Another article from a writer who thinks pens are only for writing. Ugh. Makes me appreciate my work environment of edits, annotations, and equations.

10:00 am PST? That's about...7 pm here in Spain. Less than an hour. Countdown has begun :D

I just activated the install link. Have fun everyone!
Ken

I'm downloading it, I'm downloading it!!! :D

Justa first thought: amazing! I love the way menus works, very intuitive on fast. Itseems to me as how a OS for tablets should be.

There's also a feature story about InkSeine on research.microsoft.com now:

Go Fishing for Ink with InkSeine.

Ken, you are a UI God! How long before we can see this type UI in OneNote? Bill's successor, are you listening?

Thanks, Ken. Super nice program! This rocks!

Thanks! Glad you like it so far!

But also, please be sure to tell us if there's anything that doesn't work well for you: be brutally honest, we can take it! it's the only way to figure out how to improve stuff :-)

The only complaint I would have is that the hiding of the tooltips is kind of slow. And about 1 out of 5 times my stroke isn't registered on the corner menu thingy.

But I'm pretty sure that's not InkSeine's problem though. I'm running this on a TC1100 with Vista and 1.5 gigs of RAM. I've got some speed issues just from my hardware and OS combo. All in all, it's running pretty speedily on my TC1100 with Vista.

It would be nice to have the right click configurable instead of just using the lasso tool. Personally I'd like to have it switch to highlite on right click. Or, maybe eraser.

You might try setting the "hover feedback for radial menus appears..." option to be closer to "instantly" on the slider.

This was added in part due to request from Steve S. who was Also running on the TC 1100. the issue is that transparency is really slow on that tablet. same goes for the tips. We may add a "no transparency" option at some point to handle this better.

Yup, I was playing with that. I originally went the wrong way and moved it more towards being slower. It appears to help moving about halfway closer to Immediately.

Love the Options menu by the way. Looks very cool.

The more I use it, the more I love it. The only problem I have found is that if inkseine is maximized, I can't deploy my windows task bar (I have it in automatically hide mode). I have to put inkseine window in minimized mode and resize it manually. I don't know if it is about inkseine or something else, but I have found this behaviour only with inkseine, no other software. But a very small problem, if it is one :D

Thanks Taliesin. I don't use auto-hide and nobody has reported that issue before, but we may be determining the client area for InkSeine incorrectly in that case. It's probably a simple fix when we get time to tackle it :-)

Ken, thank all of you so much! I am really enjoying "intestine" (LOL).

I have posted on the InkSeine pages that your link to the Tutorial for non-US date users doesn't seem to be working i.e. nothing happening when I click on it in FF3 or IE7.

@Philip -
You can access the on-line version of the tutorial here:
http://research.microsoft.com/InkSeine/tutorial-welcome.html

From within InkSeine, the Tutorial command currently does not work for non-US date users. We have a fix for that which we will roll out when we post our next update.

I'm loving Inkseine! I have a passive digitizer and I am noticing that there are a few things that would improve the user experience for me. I can't use hover and single click. It would be nice to have an option to use single tap & double tap instead. Also, I get the green cross when I lasso things, but I'm not getting the immediate search when I go part it Is that a passive digitizer issue, or just me?

I'm getting the hang of the pen based UI, even so, and I really love it! Thanks!

Sharon

P.S. I want this UI for OneNote, too!

@sbtablet: the "immediate search" from the lasso has been deprecated to an option. Some people reported that it was error prone, and that seemed to be supported by our data logs from internal testing (it's a little hard to say for sure). If you open the options panel, there is an option there called something like "use lasso as a shortcut for search" that you can check to try it out if you like.

And yes, you're right, passive digitizer has no hover. You can tap and hold on the menus to see the choices though, or just wiggle your pen a little bit on the menu icons. We don't have any plans to use double tap - I'm pretty sure that would just make things worse. Do yourself a favor and spring for an active digitizer :-)

Ken

Thank you so much Ken! You did it! I love InkSein.
The only thing I concern about is web search. I understand that you work for Microsoft but can we use Google rather than microsoft live search? Indeed, "Tool ring" scroll is not working in the Excel.

