One of the biggest requests folks have had when making the changeover from GoBinder to OneNote was how to port all those notes. Prior to today, the only way was to "print" them, one by one, using the OneNote 2007 printer driver. I know of this pain quite well, because I was a huge GoBinder user and have taken those time intensive steps.

Well, Jeremy Lewi has come to our rescue. He has just released a GoBinder 2006 to OneNote 2007 conversion hack / utility and it is available for free! Here is a description, and a link to the download / instructions. Consider this a hack and at "alpha" level, and could use the help of the community in making it better / testing it out. He is also making the source code available to anyone who would like to improve upon this conversion utility.

A program to convert notes in Agilix Gobinder to notes in OneNote 2007. My goal for this conversion was to preserve content (i.e ink and text) so that I could edit in OneNote 2007. This is a hack which I only intended to run once. As a result, there are many features which are still missing (i.e how to handle imported documents in GoBinder).

Well done, Jeremy!

LifeHacker.com has a great roundup of notetaking articles, many of which can be directly applied to using a tablet pc. So, whether you use OneNote, Journal, EverNote, or GoBinder to take notes on your Tablet PC / Ultra-Mobile PC, take a look at these tips. They are quite good.

• Tips For Handwritten Shorthand
• Geek to Live: Take great notes
• Download of the Day: WhizFolders
• Save and annotate the Web with Scrapbook
• Take perfect notes
• Download of the Day: ZuluPad
• Social note taking for students
• Take study-worthy lecture notes
• Download of the Day: EverNote 1.5 Beta (Windows)

In addition, give Tracy Hooten's Hipster article a read. While not Tablet focused, it provides some good insight on where technology falls short, and the need for instant on / easy acces to electronic note taking in extremely portable devices. As I've written about before, I still use paperbased notebooks from time to time for many of the same reasons that Tracy describes.

If you have been following Tablet PCs for any length of time, you have surely heard of Agilix. Agilix was an early stand-out in the Tablet PC space with their GoBinder application, development on FranklinCovey's Plan Plus for Windows XP, and their Infinotes SDK. If you know what you are looking for, you will see the Infinotes SDK being used in a lot of applications today.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Calkins, Vice President of Marketing for Agilix, about where they are headed and the future of GoBinder, their popular notetaking application for the Tablet PC.

Rob Bushway: Mark, it has been 4 years since the launch of the Tablet PC platform. I remember early on that Agilix was leading the way in the development of Tablet PC applications, with Tablet Planner, GoBinder, and InfiNotes. It seemed to many folks in the tablet pc space that Agilix was the poster child for what we all hoped lay ahead for Tablet PC software.  Talk to me a little bit about the start-up of Agilix and those first couple of years.

Mark Calkins: I wasn’t here the first few years, so I missed that phase. But the team talks about it quite often. The early Agilix team created some amazing solutions for FranklinCovey and ones that we sold. We banked a lot on the Tablet PC market, and unfortunately it didn’t take off like we had hoped. The company was even smaller then than it is now, and yet we achieved a lot. It was pretty exciting from what I understand. It helps to have an experienced team with a focus. The focus was clear and the products were delivered. Unfortunately, the market didn’t materialize as we all expected, so we had to branch out. That’s what took us to the education market in the first place.

Rob Bushway: With the release of GoBinder 2006 earlier this year, Agilix seemed to lose a lot of momentum with GoBinder, in my opinion due to a buggy release. We were all looking forward to module development, plug-ins, further enhancements to GoBinder, etc. I know there was a big rewrite to go to .net 2.0. What happened? Have things stabilized out?

Mark Calkins: Agilix was experimenting with a new architecture. First, we were moving to a new platform, the .NET Framework. We were hoping this would cut development time and costs, and allow us to leverage the work we had done with InfiNotes. Second, we were hoping to build a single platform that would allow us to support our work with FranklinCovey, our efforts in the higher education space as well as continue our efforts with GoBinder. Third, we were trying to build an open architecture, so others could extend what we were doing. On paper it made a lot of sense. The challenge was making it happen—we ran into a number of technical issues. It seemed that .NET was not ready for prime time, at least for shrink wrapped software. It was way too slow. And we found we were trying to do too much at the same time. And trying to do one platform didn’t appear to work. What worked well architecture wise for FranklinCovey did not work well for higher education. And we didn’t anticipate the time it would take to make the SDK a reality. So a combination of too many objectives with too few resources and some unfortunately architecture issues resulted in something that didn’t quite meet our expectations. We had to go back to the drawing board.

