Scott as usual had an insight too "about the browse"r

and Gil might be mstaken for a communist ....

am sure a lot of folks believed Marc ................

now this is what we call a browser war .....note the losers

Instantly capture ideas, meeting notes and concepts using sketches, handwritten notes or type
Drag and drop branches to quickly structure that information
Visually identify important tasks, issues and relationships
Refine information based on group feedback
Facilitate a clear understanding of the topic at hand
Organize tasks, supporting documents, existing resources and materials in a single application

Immediately export to popular formats, including:
Microsoft Word
Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Project
HTML Web site
MPX(via add-in), RTF, or image formats
Using SmartMapX Technology, customized solutions can be crafted to allow information sharing with any third party application

is a bird , its a plane its mindmanager

MindManager for Tablet PC Named Codie Award Finalist

there you go Loren

"Your project registration for SourceForge.net has been approved. "
We now have a new home at Sourceforge. Will set up the workspace as soon as i can

Project Descriptive Name: WriteFree

and yes there are bigger displays

and for pure style

its life............

, it might also be possible to provide layered ink

wonder how important recognition is for note taking, wonder how i can measure that

selection with a criteria

... Tablet PC Developer moved to GotDotNet.

Overall Tablet PC 2004 brings slate and convertible users who focus on handwriting some needed improvements in the recognition. However the compromise on removing Write Anywhere and the lack of editing buttons will cause some additional grief for users that want a seamless Tablet PC experience. Further if you plan on using your Tablet PC for ink alone, there are no improvements in Tablet PC 2004.

Tablet PC Talk - First Look at Tablet PC 2004 Alpha

yes this make s sense
Tablet PC Talk - First Look at Tablet PC 2004 Alpha: "Summary
Overall Tablet PC 2004 brings slate and convertible users who focus on handwriting some needed improvements in the recognition. However the compromise on removing Write Anywhere and the lack of editing buttons will cause some additional grief for users that want a seamless Tablet PC experience. Further if you plan on using your Tablet PC for ink alone, there are no improvements in Tablet PC 2004."

on my way ...

seems like i can't find a good copy of the WriteFree [old design], was hoping to release that with the menu code fixed. The binaries and sources that we posted up on gotdotnet should be good enough for anyone that may want to fix it. I hope to get some dev time as i make my way back to the forest....

the new writefree does not use a simplified document.

am doing selection, will get the new design and software out as soon as i can, lots of typing involved :)

i don't see any value in using an ink picture for WriteFree, guess i hadn't given it enough though, but am getting rid of that design, i am going with a different better design to be relased shortly, i just think an ink picture is pretty limited and a bit heavy weight...
there is no value for in limiting WriteFree to ink

"The InkPicture control provides the ability to place an image in an application and enable users to add ink on top of it. It is intended for scenarios in which ink is not recognized as text but is instead stored as ink."



we want to make it more flexible , for example there is no reason why a WF note shouldn't have as many inkpics as you want, you get where am going so a WF note is about to change

ok because of the single fact that you have to log in to gotdotnet to get to the workspace, we are moving this project to sourceforge, does anyone have any ideas , i do like the interface and VS.Net 2003 integration

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t
we are getting a new home .... we should know before christmas, i really do like lots of the stuff at gotdotnet, but sourceforge gives you terminal console access to their linux boxes,hmmmm, i chose the BSD license since that's my favourite open source licence

ok i slept, am up now and yes next week is a 2 day week,

a writefree note on a conceptual level is a background picture and ink, now thats bound to change soon, but currently its implemented as the ink you render on WriteFree and your template,which is an Image file set to the Image property of InkPicture. I am adding all the editing features and so on. That inkpic and its ink, actually your ink is the document.

