Category Archives: Blink

for OmarS – A little history of my Ink Blogging Application (BLInk!)

Blink

Omar Shahine, in my comments, says “tell me more…”. So with the presumption that he hasn’t read my blog previously…here’s a little history.

On my dotnetweblog check my tablet category. You will see that I’ve been writing some business applications for a tablet as well as playing with the general features and also trying to push for a little more developer interaction from Microsoft (heh).

At PDC, I took furious notes at the keynotes in ink using Journal and posted them immediately up to my blog:

here, here, here and here.

Although it was very satisfying to just take the notes and post them, I was very frustrated with two things – my handwriting was atrocious and no links! Frankly, I can type just as quickly as I write (and a lot more legibly) so it didn’t make too much sense except I got to doodle a little and draw little smiley faces instead of the ol’ :-). I think there’s a lot of reasons to blog in ink but there is no reason not to leverage the handwriting recognition and what is a blog without links.

So this was on my mind. THen the tablet team put up inklog.com. At first glance, cool – blogging in ink. BUt truly, they had the same problem. Crappy handwriting and no links. It was easy to discover that the blogs were gifs.

I just kept thinking about it. How it would be logically and technically possible to implement it. One thing I though about a lot was placement. If I was drawing all over the page, I would basically need to do some real acrobatics to have as close a snapshot of that as possible. I’m still thinking about that. But in reality, it’s a blog. A blog is mostly a stream of conciousness – or an article. It is not a designed user interface that should require tables to place elements etc.

So this is what I came up with and you see the basic implementation in my two previous posts. I actually had not used any of the ink tools from the SDK yet because my business application was using Infragistics tools which are ink enabled.

So I started playing with them yesterday morning and that’s what I have come up with so far. The thing that held me up the most was editing html in Windows Forms. But I already talked about that in a previous post. I did find another tool by Carl Nolan (MS) on the Windows Forms site Control Gallery , but I’m sticking with Nikhil’s and thinking of extending it a little. I’m still thinking about where the implementation goes next and have figured out how I will handle posting without writing my own blog engine (absolutely not something I am interested in doing). So I can use it with dotText or dasBlog or whatever I want.

Hey, I just thought of a name – BLInk! 🙂

Blogging in INK from my Tablet (Part 1)

Blink

(NOTE: IMAGES ARE NOT CROSS-POSTING – PLEASE GO TO MY REAL BLOG TO SEE THIS STUFF!! www.julialermaninc.com/blog)

Before I post my tablet blog – I am just using the web based part of dasBlog right now to show you these two images. These are thumbnails, click for larger view. This is just my experimentation based on a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. I want to blog from the tablet but my handwriting is illegible and I need to link!

I know it is just a start, but the www.inklog.com that the tablet team did is really lacking so far — because all they are doing is grabbing their ink in gifs and posting it. Bad handwriting and no links is a huge problem. I could not get this out of my head so I had to do something. I’m sure they will be coming out with something a lot better than what I have done today!

I could not get far with the dhtmledit control (no documentation etc.) but found a great amount of work that Nikhil Kothari posted as a windows based html editing component. I have a lot more to do here. But I’m just happy that I was able to get pretty close today.

Then I will post the actual blog next.