Heon-Jin

@neurojin: I replied about Google vs. Live search in the forum thread.

Regarding the "tool ring" scroll in Excel, the reason it doesn't work is that Excel ONLY responds to the mouse wheel events when the mouse button is up (that is, when it is NOT held down).

So when you move the pen on the screen, Windows treats that the same as holding down the mouse button. All InkSeine does is send mouse wheel events to the focus window, depending on how you are circling the pen. So Excel receives the events... and ignores them because the "mouse button", which is actually the pen tip in this case, is down.

So unless we can convince someone in Excel to change the code, this is not going to get fixed. And I'm guessing there's probably some really good reason Excel does things this way - maybe there's some requirement of Excel's interaction model that would make it undesirable to allow scrolling while the left mouse button is held down, or something else. Whenever I've had interactions with the MS Office team and UI design people, I've been very impressed. Everything is thought through very carefully and nothing is left to chance. So I doubt it is a random oversight, and I'm pretty sure they didn't design it with some crazy scrolling widget from a dude in MS Research in mind :-)

@Ken: I'd love an active digitizer, but I have two kids and a spouse all in college. So Ihave to settle for stealing my other half's Motion 1600 when I can get my hands on it!

S.

Dear ken the download link is not active in my area , Doha , qatar can you fix it itchin g to try inksiene.......

mohammed

This looks very interesting and is a nice testbed of some new ideas.
However, it is not a replacement for Journal, which is a wonderful light swiss army knife of an application.
To even begin to compete with Journal it needs:
1. text support.
2. virtual print to inkseine support
3. good actual print capability from inkseine (I don't know how good this is yet actually but wanted to add it to my list as it is majorly important. With this journal bests by a mile even the venerable OneNote ... which has horrible printing support last time I checked.
By that I mean, I need to be able to pull a single 8.5x11" sheet of printed material out of my note as I see fit. Some notes can be pages long but I don't need to print all that. These apps need to recognize it is still a paper world and they need to be able to put make their data available and accessible in that format on a sheet by sheet basis.
Journal does this beautifully, OneNote couldn't the last time I checked.

Finally, put a darned scroll bar on it! Make it optional sure. But I don't want to draw little circles on a bulls-eye every time I need to scroll! Maybe some people like this... And it is a nice feature on machines or at times when space is at an absolute premium. But it SURELY needs to be optional. This is a classic case of lost functionality due to conformation to some conceptually "cool" thing that a new technology provides.

- mike

@Mike: I agree with you on all three points. We have zero functionality on points 1 & 2 right now, which are both big holes in the current functionality. We do support printing, but that is one of the few "standard" Windows dialogs we use at all, and we don't support many options there.

On the circle gesture, you can draw it as big as you want (it doesn't have to stay within the confines of the circular area). But I hear what you are saying about the scrollbar. For scrolling a long distance, the scrollbar definitely beats the circle-to-scroll gesture. If we can get continuous scrolling to work at some time, you can be sure we'd have a scroll bar option to go along with that. I appreciate the candid comments on that, that's very helpful in our thinking and planning!

@mohammed: I've asked our systems/networking people to investigate this. I'd love to make the software available to you, but at the moment there's nothing I can do to address that. Thanks for letting us know that you were not able to access the download.

many thanx ken for your reply i downloaded it

i will keep you updated of what i think about it

Ken: I have a Raon Everun running XP and MS Office 2007. I'd love to get InkSeine up and running. Your thoughts?

Unfortunately InkSeine does require the Tablet PC Edition of XP. We depend on the handwriting recognition and ink rendering capabilities there.

Some UMPC devices with touchscreens are sold with just ordinary XP, which seems like a very bad thing to me. Sadly, InkSeine can't run on those.

Maybe it's time to get yourself a new tablet if you can afford it!
:-)

I noticed that the scratch-out function doesn't work on my notes. I have to use the eraser instead. Is this a feature in a future version?