The recently announced Google Forms has me dreaming about ink integration with the browser again. Forms and ink go together.
My long standing point of view has been that ink should be more tightly integrated into the browser. The browser is the platform for many. It should be designed as such.
One approach would be to support an ink overlay mode. Yes, the TIP can be used, but this is Vista only and cognitively every time the TIP pops up it screams: “This is not your program running. This is another program. You must juggle two programs at once.”
And besides if the idea is to leverage the TIP and its correction UI, it needs a lot more flexibility and the ability to integrate with the DOM. It needs to become more transparent. Literally and figuratively.
Here’s a simple form I just created on my Tablet–using the TIP 100% for all input, which was easy enough:
This form is TIP friendly in IE. You can select values, enter information into the edit fields and so on. But I want more.
After using the form a bit I came back to some ideas I think that would help a lot. For instance, I’d like to see some meta data for the <input> tags that can guide the recognition. For instance, is the form expecting a number? An email address? Or maybe even a signature? 🙂 (Read that picture.)
One nice, Tablet-friendly twist would be to support edit boxes with larger fonts, restricted input, and an inkable surface that “talks” with the input item. It might look something like a classic ink form field:
The recognition could be supported within the browser (if on Windows Vista machine) or on a remote server on non-supported devices. To work well, keyboard input would still need to be supported, but that’s not too big of a deal.
I have an ink layer that runs under Firefox which can do some of this. Maybe I need to think about proxying the Google Forms and building a browser-based form that really supports ink.