back to writefree "developed on a desktop, on a big high res laptop , a writefree notes document is an InkPicture , inkpicture from google

reading some boards i saw a question on developing on tpc, this has been around be fore and it didn't seem like there were too many ideas or opinions, well been running VS .NET 2002 and 2003 on portege 3500 with a gig of ram and a tc1000-256M since june , works fine .......the only thing you will not appreciate is that low res 10-12 inch display, consequently for VS.NET(keyboard biased) its not a practical development environment, see Loren's blog on some very interesting ideas on developing with a pen

fixed some bugs , but since no one seems to be clamouring for a release i will rework the document class, and maybe rethink it a bit more, the design is very simple, a notes document is an inkPicture

finally home,

undo-redo done, no time to upload, will have to do that later today, later , its travel day :(

now this is the direction that computing in general will go, real human friendly interfaces

am not sure why blogger doesn't treat us like real customers, oh well, hope it has nothing to do with google, i like google, and i like radio

gotdotnet is flaky

yep i got

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if i get time, am done with blogger and gotdotnet, geues where are going, though i don't love CVS, but i love terminal console access, and guess who is running a serious blog hosting service

another day done, ok, never got to work on our project, and though i got lots of the editing stuff done (we are getting a larger standard toolbar -- remember we had 2, 1 just grew ) ummm and we will revamp the gotdotnet site and look at sourceforge too. Its 9:00 EST, i have almost 2 hours to work on WF so i hope we can get some stuff out

will get the good R1 up there shortly

at least, its supposed to be a Notes taking and Management system. Taking notes may note be very revolutionary, but managing notes might be the killer app of the tablet pc. And as previously posted ink is implemented very well so saving it in many different ways is not too bad ....
any ways its a note taking and management system

a very complete feature set , auto saving, note books , now all we need is more battery time, and larger displays with higher resolutions .....lonestar , longhorns and vector graphics

i fell asleep at about 2:00 last night so i wasn't able to post WriteFree, am at my day job so i might not get a chance to do the same , however if i get a chance during my lucnh break or something i will do the same.
I think OneNote is going to be the future of Office

for folks who have been keeping track of my wifi ranting, this week i have acess to 5 networks, one community netwrok and the rest private, folks should do better with their security,3 of these nets let you browse shares after you connect, one guy is sharing his "My Documents", this guy is the CEO

now back to undo/redo

where does ink come from?

where doth that ink come from is the important question. Where are we going to get that ink from. Remember InkOverLay and the baby InkCollector who can only collect (thats why they named them InkCollector). Thats where all the ink comes from..
all ink in the world, all ink ever comes from the overlay and the collector, the collector like tax collectors has less capability...
Ink Collection (and not on your desk blotter, on the Microsoft Windows Tablet PC Edition). Ink collection begins with the digitizer. A user places a pen on the digitizer and starts to write. the collection of ink data "flows" from the pen. You then use the InkCollector object to get the data that comes from the digitizer.
InkCollector Object
The InkCollector object captures ink input from available Tablet devices. The InkCollector object only collects ink and gestures that are input into a specific window. A very efficient event sink renders this input in real time. The InkCollector object captures the input and directs it into an Ink object.
-if you use two pens the ink may or may not flow those that really depends on the implementation of the entire input system, down to the driver level

Ink Collector mechanics
The InkCollector object attaches itself to a known application window. It then enables users to employ any available Tablet PC device (including the mouse) to lay down ink in real time on that window. The ink strokes that it collects are stored in an associated Ink object. These strokes can then be manipulated or sent to a recognizer for recognition. The InkCollector object also notifies the application when a cursor comes into range of any of the Tablet PC devices that are being used.There are of course more details but on a very high level thats what happens.

InkOverlay Object (The Mother of Ink creating objects.) aka "the overlay"
The InkCollector object, discussed above, is useful for applications to provide their own model for selecting, erasing, and other user interaction. The InkOverlay object is a superset of the InkCollector object that provides editing support. This is useful for applications to integrate ink drawing and editing into their own document canvas by using a set of standard ink selection models that the object provides.

Both the InkCollector object and the InkOverlay object (as well as the InkPicture control) use common constructs, such as the Ink object and the InkDrawingAttributes collection, so that the basic way to interact with ink is the same for all Objects.

InkOverlay is a COM object that is useful for annotation scenarios in which users are not concerned with performing recognition on ink but, instead, are interested in the size, shape, color, and position of the ink. It is well suited for taking notes and basic scribbling. The default user interface is a transparent rectangle with opaque ink. InkOverlay extends the InkCollector class in three ways:

• It raises events for begin-stroke, end-stroke, and ink attribute changes.
  
