The ink gestures addin for Word is coming along.
Bob is making some terrific progress with the Office UI integration. He was stuck on a couple Office CommandBar issues, but I think he’s made his way through them. He’s definitely been learning lots about the workings of Word.
On the gesture side, the addin now supports recognizing handwritten text. You can insert up to a single line of text above a chevron gesture or if the text is placed above a selection it will replace the selected text with the recognized string. Here’s an animated GIF that shows these two operations in action:
It’s not shown here, but drawing the chevron without any text above it switches you to keyboard mode so you can start typing where the chevron tip was drawn. Alternatively, the standard Tablet Input Panel (TIP) can be brought up at the insertion point if you want to handwrite or handtap your text to insert. (I often switch between the handwriting recognizer in the TIP and the onscreen keyboard.)
For completeness, once again here’s a screenshot sequence showing some of the other editing gestures that the addin supports:
This reminds me, I need to pull together a list of all the gestures currently supported. A partial list includes:
* Selecting text, removing selection
* Deleting selection, deleting letter
* Toggle bold, underline, italics, capitalization
* Set line spacing
* Display font, paragraph, and style dialogs
* Copy/cut/paste
* Make lines bulletted, numbered, or plain text
* Indent, outdent
* New paragraph
* Move selected text
* Insert text and set insertion mode
* Replace selected text
My favorite gestures so far are the open and close selection brackets. I don’t know why. I just love selecting things and making the selection bigger or smaller. Yeah, it’s kind of like a Homer moment.
What are the chances of getting a release of this?
The animated screenshots look really promising. I’m excited about trying it too.
Do you know some people that are serious Word writers or maybe edits? If I were you, I’d try to get my hands on them, let them try it and give you feedback. Would they buy it? This could be a really popular sell among them (if they have a Tablet…).
Anyways, as an example, I can see the need for an editor to have a gesture to create a Word (ink?) annotation.
This looks great, Loren. Can’t wait to see the final product.
Oh, I posted on some of your other software today…
This is what I bought a Tablet for. I can hadly wait until it is available. Thank you, Loren.
Thanks everyone. We’re getting there. Your words of encouragement help a lot.
I’ve been super busy with some other stuff and trying my best to squeeze in time to keep up with Bob’s progress.
I can’t wait to get an alpha version out and start getting feedback on the gestures. I expect the feedback to help a lot. I’ve generally found this to be the situation with other reco work I’ve done. It’s a permutation of “practice makes perfect.”
Now if only we can get this out before Office 12 🙂
Great great stuff. You are solving so many productivity problems here, or maybe I should say creating more utility for my tablet. Inking documents and then having to go back and edit them into text…. how pass
This looks very cool, and I too cannot wait to play with when it comes out. One gesture that would be very useful in the solutions I am building (if you are taking requests :-)) would be one to insert an ink comment (the ones in bubbles down the side).
cheers, and good stuff!
Fred.
Fred, good idea.
Two other gestures I’d like to add in if I could figure out how to control Word sufficiently is adding words to the spell dictionary or at least marking a Word as ignore.
A quick way to add a comment fits along these lines: gestures that make it easier to use Word.
Remarkable, killer-app level idea for ink!
Brilliant, brilliant stuff Loren. I’m a writer and editor and this would be one of those applications which I could show to other writers and editors and make them want a Tablet PC. I can’t wait for this one!
Thanks for the encouragement! The addin has been a blast to work on and as it gets closer to something we can actually release the giddier I get….or is that the three bottles of diet coke talking that I drank last night in order to keep awake? 🙂
Sorry to break the hype, but is this vaporware ?
Why can’t we download a beta yet ?
And then comes :
Will this be free (as in “i am not bill gates”) ?
Will the source code be released ?
This is a true great ergonomical advance.
One that Microsoft should have done.
Please, don’t decieve us, but don’t tease us too much likewise…;)
HereItIs: I’ve passed a version along to a couple people and have gotten back some feedback on some things to fix, so I have some work to do before sending out the next version. If you’d like to provide some feedback let me know and I’ll add you to the list of testers. And if you’ve got a version of the program you’re free to blog about the addin, if you’d like. From what I see none of them have yet. I’ll link if I see any comments.
In terms of selling the app or releasing source code, I’m thinking about several different possibilities. One is to release source code that shows how to place an ink addin to Word. I’m not so sure about releasing code for the whole app. If we sell it, will you have to be Bill Gates to afford it? I doubt it. No details yet though on what price range it would be.
By the way, I’m at PDC this week and would enjoy showing the addin to anyone that’s interested. Today is my last day though.
Thanks everyone for your patience.
Loren – any news on this AMAZING ink app coming out? My girlfriend is dying for this usage…
-don
hers – TC1100
mine – LE1600
This is fantastic! I so wanna be on your beta team. This is one of those add-ins (apps that Microsoft should snag and add to the OS. As a writer, this is a dream come true.
You may just change the industry.
Please consider adding me to your beta testers.
Count me in among the early adopters!
Diego
Hi Loren
I contacted you by email, but it must have been filtered. I’m looking into implementing something similar for some research I’m doing. Our platform for research is currently tabiword, which you may of heard of, but it would be nice to move to MS Word.
How did you get a drawing surface from Word to attach an inkoverlay or inkcollector to?
-Phil Crosby
To answer my own question, InkOverlay has a constructor that can take an IntPtr window handle.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tpcsdk10/lonestar/Microsoft.Ink/Classes/inkoverlay/Methods/InkOverlay.asp
You can find a window handle of a running application, and thus associate an InkOverlay to it, using the win32 API function FindWindow:
http://pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.FindWindowEx
Here’s a good article of FindWindow’s usage in a managed application:
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/InteropSignon.asp
-Phil Crosby
I’ll be very happy to help you in debugging this.
You can join me at : mab_fr at hotmail dot com
Hi Loren
Well-done for your work, this add-in is brilliant and is very easy to use.
I am starting developping an add-in for MS-Word in order to simplify the use of forms on Tablet PC with friends, but we are having trouble managing Ink in Word in our add-in.
You said early in this news that you wanted to release source code that shows how to place an ink addin to Word. It would be a great help if could do that or explain us how you managed Ink in your code.
We didn’t find much help on internet about this topic.
I hope I don’t bother you too much but your nowledge would be a great help for us.
I wish you good luck for your add-in
Simon
PS : I’am frensh so excuse my bad english 😉