Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Fun'

Ink Is Hot.

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

No, I'm not dead. Just busy. Baby, 2yo twins, no sleep, etc., etc.

With all the talk about how tablets suck (for uncreative people who measure productivity by words-per-minute of text entry in office memos, emails, and twitter updates that no one will ever read), I thought it would be fun to do a little ink blog that shows how "Ink is Hot!"

The transcription follows. Note how the pure text conveys a different message. And a rather bland one at that.

Seattle went through an insufferable heat wave last week which inspired a bit of Tablet PC art for me. I was waiting for the bedroom to be not-quite-so-darned hot:

IT IS TOO DARNED HOT

I made the foolish error of leaving the Volvo frog, the official mascot of my vehicle, on the dash with all the windows rolled up while I ran an errand. He was not happy. But he survived the ordeal.

We don't see 108° too often in Seattle.

oh yeah. And it was 5 degrees hotter the next day.

Rebecca Renee has arrived!

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Things have been quiet here lately, but with good reason. I've been a busy daddy, and I'm happy to announce that Rebecca Renee Hinckley has arrived a bit earlier than expected, but at a robust 9lb 2oz. Consumer consumption is not dropping in this household at least!

She joins Sarah and Alissa (not quite 2yo yet!) and beaming momma Angela. The good lady on the left is Dr Debra Stemmerman who is outstanding and brought a difficult 36hr labor to the happy arrival of Rebecca.

Another Girl?

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:00:00 GMT

It’s been a busy summer – so busy, in fact, that the blog has been starved for attention of late. I have some cool posts in the works but it will be a little while longer before I can get them finished.

The exciting news on the home front is that my wife Angela and I are expecting a new addition to the family in December! The ultrasound suggests it is a girl, but it’s a little too early to say for sure. That would give us three little girls under two years old.

My twins, Sarah and Alissa, are now 18 months old and experiencing an early vocabulary explosion. Words that excite them of late include airplane – after their first plane trip to see their great-grandma and other family- as well as “bull-bo” (bulldozer) after our neighbors had their driveway torn out and replaced.

Some other new words they have picked up recently include truck, hike, mount (mountain), kitty, Cleo (our cat), rabbit, swing, outside, fork, cracker, umbrella, elephant, ear, tongue, and pants. I would guess their vocabulary is probably in the vicinity of 200 words and animal sounds now. Maybe a little more.

They can even tell us when they poop now, although they don’t always like to admit it!

My brother and his girlfriend are visiting this week from Boston, so the latest additions are “Uncle” and “Lori.” Pretty soon he will have them saying “Red Sox” as well, I suspect!

JasonJ's InkSanitorium

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:00:00 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.

Dig for Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity with the INTELLIMOLE

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

A conversation with the Tablet PC MVP's this week reminded me of a productivity hack I constructed for my tablet a while back. I guarantee that you will either absolutely love this hack, or think it is the stupidest thing you've ever heard. In my experience, there is little gray area when I mention this idea to people.

It's no secret that buttons are in short supply when you're working with a tablet PC, particularly in the slate mode. Most tablets offer a paucity of buttons along the bezel. But even tablets that do have decent bezel buttons infuriate me because nearly all tablets place them on the right side of the screen - the same side where some 75% of users are holding the pen. So I have to fumble with the pen to use the buttons. Why they are not on the left by default is beyond my ken.

I do use the barrel button on my pen, but only begrudgingly so. It's a bit awkward, I hit it by accident, and it often messes up my pen strokes even when I do intend to hit it.

I was digging around for alternate solutions to this dilemma. I realized that I had to get everything off of the pen and tablet.

My solution? Kick that tablet into high gear with the INTELLIMOLE.

The INTELLIMOLE peeks out Tablet PC productivity running out of gas? Then step on it!

Here's what you'll need:

A wireless mouse, and a willingness to commit bodily harm to it.
A foot switch.
A soldering iron.
Black electrical tape.

Rip open your mouse (unscrew it if you are feeling humane) and just wire up the foot switch to the contacts for the wireless mouse's right-click button. Use the black electrical tape to cover up the optical mouse eye so it won't disturb the pen's cursor position. Throw the footpedal under the desk, and just make sure that the wireless mouse and the receiver are within range of one another. This is what my completed INTELLIMOLE kit looks like:

Now you can stomp your foot to right click whenever you like, without interfering with your pen or tablet. Use the Control Panel settings for the mouse to reprogram the right-button click to some other function if you like.

The downside is that you do have to plug the wireless mouse receiver into your tablet's USB port, so it's really only useful while you're using your tablet on a desk.

For that foot switch, if you want the best experience, I strongly recommend purchasing a round one. That way it doesn't matter which way it is oriented when you go to step on it. The Linemaster GEM V3 switch is a good choice, albeit a bit pricey at $50 from Allied Electronics. They do also have an assortment of cheaper ones (that aren't round).

Perhaps Tablet PC designers will finally take pity on us one day and sprinkle a button or two along the left edge of that tablet bezel as well. I'd dearly love to have a programmable "magic wand" button there that would be available for tablet PC applications to use as they saw fit.