• It enables users to select, erase, and resize ink.
  
• It supports Cut, Copy, and Paste commands.
  

InkOverlay tactical mechanics:
3 basic steps are required to get an InkOverlay doing its thing - commonly called the CAT procedure for create, attache, true-it(set its Enabled property to true) . this is the same for InkCollector
CAT procedure

• Instantiate an InkOverlay object.
  
• Attach the hWnd property of an InkOverlay object to that of another window.
  
• Set the InkOverlay Enabled property to True.
  

The InkOverlay object includes basic printing support, but you must implement print preview or other advanced printing capabilities. InkOverlay persists ink in Ink Serialized Format (ISF) format.
...other interesting things about InkOverlay are the EditingMode property that determines what the pen does when it gets to the digitizer, the events (such as InkAdded, InkDeleted, and Stroke)
Hard to talk about this super inkers without talkingabout the
Drawing Attributes object
A DrawingAttributes object describes how any known set of ink is to be drawn. A DrawingAttributes object includes basic properties such as Color, Width, and PenTip. It can also encompass advanced parameters, such as variable transparency and Bezier smoothing, that can provide interesting effects or improve ink readability.

a little more ink from:
PenInputPanel Object
The PenInputPanel object allows you to easily add in-place pen input to your applications. The PenInputPanel is available as an attachable object that allows you to add Tablet PC Input Panel functionality to existing controls. The user interface is largely mandated by the current input language. You have the option of choosing the default input method for the pen input panel, either handwriting or keyboard. The end user can switch between input methods using buttons on the user interface.

and thus we now have the INK.....all the ink you see , any ink you can make and every ink there ever will be in in SDK 1.0 and 1.5 will have entered its existence from the above ways. The most versatile you might realize is the Overlay.

*note that Overlay is one word so the class name is Overlay not OverLay,

maybe i have been looking at this stuff for too long but it sounds like something that happens at a truck stop or something bad and unexpected like waylay, maybe thats what this thing is doing to linux
whats an overlay anyway
from dictionary.com
8 entries found for overlay
o ver lay1 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vr-l)
tr.v. o ver laid, (-ld) o ver lay ing, o ver lays
To lay or spread over or on.

To cover the surface of with a decorative layer or design: overlay wood with silver.
To embellish superficially: a simple tune that was overlaid with ornate harmonies.
Printing. To put an overlay on.
To create (a new area code) having the same boundaries as another: In Maryland, area code 240 was overlaid on top of area code

am not sure , the API designer needs to tell us why the fuck he called it Overlay, i guess it covers a window?

once more
an Ink object is a container
an Ink object is a container for stroke objects
an Ink object has a strokes collection that references its strokes objects

of course its a container , but more important its single meaning in life is to contain stroke objects.

And yes a Strokes collection is only existent in the context of an Ink Object.

A Strokes collection is created by an Ink object and can refer only to Stroke objects owned by that same Ink object.

simply to think of it in OO terms, encapsulation and all that ...

an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects, and a Strokes collection references Stroke objects.

ok we are going to overdo it a bit
an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects, and a Strokes collection references Stroke objects.
an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects, and a Strokes collection references Stroke objects.
an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects, and a Strokes collection references Stroke objects.
an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects, and a Strokes collection references Stroke objects. an Ink object is a container
an Ink object is a container for Stroke objects,
an Ink object has a Strokes collection that references the Stroke objects.

an Ink Object has a collection of stroke objects that are stored in the Strokes Collection -- that's it....

INK is simply a bunch of strokes...How elegant.....

public class Ink : ICloneable

that's what that's about...Who is complaining.

A list of all the properties of the Ink Class reads like below, notice that the rest of the stuff is basically clueless, meaningless and really not such a big deal and could have been implement at the stroke level or wherever.

