On Chris Pratley’s new must-read blog, he continues his discussion of OneNote. This time around he explains the design differences between OneNote and Journal.
As I’ve mentioned before, OneNote smells like a keyboard app to me–which he confirmed in an earlier post it originally was intended to be. To me OneNote demonstrates why it’s so important that developers live with ink if they are going to develop for it. Otherwise, you get features thrown–or in this case designed–on top. There’s no doubt that OneNote is much better at ink than let’s say Word.
It looks like OneNote started its development just a tad too early. If OneNote had started a year later and the developers had had a chance to really use ink, I’m betting they would have designed OneNote differently from the get go. I’m sure everything is “fixable”, but I hope that improving ink in OneNote doesn’t starve similar improvements that can be made with Journal. I look forward to seeing what the OneNote team does down the road. It’s a great product.
Hi Loren. Actually, OneNote was not designed first as a keyboard app. It was designed to be great at both keyboard and ink, not only one or the other. The problem was that we made a bet with ink that turned out to be half off the mark – structure is far less important than capture. I think the ink turned out workable but not stellar, and the keyboard stuff turned out great. Ink will get better in the future.
Chris
Hi Chris! Thanks for the clarification. I guess this illustrates the drawbacks to code archeology. 🙂
If I understand correctly, the structure part came about as a desire to make the keyboard experience–the projected 80-90% of users–the best experience it could be, realizing that people typically type in nice packages. And the design “gamble” was that ink would fit into this metaphor. Grouping and selection are two areas where you notice this in OneNote.
The beauty of software is that you can always improve it in the next version. There’s a challenge here–similar to the evolution that took place from text-based DOS apps to highly-graphical mouse-friendly programs. It’s taken awhile to find the right balance.