The ink plug-in for Firefox is inching along. There’s a test page online now (located here–Firefox REQUIRED), that I’ve been using to check out some of the plug-ins’ features.
If you have Firefox 1.5, a Tablet PC, feel eager enough to try out a Firefox plug-in that you’ll have to manually install, and are willing to put up with a plug-in doesn’t do all that much, then feel free to visit the test page above. There’s no reason to pass the URL around though, because there’s still more to do. I need to write an XPI (installer) for the plug-in and I haven’t decided what to do about detecting if the user isn’t on a Tablet or the Tablet SDK is installed or not.
So far, four people including myself have checked the plug-in and so far three out of the four have been able to get the plug-in to work without any problems. I haven’t had a chance to figure out what the situation is for the fourth Tableteer. My guess is that there’s a dependency missing. I’ll check into this later.
There are some brief instructions on the page linked to above that you’ll need to follow in order to get the plug-in working. You won’t be able to use the standard Firefox “install” feature. Instead, download this zip file, extract the two files it contains, and copy these two files to the “plugins” folder under the “Mozilla Firefox” folder. Then all you need to do is refresh the page and the plug-in should work.
What can you do with the plug-in? There are a handful of pens to the left of the plug-in that you can use to draw with. There are four thin pens, four thick ones, and four highlighter pens. (By the way, the JavaScript is probably misleading in terms of how to use the pens shown. This is just a test page after all.)
Below the ink plug-in is a series of buttons that include an eraser, selection tool (lasso), four different background styles, copy/paste, and so on. The undo/redo is broken so I disabled it rather than leave things in a messy state. Hopefully I can get the undo/redo working next.
The copy/paste will let you copy ink from the plug-in into Journal (as ink) or OneNote (as an image). In addition, you can copy ink from Journal into the plug-in. You can’t paste other object types at this time. In addition, there’s no recognition–although if you’ve seen the SearchTip before you can guess what might be under the covers. Ah, more to do 🙂
Some other things that are missing:
* No save/load feature from server
* No scrolling
* No reco
* No text or images
* No undo/redo
Oh, and you’ll find that there are some bugs. I’ve noticed a re-painting error on the border and there can be noticeable flicker during painting (I need double buffering or Vista to come along 🙂 ), and I’m sure there are other problems. Feel free to post what you find.
Worked for me.
Cool!
A couple people have asked: Where is all this going?
I’d like to see ink as a first class citizen in the browser. Already Safari and Firefox 1.5+ support the tag (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Canvas_tutorial) which provides lots of 2D drawing support including Bezier curves, shapes, images, basic animations, transformations, and so on. I’d like to see ink added to this list. An embeded object via a plug-in is a first step to see how this might play out.
Worked for me!
(Toshiba M200)
Great! Thanks for testing it out.
It looks we’re ready to work on the ink persistance part.
will this be available for linux too?
i have a tablet notebook running linux and i would like to try this.
> will this be available for linux too?
I’ve thought about it, but maybe there’s someone else that can help out here. One issue unto itself is to render ink. The Firefox plug-in shown here performs its ink rendering via the ink platform provided in the Tablet PC and Windows.
I’ve also been looking into using the Canvas tag and maybe there’s something that can be worked out here. I’m still learning what can be done with it. The biggest unknown for me at this time is coming up with a high-quality way to render smooth, “pressure-sensitive” strokes.
The coolest thing (for me) would be to write ink comments directly on a FireFox web page and being able to save/bookmark these pages with the ink comments (optionally being able to hide/delete them.
It would be a great add-on tool to an Firefox extension like Scrapbook for annotating on saved offline pages! 🙂
SJ
Worked for me!
Tablet PC: LG LT20
Firefox 1.5.0.4
But I don’t see yet what can be done with it?
I haven’t seen any web page where it can be used a part the test page of your site.
And unfortunately I can’t save the page with ink annotation.
But great job anyway that can lead to great evolution for future.
JC
JC: Next up is to get the file save/load feature to work so the plug-in can actually start being used in a live web site. That’s when the fun will begin.