Property Description
CustomStrokes Returns the collection of custom strokes to be persisted with the ink.
Dirty Returns or sets the value that specifies whether the strokes of an Ink object have been modified since the last time the ink was saved.
ExtendedProperties Returns the collection of application-defined data that is stored in the Ink object.
InkSerializedFormat Returns a string that contains the name that should be used to query DataObject on the Clipboard to see if it contains that particular format
and what its all about

Strokes Returns the collection of all of the strokes in the Ink object.

more detail later with some code and that promised journal clone

"Strokes Collection"
Contains the collection of Stroke objects that represent a single ink stroke.

Strokes collections are references to ink data and are not the actual data itself.


Caution In managed code, to avoid a memory leak you must explicitly call the Dispose() method on any Strokes collection to which an event handler has been attached before the collection goes out of scope. "
from Microsoft Tablet PC SDK definition for Strokes Collecction

this abstraction represents a single ink stroke, it implements ICollection and IEnumerable , has 28 methods and 2 events(StrokesAdded and StrokesRemoved ) and 7 properties that take care of things like how many Stroke objects are stored in the collection. In addition to the standard collection methods that take care of adding ,removing, moving stroke objects there are methods to scale and rotate stroke objects (remember that from PacketProperties that stroke objects are really just a fancy polyline - you have all the information that is required to do all kinds of vector type transformations on strokes) It would have been easy for the designers of the API to keep it at the bitmap level but the it might not have been the same magical ink that we have today. Requires more data to be stored but gives real powerful ink.


PacketProperties of course are very exciting to think about but thats too much paper for folks that just recently (70 centruries ago) figured out how to abstract on a surface. So we will still talk abit about Strokes. That power is coming shortly.

A Stroke Object is contained by an instance of an Ink Object. Ink Objects define the scope of a Stroke Object. an Ink Object owns zero or more Stroke objects. Yes am going to capitalize all the class names i reference. Thats because the SDK did such a good job at OO that its literally possible to talk about this and it would sound like a normal english conversation, talk about Object abstraction.

liteally the ink is made up of strokes and the strokes are made up of packets described by PacketProperties.

its hard to talk about ink persistence without talking about ink itself. We have all heard how ink is a first class citizen in the the Tablet PC SDK object model.
Another way of looking at it is that the Ink class is the outermost entry point into the Ink Data API, and it is analogous to a document class , much like text or files are the basis of keyboard based computing.

User input occuring on InkCollector and InkOverlay create Stroke objects.
Stroke objects are the characters or basic building blocks of an ink document . Each Stroke objects represents a stroke of digital ink, the same way each handritten stroke represents some type of human intention, a doodle and scribble, a straight line, a letter, a number, a stroke of the pen. Each time you actually take a pen to paper , you are really create strokes of some type. Thats what is abstracted by Stroke objects. A stroke.
-Movement of the pen on a surface is essentially what is captured though more information is collected than the movement - its scary to imagine how powerful this strokes are compared to ordinary pen and paper strokes.
paper and pen interaction of course has a lot of expressiveness but once you have a computer underneath , you can the capability to store things like the time the stroke was done, a serial number for each stroke, even the angle the pen was making with the digitizer....thats why paper is at the end of its time, and of course there 's the whole "save a tree thing"

Stroke objects are are a collection of packets and each packet contains an x,y location and other packet properties. Next is the almighty PacketProperty Object.
Your stroke is represented as a collection of PacketProperties

Is JNT really a proprietary binary format?
Ok , couple of things first. Ink is ink and i would rather it stayed ink. That probably means i would rather have the actual serialized object . Thats where ISF shows up.

Ink Serialized Format (ISF) , the most compact persistent representation of ink is extensible with custom attributes (identified by a GUID) and allows you to store any kind of data or metadata as an attribute in an ISF stream.

