The AlpineInker : Touch

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.

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #11: Dish out a Little UMPC Love

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

I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC. Originally I borrowed this to see if InkSeine would work correctly on the device, but I have more or less inherited it on a permanent basis. So I have started using it to play around from time to time.

Here's a capture of what InkSeine looks like on this device:

Here's another shot that shows InkSeine's search panel and the help tips on the UMPC screen. We spent about a weak tweaking its layout and design to accommodate the limited screen dimensions when you launch it on a UMPC. Admittedly it's a tight squeeze, but 480 vertical pixels are not a lot to work with!

To be honest, I am still trying to figure out where a device like the Samsung Q1 can really fit into the way I live and work. I actually like the size of it and the heft of it in my hands, although it is about twice as thick as I'd like it to be.

I am also the lucky owner of one of the old NEC VersaPro YV11F/GL-R tablets. Now that name has a real ring to it, doesn't it? I think they must have chosen a Tablet PC hallucinated title based on their designer's doodles. The VersaPro weighed in at 1.98 lbs, was a scant 11 mm thick, and was only ever sold in Japan. Talk about a wonderful slate. Even people in Microsoft Research, who are used to seeing strange devices (not to mention eccentric researchers) roaming the hallways, would stop me in my tracks to ask what it was and drool over it. The processor and hard drive capacity were a bit anemic, but it felt like carrying around a legal pad. I knew it was a qualitatively different device when I observed that I would leave it piled up with the papers and magazines on my messy desk - I have never done that with the Toshiba M400 that is my main tablet right now...

Anyway, if I could get me a UMPC as "wafer thin" as my old NEC, I think we'd really have something. That's partly why the dual display e-book project at the University of Maryland has me excited.

I do have difficulty getting used to the passive touchscreen on my UMPC while inking. I just cannot train myself not to touch the screen while I am holding the pen. This is deeply ingrained not only from my heavy tablet-inking addiction, but also from a lifetime of sketching on real paper.

But don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of touchscreens. I plan to get a multimode pen + touch device when I get my next Tablet PC. Throughout graduate school, I worked daily on a system that had a touchscreen. Even though the mouse and keyboard were always at the ready while I was working, some operations were wonderfully convenient with touch. I set up my X11 window manager (now I am really dating myself) to immediately switch the focus window as soon as I clicked anywhere in a window. Now I could just swipe at the screen with my hand to switch windows. That was fun, fast, and reliable. I remember hacking up a quick demo where almost the whole screen was a button, and I could activate it by head-butting my screen. Now that was utterly useless!

I see wonderful opportunities for touch interactions on my UMPC. But there really is not any software on the device that takes advantage of touch. I tried using InkSeine with my finger, and it actually works pretty well with touch. The radial menus that we use have a wonderful feel when driven via touch - I find that just sliding my finger in a direction to get a command is oddly rewarding. However, I must confess that InkSeine really hasn't been optimized for touch; our menus and buttons should probably be a bit larger so it is easier to land on them with your finger. We'll look to improve this in the future. Also, the ink that results if I try to finger-paint on the Samsung Q1 UMPC is utterly horrible, so touch is only useful for navigating through ink content that I have previously generated with the stylus.

I also have to say that my experience on the UMPC was the first time that I really missed scrolling in InkSeine. InkSeine has a discrete page model, where all pages are always scaled to fit the current screen size. The UMPC screen is so small that scrolling feels necessary so that I can paste larger bitmaps, etc. on the page.

My biggest disappointment on the UMPC? The ribbon UI model of Office 2007. It's been growing on me for my desktop and tablet usage, but it is a complete joke on the UMPC. I can only see a tiny fraction of my document if I leave the text at a reasonable size:

Overall, there are some things I don't particularly like about the Samsung Q1, but using this UMPC has been a bit of an eye opener for me and I am becoming more interested in the platform, both for "real work" and also as a target for research projects. Many of you have probably seen LucidTouch, the see-through device demonstration by Patrick Baudisch. Well, Patrick is part of my team and I talk to him almost every day. I think doing more with a Lucid-Touch type of UMPC device could be very interesting indeed.

But I've also concluded the Samsung Q1 is not the UMPC for me.

To this end I'm seriously considering picking up an OQO Model 02. The ultra-portability without serious compromise on performance is appealing. And the active digitizer on the OQO is a must have for me.

For now, though, I am struggling to contain my device lust for the OQO 02, and the many intriguing new Tablet PC options hitting the market of late, until InkSeine is out the door. Otherwise we would never finish it!

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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.