Daily Archives: December 5, 2003

Got Snow? Send it here! Pleeeeeeeeze

Vermont

Hey! We moved to Vermont for a reason. We’ve got 4 lousy inches of snow right now. Already we are getting the same insult as last year. We moved here from the Hudson Valley where they are expecting 12-18 inches of snow (okay so it’s a blizzard) in the next few days. According to Sam Gentile, Boston’s buckling down to get hammered. We are VERY happy to have snow storms here. We just camp out at home for a few days and then strap on our skis or snowshoes. It makes us very happy. It is what we live for. But nooooo – everyone else who does NOT want the snow gets it. This is what happened last year. A gazillion snowstorms everywhere that is south of us. What is going on here? We WANT THE SNOW! 🙂

Goodbye Outlook Personal Update Dashboard

Tools

I have been using the Personal Update dashboard for about 3 years. I really love it. I open up outlook and see highlights of my calendar, the weather, headlines of topics I have chosen, and the state of my paltry stocks.

I was SO VERY SAD to see this today. I’m sure there is a replacement somewhere, but I don’t have time to look. Hey, maybe its just built right into Outlook 2003 and I didn’t realize it! I’ll have to look into that AFTER I do my client work!


(click for larger image)

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! 🙂