Alright , and .....ISF is a format specific to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and the only way you can get at ISF is to use the Ink object's Load and Save methods.....

everything else starts after ISF.
For best performance and total control of ink ISF is the way to go with whatever enhancements you need to work with ink

For heterogeneous content, use fortified GIFs to encode ink into HTML documents. Browsers and html's hyper linking are your friend in that situation

For Images you could move bitmap and metafile that are got from inks conversion to GIF

And we can alsoe encode ink in the RTF as OLE objects. This is very useful for pasting into an OLE container, such as Microsoft Word.

and of course the most useful format is XML .

the are 4 supported PersistenceFormat, though it essentially is 2 formats , you can go anywhere from this. Actually go any where and come back ...

enum PersistenceFormat {
InkSerializedFormat = 0,
Base64InkSerializedFormat = 1,
Gif = 2,
Base64Gif = 3
};

i used to post ink related stuff to my other blog while working on WriteFree stuff, most of the posts are basic stuff about ink and related technologies.....i'll copy it over here some time

ok, was supposed to work on WriteFree until 10:00 EST but am still working on it....Will post the stuff wherever, am implementing undo/redo right now,

ok, maybe we need comments here ;P

oh well, i don't mind ... The RSS Bandit project has moved to SourceForge. The new URL for the project is http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssbandit

hmmmm,

R1 screw up, the code i uploaded was broken, while cleaning it up on a low res display i deleted a bunch of menuing code, so the menus in the uploaded R1 were broken, code is simple , worth fixing, will upload the working version this evening.....now the good news is design work for R2 moved well and we now have an editor ... and libs...more about that very shortly....there never seems to be too much activity in the gotdotnet boards

this is totally cool

and thats what the logo looks like

another

Yes we have a screenshot too

Write Free , Open Source Journal: News item: "R1 beats Windows Journal because R1 runs on Windows 2000, XP and TPC XP edition. "

technically WriteFree Journal is an InkPicture, 2 toolbars, menus and image files for the template. All development was done on XP or W2K, sometimes with a tablet. The image files are Windows Journal templates exported to tiff and then converted to jpg (am not sure why i went to the trouble).
Most of the development was done using the designers in VS.NET.
R1 will be refactored and then will be refactored some more, it will be componetized so that we can reuse alot of the common stuff.
There will be an R2 and apart from thinking it may be more like OneNote than Windows Journal i don't know what its going to be like.
One of my fears about ink and winforms is that sometimes when you do particular things (zoom in and out for example) it stops behaving like ink and paper, it starts behaving like a windows computer (hanging and might bluescreen) .... that has to change. Paper never hangs and does not need saving (thats why auto save might make sense - in its own thread)

Other than that , i just need to get a break from work to test the thing and see what else i need to do to make it a useful program :)

one thing about WriteFree Journal R1 is that like Windows Journal it seems to suffer performance issues of one type or another, like saving seems to take quite a bit of time. I never multi threaded it and i should. There is also the issue of auto-save, i will bring that up on the messageboard to see what everyone thinks.
Sucks that i can't say much about it since i haven't actually used it. I did some smoke testing but thats about all the testing that i did.

A neat feature of WriteFree Journal R1 is the ability to read and take notes at the same time. A menuitem provides 11 different transparency levels including totally invisible (quite useless) and 2 toolbar buttons provide 9 transparency levels each. I haven't had time to actually beta test R1, so am curious as to how folks will use this feature.
The editor is not as lightwieight as i woul d like it to be and there should be more work done in that area after i get beta testing feedback.
We went with a single document model since not only was that easier to do but most of us never do lots of multiple document notes.

R1 is finally ready

lots of refactoring needs to be done.

get a tablet...!!

and thats that

for those who have been following my "no hostspots" whining will be glad to know that this week when i checked in to my hotel in nyc - i powered my laptop to recharge the battery and i instantly got connected to "linksys" wifi network. I ran netstumbler and 6 networks came into view....some weak, some ok. after work this evening i came set up my little network....2 tablets(tc1000 and portege 3500), a dell latitude, an axim and a zaurus, all devices get a signal, i also have a cross over between the big screen laptop and the toshiba, i also fortunately may have the day off tomorrow..a holiday.....:) now thats the life....no more starbucks, -why the f#@* don't they have enough power outlets..

another real reason why we need WriteFree and related inky components Create and Use Forms in Journal . Form filling in Journal is very exciting especially for commonly filled out forms - tax forms come to mind for folks that don't use turbo tax, quicken and other software. Being able to get at this functionality programmatically is neccesary for a lot of developers, maybe thats what we might go for , a simple component that enables form filling. Will look at this later, post ideas to the message board

