Humility and handwriting

re: Humility and handwriting

John Porcaro — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:37:00 GMT

Excellent blogging, best blog I've seen from Microsoft (my own included, I think). I love the peek into the thought process behind tools we use everyday. Thanks, and please keep it up.

re: Humility and handwriting

Tejas Patel — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:45:00 GMT

Nice one again, well Your's is second Blog from Microsoft after Scoble's that I look forward to reading now, the reasons being it has your thought process into a product as John said before, you are showing us how you felt the need of the product and what other users are using the product for as well.

re: Humility and handwriting

Jason Salas — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:05:00 GMT

Hi Chris,

Great thoughts. During my first Microsoft interview (of 2), I was asked about what feature(s) I'd like to see in future versions of Word.

Long story short, the PM said you guys have quite a daunting challange, because were it not for customer requirements and hardware limitations of the vast majority of consumers, you guys could build the best program the world has ever seen. He told me this, and said the bummer of realism at the end of the day is that they have to keep reminding themselves that all they're doing is creating an electronic typewriter. :)

Great blog!

re: Humility and handwriting

mike — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 19:44:00 GMT

These entries are fascinating. Looking forward to more!

re: Humility and handwriting

Chris Pratley — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:54:00 GMT

Well, I have to disagree about electronic typewriter! Today a Word document can "know" it is an invoice and direct you to pick from your accounting or ERP program the customer you are sending the invoice to, and automatcially fill out the invoice for you (thanks to XML markup). This is the sort of thing that helps people be more productive. It is hardly a typewriter!

re: Humility and handwriting

Kartik Agaram — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 17:41:00 GMT

"...just getting the ink on the page is a big one (maybe 80% of the value at least is achieved just with that)."

I have to disagree with this a bit. Getting the ink on the page is important, yes. But if you can't search it oneNote would have the same disadvantages as paper. I would say the ink input experience and ability to search are equally important.

Once you can search ink doesn't recognition to text pretty much come for free?

re: Humility and handwriting

Mary Branscombe — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 18:18:00 GMT

I hope one of the ink things you're looking at is gesture recognition; not being able to scribble out a mistake is a real pain for me. As you say, Journal is the other main ink tool and it's the poster child for ink and you work very differently; but the gestures should be OS consistent (and the OS should let me ink into dialog boxes directly but that's another rant and I think Longhorn will Do It Right (or else, of course)) ;-)

re: Humility and handwriting

Chris Pratley — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 20:08:00 GMT

Kartik, believe me, we also started out thinking that ink on a page was not too valuable without structure (that includes determining text vs. drawing, so that you can do reco, and also determining what words are connected into sentences). But as time went by we were forced to admit that getting the ink down was not only fundamental (as we had always assumed), but a large part of the value was that you could simply have your paper notebook on your PC. Even without searching, people liked that you could flip through your notes and see them. Journal, for example, although it allows searching of ink does not use notebooks - you create files and save them, as you would with Word. That makes searching across multiple files very difficult. So in effect Journal only has electronic paper, yet many Journal users see it as very valuable.

re: Humility and handwriting

Chris Pratley — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 20:13:00 GMT

Mary, we're looking at gestures for next tme. "scratch out" is not very controversial, but most others are. Both the tablet and OneNote teams looked at doing many more gestures, but the problem is that most of them are not natural like scratch-out is. If people don't know the gesture, *most* will either never use it since they'd have to realize that such a thing as gestures might exist, then go teach themselves. What we found was that if you enable gestures by default, people unaware of them execute them by accident once in awhile, and that is very distrubing - when text disappears because you moved your pen, people stop trustng the application. Making them optional would mean that they would be used only by a small niche of users, so they did not make the cut for version 1.

Field Trial

Chris_Pratley's WebLog — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:09:00 GMT

re: Humility and handwriting

William Dowell — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:42:00 GMT

Great read as always from you! The "re:..." comments are a valuable addition too!

re: Humility and handwriting

Peter Torr — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:56:00 GMT

Supporting the PocketPC gestures for newline, space, etc. would be cool. (Not that I've ever actually been able to use text recognition with OneNote... I need to flatten my Tablet for that to happen).

OneNote and Journal

Chris_Pratley's OneNote WebLog — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:23:08 GMT

Those of you who have a TabletPC are probably familiar with the built-in note-taking application called...

re: Humility and handwriting

Mustache Orchestra — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 08:31:06 GMT

That's a very interesting note on the handwritting. Those old typewriters do the trick for me every time! :-D

OneNote "12" and the Tablet PC

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:27:10 GMT

I promised some time ago to write about the Tablet experience in OneNote 12 and how it has changed. This

OneNote and Journal

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 10:25:11 GMT

Those of you who have a TabletPC are probably familiar with the built-in note-taking application called