)]

Update: Since my original post, we've discovered that on Windows XP, Microsoft.Ink.dll under the Common Language Runtime (CLR) 2.0 has a bug that prevents inky goodness from happening by default. Since InkSeine is 100% written in managed code, this issue affects us.

But there is good news! The issue is described in this knowledge base article and has a patch available. Copying and pasting ink between InkSeine and other applications will work as long as you install the update and reboot your Windows XP tablet.

I've also been able to verify that ink strokes can be copied and pasted between InkSeine and Windows Journal. ~~However, Windows Journal highlighter strokes cannot yet be pasted into InkSeine correctly~~. Nevermind, we've fixed that too!