At least its not only me ranting about the lack of ubiquitous broadband jrjBlog...This is a big fucking , fuckin, fruckin deal....lemme explain. --its a long story though
Somewhere around 80 centuries ago- lots of previously "primitive folks" converged on strategically advantageous locations and started living close together probably due to the efficiencies that it provided (efficiencies= easier defenses and sharing and whatever else)....
--this growth in communities and the "efficiencies" that it brought made it possible for this folks to have a bit more time on their hands....And back then time on their hands was really literally "time on their hands"....Since that's what the human brain is supposed to have evolved for , hand coordination...
for some reason and it could have gone another way, some person in this "primitivia" decided to use a surface to communicate an abstraction....pure magic...this "abstracting on surfaces" over the 80 centuries past (some say 100 centuries others 200- I don't care), developed into elaborate multi faceted human activity that sadly went mainstream only about 4 centuries ago...track the dominant civilizations over human history and you can see how this "abstracting on a surface" is related to dominance.
The harder thing after abstracting was sharing ... sharing this stuff made all the difference, abstracting alone is a bit weird.....as usual this long story will suddenly be cut short by this claim.... "groups of people with widespread, ubiquitous networks access- broadband will kick some serious butt" now does someone think that its disturbing that S Korea has more internet connections per person than the US. My life is impossible without network access, and am sure everyone is in pretty much the same situation....am in new york city this month and apart from a few often inconveniently located community hotspots there is really no ubiquitous broadband ...in New York (the big apple, the greatest city in the ...), the internet for most is still an oracle you go to every so often, go through a ritual to use and so on, someone tell me am stupid or I have no clue....but something is really wrong...this is the biggest issue today...the fact that components access points selling for barely a hundred bucks and so on, you can almost never find an access location in NYC.....anyway I promised not to whine about that here any more.....but I think that there is a serious problem that our society hasn't figured out ubiquitous network access ...maybe my biggest fear "capitalism regressing" is making people refuse to do the right thing and share network access that they are not using....end of the rant , but there is another frustrated person...yes why can't hotels offer internet...don't they get it, maybe IT industry is so full of crooked people that hotel management can't figure out how easy it is to share the same fuckin internet service that they are paying for anyway with their guests

writefree

writefree

ok, my hotspot ranting will be done elsewhere, i seem to spend quite a bit of time looking for hotspots, but its the only way i can get unfettered internet access - proxy servers, content blockers and all that so read here if you care about wifi and the lack of

because guess what, its 7.50pm now and starbucks at 35 st and 8th ave will close at 10.00, actually they kick us out earlier, though i found a bar that is in my hotel that faces a starbucks and i can get a moderately good signal if i sit at the right place.
Thats the state of ubiquitous internet today, of course if you don't care you can get on those cullular networks for about 300 bucks for the card and some more for the service, and thats always under 100kbps....something is very wrong with that picture, remember the internet is over a decade old

and on the hotspot thing in nyc, there are a bunch on nycwireless.net's nodedb, you just have to find them, and there are might not be any conviniently located that open late.
The optimal place would be like paris on the platte in downtown denver, opens very late, totally free, lots of folks pecking away and dirt cheap coffee and food. I am so sorry for any time that i didn't appreciate paris. So a bit more hunting and i should find some interesting location that is not bryant park

ok, some more ranting and little coding, i managed to convince my boss to let me do a particular solution using C#, actually i doubt he cares whether its C#, VB.Net or Swing, He just needs a good app. The entire backend is a mishmash of java, lots of scripting and a bevy of legacy shit with lots of soap calls. The direction of the organization is a java based integration framework, so it should have been a java client app, but luckily with the fairly small user base behind the firewall a web app made no sense. Thus i sold him on a windows stuff client instead of the earlier envisioned JSP's. The purpose of this rant is that i will now be able to run VS.Net on my developer workstation, that means i can do all sorts of WinForms shit whenever i can, and i plan on selling them more WinForms stuff since they are already a Windows shop, the inhouse backend is all windows. Thus i should be able to sneak in some Write Free coding in the meantime. No promises but i will get to finish the Toolbars and maybe work on some more components, I read somewhere that someone had inky components, i went to their website and wasn't able to find any of those components. And like i keep on saying i need inky components, actually i don't but the tablet really needs inky compoenents, Windows has to get very inky fast.....and yes Dell is still wrong about the direction that the Tablet will take....so we are back is the point

the cool thing is that with the delay and disruption that write free has had there might be industry developments that may change the direction and structure of the project, so ever the optimist , i figure there is something good about the slowing pace of development. Its just one of those things, we are always moving in a particular direction and though we might never get there , we still took the road less travelled .....

