Ink in Firefox? Loren’s at it again….

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I’m not sure whether Loren has more time or ideas. Whichever it is, he keeps coming up with new things to do with ink. First he came out with ink in IE (primarily on form filling), and now he decided to play with doing ink in Firefox. Surprised a Microsoft MVP is playing with Firefox development? If you really knew that much about our little MVP group, you’d be surprised to find out just how rebellious they can be!

“TabletPCBlogs has a cool feature that enables you to author a post with ink. However, in order to blog in ink, you have to use Internet Explorer. This isn’t a bad thing–at least to me–but there are quite a few people I know that prefer not to use IE and are Firefox fans instead. Up to this point, I wasn’t sure what we could do about this. Well, we may have a solution after all. The snapshot below is a picture of me inking in Firefox. How was this done? The solution employed here uses a special Firefox plugin that provides inking capabilities. The nice part about this solution is that no ActiveX is required and the inking surface comes up quickly. The downside is that the user is going to need to install the ink plugin. Actually, this isn’t a bad deal. As it stands now, the ink plugin only supports Tablet PCs and Windows XP systems with the Microsoft Tablet PC SDK installed. Also, recognition is only available on a Tablet. It does get me thinking about supporting a more generic solution, but that will have to wait. Right now I’m focusing on enabling a scripting level for the plugin so that JavaScript can interact fully with the ink surface, such as set the color and thickness of the brush, catching the recognized text, and so on. Like always, so many exciting things to do.”

Check out Loren’s Firefox efforts thus far and make you comments on this post in his blog. It is not released code yet, but he says it should not be too long!