InkSeine Frequently Asked Questions

GottaBeMobile forums and viewing the posts or asking your general Tablet PC questions there. The forum offers an amazingly helpful community of Tablet PC and UMPC users.

Q: What is the difference between InkSeine, OneNote, and Journal?

A: InkSeine is a prototype application (not a real product) from Microsoft Research. It has a number of innovative features for pen interfaces that we are trying out, in the hope that we can learn more about what works (or doesn't work) for Tablet PC users "in the wild".

InkSeine has been described by some people as "Windows Journal on steroids" - like Journal, InkSeine has a pen-centric user interface, but InkSeine has some features such as integrated search, cross-application capture of screen clippings and scrolling, and the ability to easily drag links to files and web pages into your notes.

Microsoft OneNote, on the other hand, is a feature-rich application for taking notes and collecting research, but even though OneNote supports inking, it adopts a more text-centric usage model. This makes perfect sense for OneNote since the majority of OneNote users employ ordinary computers and laptops without inking capabilities.

Thus InkSeine is complementary to OneNote. InkSeine has a simple set of functionality with a pen-centric user interface. InkSeine lacks many features that OneNote users love, including tagging, organizing, and synchronizing notes, automatically saving all entries in a single hierarchically organized notebook, etc. Also, InkSeine does not support text entry at this time. What InkSeine really offers is a unique interface for working with ink.

For more information, see the discussion of InkSeine, OneNote, and Journal on the GottaBeMobile forums.

Q: Why isn't InkSeine integrated with OneNote? I'd rather use
OneNote to store everything, but have the InkSeine interface.

A: InkSeine is a research effort and is trying out ideas that may or may not be a good fit for OneNote. In principle it would be great to have an InkSeine interface on top of OneNote. In practice integrating InkSeine with OneNote would take a major development effort and would likely require removing much of the whacky stuff that we are trying out in InkSeine, in order to mesh well with the ways that peole are used to working in OneNote. By building our own "concept car" that demonstrates what the future of inking might hold, we can explore ideas without being limited or jaded by the way that OneNote currently works. If ideas in InkSeine are found to have merit, then the product groups will assess whether they would make sense in the context of future Microsoft product offerings. This is where

your feedback can really help us to improve InkSeine and understand what works well about it, and what doesn't.

The Tool Ring:

Q: What's this crazy arrow on my screen?

A: The circular widget that hosts the spiral-shaped arrow is InkSeine's

tool ring. It comes up by default when you launch InkSeine or open a document from within InkSeine. The tool ring floats on top of all of your windows so that you may scroll documents with the pen, or quickly access the camera to capture screen clippings without having to return to InkSeine. Floating tool ring for clipping and scrolling

Floating tool ring for clipping and scrolling

Q: I'm trying to use the scroller on the tool ring but the application
doesn't scroll. What's wrong?

A: The scroller simulates the wheel on your mouse, so the correct window
must have the input focus for the scroller to work. You need to tap on the
area of the screen you want to scroll, and then touch down inside the
scroller and start circling your pen.

If that still doesn't work, then the window you are trying to scroll may not
support the mouse wheel.

The scroller does not work with Excel (we cannot fix this). Also, we have several reports that it does not work in Firefox, although it has worked in Firefox for other people. We have not been able to track down the problem yet.

Q: I want to have links to the screen clippings that I take using
the camera on the Tool Ring. Can InkSeine do this?

A: YES! Automatic hyperlinks are now available in InkSeine for Office 2003 and 2007 (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook emails), as well as web pages in Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately we do not yet have support for backlinks to clippings taken from OneNote, Adobe Acrobat (PDF) viewer, or web pages hosted in other web browsers (e.g. Firefox, Opera).

Special thanks to Brian Meyers and Greg Smith in the VIBE research group for helping us adapt their code to make this great feature possible.

Customization:

Q: Can I set up my page with something other than graph paper?

