Are You an Inveterate Doodler?

If you are like a lot of people, when you get stuck in a meeting, your hand begins drawing all sorts of doodles instead of actual notes. I know I do it, and Microsoft Research’s Ken Hinckley does it, too. Personally, I think it is a sign of great intelligence :-)

Ken’s even come up with a unique way of titling his doodles by letting the recognizer title it, something he calls a “Tablet PC-hallucinated title”. What a great idea!

Knowing there are a lot of other “inveterate doodler’s” out there, Ken is running a special contest on his blog, soliciting doodles for his website, otherwise known as the “Museum of Modern Doodles”. You gotta love this guy!

Submit your entry by following these tips as supplied by Ken:

• I sketched the two pieces above with InkSeine. With InkSeine I can easily translate my handwriting-or doodles- to text by lassoing some strokes, picking the search command, and then taking a snapshot of the resulting query. InkSeine will be available for external release soon. If you are reading this blog post then you know that is February 15, 2008.
• If you use Windows Journal, you can do the same by lassoing some strokes, and then from the Actions menu, choose Convert Handwriting to Text.
• If you’re using OneNote, the game is a bit harder to play because it’s clever enough to realize that the strokes are probably a drawing. So you’ll have to force OneNote to treat it as text. To do this, lasso-select your doodle and then go to the Tools menu. Pick the Treat Selected Ink As command and choose the Handwriting option. Then open the Tools menu again and choose Convert Handwriting to Text. This will replace your doodle with the text equivalent, but you can just copy the text and hit Undo to get your doodle back.
• Then just snip or snag the entry and save it as an image.

Join Ken’s blog and submit your entry as a comment ( with a hyperlink to the picture) to this post. Feel free to post the images on the Gottabemobile forums and link to that if you don’t have a way to host the image yourself. The winning entry will get the above official Microsoft cup signed by Ken Hinckley himself, the man behind InkSeine!

Let’s see how many great doodles we can come up with!