April 29, 2003
Animated notes with InkPlayer
The possibility of animating notes is intriguing. Sometimes you need to draw out a sequence of steps and be able to scan back and forth through the sequence like a movie.
I hadn't come up with a personal need for a tool like this until the other day when I was debugging a complicated data structure. I realized that I could use a little helper app in which I could draw a data structure at various states and be able to scan forwards and backwards through the sequence. So I cobbled up InkPlayer. Here's a series of three screenshots of InkPlayer that shows an array and an index position as each cell is added to its rightmost neighbor:
The InkPlayer app is simple. As you draw in InkPlayer you can mark "Visible/Key Frames." These are the states of the drawing that are actually played when reviewing an ink sequence.
Currently the app has only limited editing and I find it a little bit clunky to have to keep marking the visible frames. Undo and Redo are mandatory timesavers in an app like this because I find myself needing to jump back and forth to fix things.
What would be really cool is if I can integrate Visual Studio's debugger in with the player somehow.
Posted by Loren at April 29, 2003 11:08 AMAny thoughts of letting this one loose in the world, even in rough form? It's a terrific concept--a novel approach to ink to produce a needed tool.
Posted by: rsp57 on May 3, 2003 12:06 PMI think that animated ink will be very important to explaining processes. Some users learn better by seeing things in action and your app allows that!
Posted by: ChrisD on May 4, 2003 12:27 PMLet me see if I can put together a version. Not sure if I have time over the next several days, but I'll see what I can do. I'll give an update toward the end of this week (May 9).
Posted by: Loren on May 5, 2003 10:57 AMi want to learn medical statesman.plz help me..
Posted by: sanjay on May 6, 2003 12:43 AM