A: From the page menu at the bottom center of the screen, stroke left to select Page Setup... That will bring up the page style dialog. There is no direct support for page background bitmaps yet, but you can

drag a bitmap into your notes from the InkSeine search panel or from a file folder, and ink on top of it as a temporary work-around.

Pick your paper!

Q: Can I set up my own pen and highligter colors?

A: InkSeine does not offer custom pens or highlighters at this time. We plan to add this feature to InkSeine as soon as possible. However, you can copy ink strokes with different colors that you draw in OneNote or Windows Journal into InkSeine.

Q: How do I use the options to customize InkSeine?

A: Use the InkSeine Options command to call up the options panel.

InkSeine's Options panel lets you customize things.

Here is a summary of what each of these options do:

o Use pen button for lasso mode: If your Tablet PC pen has a button on it, this option lets you use it to enter the lasso selection mode. You can also tap-select by holding down the pen button. If you find that you frequently hit the button on your pen by mistake, you can disable this option to prevent the button from interfering with your inking.

o Hover feedback for radial menu appears: This slider lets you adjust how long you have to hover over one of the round icons in InkSeine to see the menu's choices. This setting also affects the

hover-activated thumbnails for the page tabs at the bottom of your page. Icons for files, links, or searches that are embedded in your notes always have a slightly longer delay because otherwise these menus are too easy to bring up by accident.

   o   Search from context menu: This option lets you choose the default type of search that appears in the "green plus" menu.
           - Personal Search searches your local hard disk(s).
           - Web Search lets you search the Web by default instead.
           - Tag for Search creates a search icon but does not immediately open a search. This allows you to return to the icon at a later time and either stroke to the right for Web Search, or down for Personal Search.

   o   End lasso on looking glass as shortcut for search: This option enables a special icon that appears at the start of all lasso selections. Make a complete loop with the lasso and lift over the search icon to Tag the selection for Search. Some people like this feature, but others find it error prone, so we have disabled this feature by default. Give it a try to see if it is for you or not. How to use this feature is illustrated in the selection tutorial for a pre-release version of InkSeine.

   o   Recognize handwriting to place InkSeine documents in Windows Search Index: By default, InkSeine automatically performs handwriting recognition on all the ink in your InkSeine notes every couple of minutes. This enables your Personal Searches to pick up results for InkSeine notes as well as other text documents on your system. However, the way InkSeine does its handwriting recognition is inefficient and this may bog down your tablet if you have a very dense note, or an older Tablet PC. This option enables you to decrease the frequency of the handwritging recognition, or even turn it off. But if you turn it off, you won't be able to use search to find InkSeine notes, unless the word you are searching for appears in the title of the note.

Q: I have an older tablet and InkSeine gets kind of slow every
few minutes when there are a lot of notes on the current page.
What can I do about this?

A: Use the options panel (shown above) to reduce the frequency of InkSeine's automatic handwriting recognition for search indexing, or disable this option altogether if necessary.

Queries & Searches:

Q: Can I make Web Search my default search when I select ink?

A: Yes. Use the

InkSeine Options command from the options menu at the top of the screen to bring up the options panel, as pictured above. Then use the radio button to select Web Search as your default search type from InkSeine's context menus for selections with ink in them.

Q: When I do a Personal Search, the search panel just says "Error in
Query Engine." What's wrong?

A: InkSeine uses Windows Desktop Search for Personal Search queries, but particularly under Windows XP, WDS takes some time to start when you first turn on your tablet, or after a reboot. Try the query again in a while and it should work. This is less of a problem for Windows Vista Search.

If this error keeps happening for you, double-click on it and report the details of the error to the InkSeine Team.

Windows XP also occasionally has problems with losing Outlook email results from its search index. To remedy this, right-click on the Desktop Search icon in the Windows task tray. Pick the Desktop Search Options command, and then choose "Rebuild Index" to force desktop search to pick up your email results. Again, this problem seems to have been resolved in Vista.