We decided we could not be all things to a lot of different people and markets. We saw our future as getting more into education and learning, so we made the decision to focus there. We decided to learn from our mistakes and ended up re-architecting a whole new product, called GoCourse. This product became the basis for second version of Blackboard Backpack, and a few other projects we have done  for Thomson and Early College. The results were fantastic. The platform really delivers. It runs on .NET 2.0, it’s amazingly fast and is very customizable, allowing us to support a variety of education-oriented solutions.

Rob Bushway: I’m sure you’ve felt the pressure, on many fronts, from Microsoft and OneNote 2007. What does that mean for the future of GoBinder and your focus on Tablet PC development? Are we going to see a GoBinder 2007 release?

Mark Calkins: There’s no question that Microsoft cannot be ignored, even in the Tablet PC space. While I doubt OneNote 2003 met Microsoft’s expectations, the product does have some great capabilities. And what we’ve seen from OneNote 2007 shows Microsoft is definitely committed to this space. We sort of figured we’d never be able to take Microsoft head on, and that’s another reason we decided to go over to education and learning markets with some unique capabilities. Sure, OneNote is widely distributed in colleges, but it doesn’t do anything like what Blackboard Backpack or Early College EPIC do. And where we are heading will take us further from what OneNote does. The education and learning markets have great potential and we like the direction it is going.

We definitely won’t abandon the Tablet PC. It’s too easy for us to leverage our InfiNotes work. And the Tablet PC is a great product for higher education. But I doubt we’ll spend much time in the general purpose Tablet PC market in the future. FranklinCovey still delivers their solutions, which we will continue to support. Both make the Tablet PC a natural for us to continue to support going forward.

I’m not sure we will do a GoBinder 2007 that would be a natural follow on to GoBinder 2006. We want to stick with the GoCourse platform and there are a number of things we dropped out of the previous architecture to make it faster and more robust. These were features that were hard to maintain and little demand in the higher education market. And we won’t be supporting the SDK any longer—we just don’t have enough resources (technically, it never made it out of beta test). If and when we come out with GoBinder 2007, it will have a definite education, training and learning focus, along with Tablet PC support. Many of the features will be similar to GoBinder 2006’s, but quite a bit will change. Some features will be gone.

Rob Bushway: Being heavily focused on the education market, what has been your experience with the Tablet PC roll-out in the education sector? Are you seeing many deployments or are they mostly laptop based? In your opinion, is  it trending up or down?

Mark Calkins: The Tablet PC has a lot of potential in education, especially higher education and K-12. It is definitely making progress, but unfortunately not fast enough. Many implementations are still laptop based. There are some great exceptions, and we hope they continue. Quite often, when we demonstrate Blackboard Backpack  and show the Tablet PC features it supports, people are still pretty blown away.

Rob Bushway: Where is Agilix focused right now? Who is Agilix’s customer?

Mark Calkins: Agilix is focused on one major effort: building private-label versions of our GoCourse application platform for ISVs and SIs in education and in learning. We started in higher education, and are now moving to government and corporate markets. We are getting a lot of traction, and that is encouraging. There is a HUGE need for what we are doing in serving the department of defense. Everyone who has seen our solution is completely amazed by what we are doing. We think there is the same potential in the corporate market as well. And some of our work is taking us outside the U.S, such as China.

At the same time, we are still looking at a solution we can deliver ourselves. We are working on a new plan that is quite different from anything we’ve done. Still focused on learning, but moving out in a new direction, leveraging Web 2.0 trends. It’s still in prototype stage, but we’re pretty excited about it. We think it has a good chance of being a delivered solution in the future, although only time will tell at this point.

We really like the whole education, training and learning space. So that’s the focus. Primarily selling to vendors, like Blackboard, Early College and Thomson. But with plans to do some direct to users, but very unlike what we’ve done in the past.

Rob Bushway: Talk to me about your software team. I met several of them years ago when they used to work for Folio Corporation; and really enjoyed getting to know Bernd and Jeff at  various forums and conferences. You guys have managed to hold on to a great set of engineers.

Mark Calkins: We have some incredibly talented developers at Agilix. I’ve been in high tech for 30 years, and haven’t worked with a team like this one. Every single developer is able to do what 3-5 people do in other companies, and a lot faster too. With our new direction, people are more excited at Agilix than we have been in a long time, since the early days of the company. There is a new energy here, and that has also helped to make these guys more committed and productive.

Rob Bushway: What advice would you give to the small ISV shop starting to develop and market mobile software?

