Incremental Blogger

Revisiting ink editing

This past week I spent a good chunk of time reworking the ink editing proof-of-concept app I created last year.

An animated gif of the new app is shown here.

This time around the app supports RTF files which makes it a lot more useful. The number of gestures supported is just over 10, so this still isn't a full-blown editing app, but it feels more "real." It's quite fast to be able to bold some text, underline another, or force a paragraph to indent.

Another big change I've made is in how text is inserted. In the first iteration I was trying to recognize handwritten text. I gave up on that approach, because when you're editing, quite often you may want to insert or append a partial word and the handwriting recognizer isn't going to do too well with partial words. So instead, I'm trying out switching to "insert" mode by drawing a caret symbol. After the caret is recognized, the TIP can pop up and the user can handwrite their text in it. At least for now it saves having to recreate what would essentially be similar to a TIP anyway. I'll have to see how it works out though. Switching between ink and "text insert" mode is a bit clunky.

Besides adding more gestures and control over them, I have a handful of pending "issues." There are cases when the TIP hover button is appearing when it shouldn't (you can see that in the gif animation above). There's also lots of flicker right now. And the document support is limited. A large file would probably cause it to crash.

I'm not sure where this will lead, but I think this time around I have a better foundation to work with. Still lots to learn and experiment with too. For instance, I'm still not sure ink editing gestures are the best way to go. The user will have to memorize them and it's very important to avoid false recognition. On the plus side though, they are fast.

Posted by Loren at November 1, 2004 02:50 AM