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HardwareTablet PCInking in Firefox

Inking in Firefox

TabletPCBlogs has a cool feature that enables you to author a post with ink. However, in order to blog in ink, you have to use Internet Explorer. This isn’t a bad thing–at least to me–but there are quite a few people I know that prefer not to use IE and are Firefox fans instead. Up to this point, I wasn’t sure what we could do about this. Well, we may have a solution after all.

The snapshot below is a picture of me inking in Firefox.

InkInFirefox500.png

How was this done? The solution employed here uses a special Firefox plugin that provides inking capabilities. The nice part about this solution is that no ActiveX is required and the inking surface comes up quickly. The downside is that the user is going to need to install the ink plugin. Actually, this isn’t a bad deal.

As it stands now, the ink plugin only supports Tablet PCs and Windows XP systems with the Microsoft Tablet PC SDK installed. Also, recognition is only available on a Tablet.

It does get me thinking about supporting a more generic solution, but that will have to wait. Right now I’m focusing on enabling a scripting level for the plugin so that JavaScript can interact fully with the ink surface, such as set the color and thickness of the brush, catching the recognized text, and so on.

Like always, so many exciting things to do.


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Loren
Lorenhttp://www.lorenheiny.com
Loren Heiny (1961 - 2010) was a software developer and author of several computer language textbooks. He graduated from Arizona State University in computer science. His first love was robotics.

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  1. 100% fun! There are tons of cool things yet to do on the Tablet. That’s one of the reasons I like to develop for it so much.

    When can you get the plugin? I’m guestimating that it’ll take me another week or so. Actually, it’s probably best to double that 🙂 Why so long? Because this is a side project and I’ve got my regular work stuff to handle. I’ll do my best to sneak in some time here and there depending upon the community interest.

    How much will it cost? Plans are now to make it freely available.

  2. Bruce, very true. I’ve used the IE Tab plugin installed in Firefox quite successfully. I’ve also experimented with the ActiveX plugin with some success.

    However, I’d really like to see ink become more of a first class citizen in the web world and the Firefox plugin is one project in that direction. After working on it, I’m now of the mindset that IE needs one too. An ink canvas that can render ink in multiple platforms makes sense to me.

    I’m not sure what to do about the Mac, Linux or Solaris though. Maybe something that can handle a fortified GIF, or SVG, or Tablet ink is the solution. I don’t know, but it’s fun trying to figure out a solution.

  3. Hi Loren… When I’ve seen the word “inking” used elsewhere, it has translated as “drawing on a TabletPC screen and having the computer accept this data”. Is this similar to what you’re working on here, or should that definition be refined…?

    (Reason I’m asking is that the Adobe Flash Player may be a way to get some browser-neutrality, device-neutrality here.)

    tx, jd/adobe

  4. John, the Firefox plugin provides ink input (with recognition) as well as ink rendering. This allows the strokes to be rendered with their full pressure sensitivity and scalability.

    Like you suggest, the Flash player can be used to render the stroke sequences also. One advantage of this approach is that you can fairly easily animate strokes. InkPlayer does this, for instance.

  5. Bless you, Loren! I haven’t been able to ink in IE on TabletPCBlogs since the upgrade, but I’ve been too lazy to try to resolve the issue. Now, maybe I won’t have to.

  6. Hi MiniMage,

    If you’re running the .Net 2.0 framework (check AddRemove Programs list for .Net 2.0 being listed), then try this update from Microsoft:

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=84bbefa4-7047-41df-8583-e3bdbf9d805f&DisplayLang=en

    (Note: You do not need .Net 2.0 to ink in TabletPCBlogs.)

    If this doesn’t help the situation or you weren’t running .Net 2.0 in the first place, try adding TabletPCBlogs to IE’s trusted site list:

    In the Tools menu, select Options menu item.
    Click on Security tab
    Click on “Trused sites” icon
    Click on “Sites” button
    Tyope “http://www.TabletPCBlogs.com” in the “Add this Web site to the zone:” edit field and click the “Add” button. You may have to uncheck the field “Require server verification…..” if it is checked.
    Click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options dialog.

    Hopefully this will fix the problem within IE.

    The Firefox addin will give you inking within Firefox on Windows.

  7. Like quite a few others, I had the problem when Ink was first added on the blogs, so I’d done the trusting thing, then. I’d also had to do the iexplore.exe.config for .NET 1 to Ink on Channel9 (perhaps it’s ok/necessary to remove the config file, now). Also, the ink update is already installed. I’m content to wait for the Firefox extension, though; the blog was one of the few reasons I’d resort to IE at all, so I don’t care if IE gets fixed, as long as FF does :).

    Thanks!