Mark Calkins: That’s a good question. We have probably developed a couple double business plans to get to where we are now. What we started out doing is not what we’re doing now. I’m not sure we have all the answers but a few things seem clear. First, it’s great to get focused, but you need to be very flexible. If what you are working on isn’t working, don’t be afraid to make a change in direction. Second, take risks with new opportunities. You can’t succeed without taking risks, even if you make big mistakes. For example, Windows Vista looks like it has some pretty amazing opportunities with mobility, and from what we’ve heard from Microsoft, it doesn’t appear that many companies are fully leveraging some of the built-in mobility features yet. RSS and peer-to-peer networking could be very interesting aspects of Vista that have yet to be exploited, for example. Third, get connected. Probably one of the most amazing things about Agilix is how well connected the company is with Intel, Microsoft and other key players in our market. We are able to do things that many other companies much larger than we can do. For example, right now we are doing a joint marketing project with Intel that they are paying for that is hitting over 20,000 education executives with some very high touch marketing. We would have never got that without connections. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that our new platform, GoCourse, is optimized for Core Duo either.

Rob Bushway: Mark, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. I know our readers really appreciate the update on Agilix.

Mark Calkins: You’re welcome.

Last week, I posted a link to BlackBoards blog where Melissa wrote about Tablet PCs and education. In her article, Melissa made reference to a Tablet PC / Education research project that Agilix, BlackBoard, Intel, and CUNY participated in with the Center for Digital Education.

Melissa emailed a pdf of the report to me if you are interested in reading it.

Melissa Chotiner contributes to a Blackboard blog and wrote a really good article on Tablet PCs and education. In the article, she points to a research project they participated in, interviews Brad Baldwin, of Agilix , and also points to StudentTabletPC.com . She pulls some really good quotes from one of Tracy’s articles about how she integrates a tablet pc into her educational experience. Some really good info here if you are interested in tablet pcs, ultra-mobile pcs, and education.

Tracey: “I’m so passionate about tablets because it’s one of those rare occasions where you find the perfect solution to a problem. Keeping organized for school use to take a lot of time and effort. I use to spend hours organizing my binders and keeping everything neat and tidy to satisfy the perfectionist in me and make things easy to find when I was studying. Now it’s just a simple matter of saving files in the right place. The software and hardware aren’t perfect yet obviously, but the idea of going digital with everything is. When everything you need at any point in any class is right there with you and organized…now that’s just efficient.

On Friday, I wrote about some troubling issues regarding the performance and bug issues that many users have been experiencing since upgrading to GoBinder 2006. Agilix has been steadily at work at trying to address these issues and have released a new build (2117). If you use GoBinder 2006, go to Help, Check For Updates and you can install this new build. Preliminary testing from GottaBeMobile.com reader, Richard Mayrand, indicates some improved performance.

I’m installing it right now and importing my 400mb database. I’ll report back on my findings later today. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that this new build is available to Plan Plus for XP users, yet.

Update: I’ve installed the build and imported my database. This new build is much faster than previous builds. I’d highly recommend installing this new build. Richard Mayrand has also installed it and offers this comment:

I received the following email from a friend of mine who uses Franklin Covey’s Plan Plus for Windows and recently “upgraded” from version 4.0 to 5.0. Plan Plus uses the same foundation system as GoBinder 2006. What I’ve been reading on www.TabletPCBuzz.com , Agilix’s support forum, and this email really has me concerned.

Have you played with the new PlanPlus yet? It is BUGGY and SLOOOOOWWW! I cannot believe the most important program I use daily has become a big muddled porky. Is GoBinder any faster/better? I have complained twice to FranklinCovey and they have told me they’re working on it. But I can’t believe that they would release the program in this condition. Not one earlier version has had this many problems or is this slow.

Overall sluggishness, bugs, and sync issues are causing people to really question the value of upgrading, even though the upgrade is free. Much of the sluggishness is being attributed to porting over to .net 2.0; however, I’ m becoming very concerned that Franklin Covey and Agilix have got a big problem on their hands that needs to be addressed quickly in a very public manner about their plans and acknowledgement of the problems. An email to all registered users is very much needed. In addition, answer these users problems on the buzz support forum – its’ your forum, participate in it.

Because I’d been beta testing GoBinder 2006 since last year, I was very surprised when Agilix officially released it several weeks ago. In my book, it just wasn’t ready – too many bugs, too slow. What I was really surprised about was when Franklin Covey announced their release of Plan Plus 5.0 in the middle of the GoBinder beta. Do Franklin Covey users have early beta builds of GoBinder 2006? Makes me wonder.