Until then, I'll continue to tunnel through the netherworlds of Tablet PC productivity with the INTELLIMOLE.

Other Posts in the AlpineInker's Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity Series:

Great Visit with Tablet PC MVP's

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:00:00 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.

Faux-OQO with origami

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

It's been a very busy couple of weeks for me, so I haven't had time to attend to the blog, or much of anything else for that matter.

But one thing that has been on my mind from time to time is the OQO Model 02 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). It's an intriguing device but I have wavered for some time now on whether or not it is the right device for me, and whether it will offer the right fit for the projects I have in mind for it. I don't know anyone who owns one, so taking one for a test drive has not been an option.

The active digitizer on the device is extremely appealing to me. Obviously, I want to use InkSeine on it. The passive touchscreens that I've tried on other devices are rather unsatisfactory for inking.

But yeah, I keep hearing the screen is small on the OQO. But how small is it? The entire device measures 5.6" by 3.3" and is 1" thick. It weighs just one pound. Some people like the OQO's diminutive stature because they can slip it in their pocket. Others don't much care for it, because their big meaty hands just cannot write on such a small screen.

Got it. But how big is that really? How would that feel to me? Would it be useful in my nutty research project ideas? I just can't decide!

What to do, what to do?!?

Finally I could stand the waffling no more. I had a bit of time today, so I made a scale model "OQO origami" by using InkSeine and PowerPoint together. Then I printed the origami, cut it out, and folded it up into my own little "Faux OQO" device. I taped it to some cardboard to make it a little more rugged, and I carried it around with me during the day. It looks surprisingly realistic. Maybe, just for kicks, I should try to fool my co-workers with it. Tomorrow I'll have to pretend to drop it down the stairs, or fumble it off the railing of the four-story atrium that we have here in the new Microsoft Research building.

This bitmap probably won't print out to scale, but my OQO origami PowerPoint will. I've attached the file to this post so you can join in the fun. It's attached as a .zip file because I can't directly post .ppt files on this blog. Just open up the zip and you'll see the ppt file in there. The attachment also appears as a link at the very end of this post.

Now you can make your own Faux OQO and truck it with you in your travels. See if it stirs your gadget lust as well. Better yet, have some fun and pretend you are using it in meetings, on the bus, or on the subway. Fake out some gullible rubes. Go ahead.

If they get mad when they discover your ruse, just tell ‘em the AlpineInker made you do it.

Jump Start your Creativity with Custom InkSeine Notebooks

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:00:00 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?

Artistic Interlude #1

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Tonight I stumbled across a piece of artwork that I did many years ago. And I thought, “Hey, I still really like that!” Plus I figured the blog could benefit from an artistic interlude, so here it is:

This is from a brief period of colorful geometric abstractions that I did in the early to mid 1990’s. I have very few surviving pieces like this. Untitled, colored pencil on paper.

The main drawback of this piece is that because it doesn’t exist as stroke data on my Tablet PC, I can’t use the handwriting recognizer to name it. Hence the dreaded “Untitled.”

What is the Role of Sketching and Handwriting in Web Design?

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:00:00 GMT

A lot of ink blogs are just a vile mess.

But there are a few, like Sumocat, who really get it right.

Partly it is just because his handwriting is so beautiful, but also, the interesting content is there to back it up. When ink blogging is done right, the format can be extremely engaging and offers a personal touch to communication that is just not possible with text. And, of course, you can freely intermingle sketches and diagrams, since the pen is not confined to ascii characters on Cartesian coordinates.

But how can ink and sketching best be used in web design in general?

I was perusing the weblog of Richard Banks, of Microsoft Research Cambridge, where I stumbled across Richard's post about an article in Smashing Magazine on the role of sketching and drawing in web design. The article is a visual smorgasbord, with dozens of examples. The eye candy ranges from fairly traditional pages with a smattering of hand-drawn elements, to artistic web forays in sketching. Others can only be described as bizarre experiments in Flash that are not for the faint of heart. It's definitely worth checking out, both for inspiration and as examples of "what not to do!"

Not surprisingly, many of the best examples come from photographers, artists, and designers. Here is one example that I found both visually appealing, and usable as a web site that you just want to spend time at:

Not Your Average Joe

Sadly, they didn't include Sumocat's site. He does more than just pure ink posts. Sumocat recently wrote about how Build 52 can be combined with Ript to produce some cool posts. I like the results - two great tastes that go together!

Sumocat's Scribbles

Of course, I've taken my own best crack at using ink and sketching in an effective manner. The entire InkSeine tutorial is formatted as a comic book. I found Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics to be quite a helpful resource when I was putting this tutorial together. I've gotten quite a few comments from people who tell me they (and their kids) love it.

InkSeine Tutorial

But to be 100% objective, I also have received one comment from someone who absolutely hated it. This person wrote to me:

The comic book turned me off from ever trying Ink Seine. It was clutter ridden and didn't provide a good impression on the product.

Oh well. I guess sketchy web sites just aren't for everyone. But they're definitely for me.

Here's ink in your eye!