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Thursday, February 21, 2008

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InkSeine Fixes On Their Way Next Week!

For those of you that are out of the US and having some localization problems in InkSeine... The fix is on it's way. The main symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, loading the tutorial, and loading files that had been saved will not work. Also, there are some other fixes that were smashed already as well.

From the blog of Ken Hinckley:

Fix for broken InkSeine file association. If you double-click on an InkSeine (.IKS) file, it will open up inside of InkSeine without forcing you to manually perform the association to InkSeine. Fixed!
Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog that some international users have encountered when doing a search. This can be worked-around now by installing a language pack, but we believe our localization fixes will remove the need to install any language packs. Fixed!
Option to disable automatic checking for updates has been added to the installer and to the InkSeine Options panel. We hope you'll take advantage of this great feature to get future updates & bug fixes, but we understand that some people don't like to be prompted for automatic updates, so now you can turn that off if you like. Fixed!
Missing Notes file types added to the notes filter (looks like the OneNote icon). New extension supported: .onecache (shared OneNote notebooks are cached in these; you also may need to add this extension to Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search for the indexer to pick it up), Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK). Fixed!
.TXT file extension removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion for some people. Fixed!
Probably also a fix for the annoyance where icons that you drag out from the search results list don't drop directly under the location where you lift the pen, and maybe a couple of other little things.

Thanks for the quick fixes!!

InkSeine

2/21/2008 11:30 AM MST

InkSeine Fixes On Their Way Next Week! Comments [7] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Thursday, February 21, 2008 1:04:11 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Anyone use this a lot? I tried it out but I'm not sure what to use it for. I don't use Outlook and don't like the idea of Windows Desktop Search draining my battery.
More elegant Sticky Notes?

Rodfather

Thursday, February 21, 2008 2:45:31 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Rodfather, I'm glad you tried it. The search functionality is one of the most interesting features, so if you don't like Windows Desktop Search (which is admittedly demanding for some of the devices out there) then it will be less useful. At least for myself, though, I find search is so important to working efficiently on a mobile device that I'm willing to pay a small tax for that. Vista Search is definitely better behaved in terms of hits on your performance.

It is possible to run it without Desktop Search as long as you don't try to do any "Personal Search" commands. There is an option to make Web Search the default search command instead.

I did a series of blog posts on some ways that I use it: http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/01/22/twelve-days-of-inkseine.aspx

There have also been people discussing it in the forums here.

At its essence, there aren't a ton of program features that you can't find in other applications (OneNote, Journal, and so forth). The pen-centric user interface for inking, the search capabilities, and the ease of pulling links to other content into your notes are the main things that sets it apart.

Ken Hinckley

Thursday, February 21, 2008 6:33:49 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Great stuff. Thanks Ken.

Rodfather

Thursday, February 21, 2008 7:55:32 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Wow your 21" Cintiq tablet is insane. I can see the use of InkSeine on a monster tablet. No scrolling makes sense.
On a 5.6" screen on the Fujitsu U810, it doesn't feel right not being able to scroll. I could make a new page..
I guess I dived in thinking it could be a nice alternative for a ink blogging tool but it's better to be used as a scrapbook.

Rodfather

Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:39:21 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I agree. I've used it some on my Samsung Q1 and the no scrolling model + small screen there is not really a winning combination. While I still think on a "pad-of-paper-sized" tablet the no-scroll model can have many virtues, a lot of people have asked for ways to reduce the limitations of the no-scroll model. I'll definitely be thinking about whether there are ways we could have some limited ability to expand the view without the full complexity of pan+zoom which can easily become a disaster. If I can figure out something good there, it would likely benefit UMPC devices as well.

A final confession: UMPC devices were an afterthought in the design. We got a few UMPC users at Microsoft, but also alot of UMPC users on the net wrote to me or blogged about their interest, so we did some work to make sure InkSeine would work on those devices, but it was never really designed for 800x480 screens.

I plan to get an OQO 02 now that I have a little more time to play, and that will bring me added motivation to make it work better on that platform.

I have thought about ink blogging, e.g. if you could take an inkseine note and export it to what amounts to an HTML image map that could be very cool for sharing your notes easily. That definitely seems feasible, but we have some other bugs to fix and other projects that need attention, so I'm not quite sure when we will get to that.

Thanks again
Ken

Ken Hinckley

Thursday, February 21, 2008 10:06:42 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Thanks for the great response. I'm one who would like to see UMPC's as a light weight, portable inking device. It would be great if you had UMPC's in mind when creating future inking applications.
Hopefully hardware manufacturers will take note as well and create more UMPC's with an active digitizer, or ideally, dual-mode active/passive screens.

Warner's video sums it up well.
http://www.gottabemobile.com/DreamingOfTheUltimateUMPC.aspx

Adding great software to go with the small screens would be fantastic.

Rodfather

Monday, February 25, 2008 3:20:38 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I've just uploaded a new build with the fix for this problem, and some other small things.

See:

http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/02/25/inkseine-localization-problem-fixed.aspx

Ken Hinckley

Comments are closed.