Take all of the above thoughts from a person who has been using GoBinder and Tablet Planner from day 1 and have evangelized the product from the beginning because I love their product and I really like the folks at Agilix. I want to see them succeed, but I'm more concerned about what this is doing to the users who depend on the product.

If you remember my post from last week regarding the Ultra Mobile PC being demoed at the Blackboard Conference, I said  that several of the apps mentioned to be built to run on the UMPC  included Blackboard Backpack and GoBinder 2006.

Now that there is a list of ISVs who have stated that they will support the UMPC platform by ensuring their apps run nicely on the UMPC and take advantage of this new interface, I asked Mark Calkins, Vice President of Marketing for Agilix, what exactly they did to make GoBinder 2006 fit the UMPC platform. Here was his reply:

The main things we did for the March 1 release was to rearrange the toolbars to work better on a 7” screen and support the new Touch Screen functionality in the OS.

I’m waiting on some screen shots from Mark with their app running in the emulator so we’ll have an idea of it looks like. I’ll post them when I get them.

I just received this notice from Agilix regarding potential data corruption issues for folks who had done beta testing for GoBinder 2006. If you used a beta version of GoBinder 2006, please read the following:

There were numerous defects fixed during the beta period, some of these bugs probably wrote bad or incorrect data into your database. We highly recommend that anyone who is using a database that was created or edited with a beta version of the software create a new database and import the data from the beta one. If you don’t do this it is quite likely that you will get corrupt data and suffer data loss.

To do this you can follow these steps:

1. Run GoBinder.

2. From the File menu select New | GoBinder database...

3. Type in the name of the new database.

4. Once the database is open, from the File menu select Import...

5. Select “Import from a GoBinder database” from the list and click the Next button.

6. Click the “Choose Database” button and browse to the database you wish to import.

7. Click the “Finish” button.

Thanks again for participating in the GoBinder 2006 beta!

I’ve been told from a very reliable source that Microsoft unoffically showed the origami pc yesterday at BlackBoard World to a select 50 customers of Blackboard – among the software to be included from day one: GoBinder and Backpack. He also confirmed that they will announce it on March 9 with Intel. Considering GoBinder and Backpack and the BlackBoard markets ( all centered around students), you can start to see who Microsoft’s target market will be with this new device, and why they would use this opportunity to give a “sneak peak”

Well, this comes as a surprise. According to Agilix’s press release, GoBinder 2006 has been officially released. I’ve checked their beta support page and there is no announcement there, although it does appear on their homepage.

Checkout our InkShow for a good overview of GoBinder 2006.  Download the new version (build 2029) here . If you are a beta tester, go to Help / Check For Updates to download the update.  This upgrade is free for existing GoBinder 2005 users, $99 for new installations.  Here is a little snippet of their press release.

Watch our InkShow of Agilix GoBinder 2006

We cover new UI improvements, categories, tabs, folders, the improved ink interface, and much more in the beta version of GoBinder 2006.

• Watch the InkShow
• Download GoBinder 2006 beta
• Visit the Beta support site

I’ve officially switched over from GoBinder to OneNote 12 beta for my free form notetaking and storage of printed documents. In addition, when I need to do free form notetaking within MindManager, I create a hyperlink from a topic to the OneNote section where I am storing that note.

I’ve printed all of my GoBinder notes into OneNote 12 – note that GoBinder 2006 currently has a bug printing to OneNote 12 using the MDI option, so I printed them using GoBinder 2005. I’m also in the process of printing all of my Bible stuff into OneNote 12. All of my books and Bibles will be available for OneNote 12 within a month or so of OneNote 12 going in to public beta.

The main reasons for making the jump are as follows:

1) I can’t talk about features of OneNote 12 beta, but suffice it to say it is really stable. You can read Chris Pratley’s blog for more info.

2) I really like doing all of my project planning and task management within MindManager. However, the free form noteaking in MindManager leaves a lot to be desired. I can, however, link to individual OneNote sections. Because everything in GoBinder is stored in a single database, I can’t link from MindManager topics to anything within GoBinder. Having that ability to have file level access to my notes is very important now.

3) Note flag summaries are in OneNote 2003 and 12, not in GoBinder 2006.

4) linking internally to other notes ( a great feature!!!!)

I’ll still support all of my Bible text in GoBinder 2005, 2006 and future releases. In fact, I’m working on something with Agilix that will make it even easier to implement. I can’t, however, use GoBinder on a day to day basis any longer. The way I work has changed over the past year, and GoBinder no longer fits.