Reading #23: InkSeine: In Situ Search for Active Note Taking (Hinckley)

Comments

Jonathan

Summary

One of the most popular application of sketch recognition today is note taking. This is thanks to popular devices and applications such as the palm pilot and OneNote. In this paper they present a very nice application where the user can dynamically take notes and embed dynamic content within the notes without having to change the workspace context or the tool that is used. This enables a continuous workflow without interruption. The key part of the application is the Ink search where the user may draw an ink note and using gestures indicate that the selected strokes are text to be searched in a particular context, which is also selected via gestures. Thus without having to leave the canvas the user can create rich context over the ink notes.
The paper explains in detail the use case scenarios of the system, and gives a good impression of the system usage. They however do not go deep down in the recognition techniques that were employed in the text recognition or the gestures. After two iterations of their work the authors found out that a plausible and usable system can be implemented using the InkSeine technology.

Discussion

This tool provides an important improvement in note taking applications for tablet PCs. Most of the applications for ink note taking found today either don’t provide many of the possible features and advantages achievable trough recognition, or have a complex user interface that makes the note taking non-natural. The learning curve of this application seems small enough to allow the novice user to use it, while still providing him with the ability to use embedded and rich content. I really like the idea and the UI, however I would have liked to see some numbers in the results in terms of accuracy, since the complete experience can turn very frustrating if the ink is not recognized correctly.