Desktop Search options under Windows XP.

Q: I've created a query in my notes by lassoing some ink and
choosing the search command. What are the semantics if I
open that query again at a later time?

A: InkSeine always re-issues the query when you open search results. In this
way, you can be assured that you will always have up-to-date results when you
open a

search panel.

Q: I used a highlighter and now I can't access my query since the
highlighter covers it. How can I open the query again?

A: 1. Use the

lasso tool to tap-select the highlighting:
1. Tap-select the highlighting

2. Next use the Send to back command from the selection's green plus menu
to place the highlighting behind the query icon.

3. Now the query icon is back on top so you can get at it. 3. Now the query is on top.

Selection:

Q: How can I activate the lasso without moving my hand to the edge
of the screen?

A: You can use the pen's barrel button as a shortcut for the Lasso selection mode.

Q: How can I easily select a single stroke?

A: Select the

lasso tool, and then tap to select exactly the stroke that you
want. You have to tap pretty close to it, and tap-select will select whichever
stroke is on top if there are several nearby.

Q: How can I select a big bitmap without lassoing it?

A: Select the

lasso tool, and then tap to select the bitmap.

Q: What's the rule the lasso uses to decide if objects are contained
in the lasso or not?

A: Ink strokes must be "mostly" in the lasso. For bitmaps, the center of the bitmap must be in the lasso. For hyperlinks, either the round icon or the center of the green title area must be in the lasso.

Q: How can I select a hyperlink or query to move it?

A: Lasso it, or touch down on the link and stroke to the south-east to choose the Select command. You can also employ the other commands on the link to Open it, Remove it, or Cut / Copy it.

Q: I'm trying to select a small object, but I can't drag it around
because there's no way to avoid hitting the resize handles on the
selection. What can I do?

A: Draw another "dummy" ink stroke nearby, and select both of them. Now the selection will be larger and you can grab the small object, and the dummy
stroke, and drag them around. Just cut the dummy stroke when you are done.

InkSeine Tips & Tricks:

TIP #1: Drag & Drop files from Windows Explorer into InkSeine
via the Open Folder command.

HOW: You can drag links to files directly into InkSeine from any Windows Explorer folder. A quick way to do this is to use Open Folder in a highlighted personal search result to open Windows Explorer with the directory containing a file. Then you can quickly drag more stuff from the same directory into InkSeine. You can even select multiple files and drag them all in, where they appear as a tidy row of icons inside InkSeine.

Any image files that you drag in will automatically import as bitmaps.

Open Folder is handy for importing multiple files.

Open Folder is handy for importing multiple files.

TIP #2: Rearrange Pages, create new blank pages, or delete pages.

HOW: Drag the page tabs left and right to rearrange them. Tapping on the page icon creates a new page at the end of the note, which you can then drag to a different spot in your note if you want. Or drag a page to the trash can to delete it! Warning: No undo for page operations.

TIP #3: Drag & Drop any link or image from Internet Explorer into
InkSeine while both applications are full-screen.

HOW: From the Internet Explorer window, drag from any link or image to the
task bar and hold your pen over InkSeine. The InkSeine window will come up,
and you can then slide back onto the note page to drop the link or image in
your notes.

Images that are also links will only import as links, unfortunately, as the Windows Drag & Drop mechanism reports the link, but not the image, to InkSeine.

TIP #4: Create an empty search with filters to quickly access your
recent notes.

HOW: Write a single ink dot or squiggle and lasso it for search. Tap on Clear
to remove whatever random character the recognizer comes up with for your
ink. Tap on the ink notes filter in the right-hand column of the search panel.
If you like, narrow it down further by selecting only recent categories from the
date filters along the bottom of the search panel.

Try using the other filters to quickly generate lists of other useful things, like
all recent emails, office documents, etc.

Click here for the Install instructions.