yes , am really sorry but i have had to spend the past couple of weeks in nyc and in between trying to find suitable internet connectivity and lugging a laptop and a tablet, i haven't done too much on write free. I am hoping to get more organized soon and then i can put some time into the project. my weekends are horrible -since i spend almost 20 hours commuting, i try to do some work in transit but the real work in a software project (design, strategy and planning) never seems to be possible in a transient environ since the nature of software development requires being able to sketch, doodle, prototype, communicate and the very neccesary "zone time" ...oh well i hope to be home without the commute in a couple of weeks and that should be good for the project.
Anyone that knows 24hour open hotspots in nyc , please email me, there is nothing worse than not being able to get online at night (this week am in a room facing 8th Ave and there are 2 miserable wifi networks that i can get but none of them are accesible, so i haven't had last weeks luck, though even last week the intermittency was quite a try, oh well, and yes unlike the bookstores in denver which were always empty, the bookstores in nyc are always full of sometimes disruptive juveniles- i have also drank enough tall mochas to last me the rest of my life

still swamped, bad time management or both, but i guess this gives us time to evolve the design according to changing market conditions, no message board comments so i figure everyone is busy :)

yes, yes, am sorry there has been little progress but i have been busy at work, uploaded buggy standard toolbar, will fix it when i get the time,otherwise knock yourself out folks

ok Denver sucked since there wasn't ample wifi networks and there is the other factors, but the Borders were literally empty and that made it an optimal place to code- think all the books you need and an 11 mbps network, New York, the bookstores are always crowded and though there are many networks , in the fall its not too cool cause you can't sit outside, so you literally have to move from location to location, I plan on just saying shucks after room service has been to my room and doing the rest of work in my 10 by 10 room after moving the furniture around to be able to use the desk so that i can still get a signal and sit at a desk. And the week after next , am coming up with a zaurus, and the pocket pc's for sniffing wifi networks. You should always carry a smaller device that can pick up 2.4 and 5 GHz radio bands signals, you can find your own or you can just get a pocket pc and netstumber or similar software. That enables you to discover networks that you can use

bit more ranting about wifi, am still intermittently coding, talk about context switching and related, unless you have to i would recommend hunkering down in one location and doing all your coding at that location though on the move tends to i guess encourage the whole concept of prioritisation and improvisation in software development .... oh t-mobile keeps dropping me and customer service sucks. Nevertheless i will still put in my 5 hours today for WriteFree and if you remember i still have access to one of the 5 wifi networks that i can pick up on the 25th floor and so on

ok , now am 25 floors above seventh avenue and for some reason am picking up 5 AP's , and yes some are accesible, so i have 6 mbps connectivity via an unknown insecure entwork, i am not complaining but i will try to find the owner of the ip so that i can inform them that their network is open to whoever, if its internal , too bad. So i have net access, now i can work in my room

ok this blog is about Write Free, the open source note taking framework, so its probably not a good idea to rant about hostpots here , but the fact this project is not being done in one location and like every one i also have to have a real job at some point in the year so i have to travel, i really expect that i might miss my books and other artifacts that i may have at my desk, but i expect to be able to connect to resources and stuff like that ...oh well may be i am clueless

someone tell me am clueless about the broadband and hotspot thing since if am right then we have a big big problem, doesn't those two items determine the economic direction of the human race, i mean doesn't it seem like a critical aspect of what we will ultimately become, a species that communicates in real time and with unlimited bandwidth. Thats what i think, but then why are so few public places not going out of the way to set up few hotspots, i would figure any public place would find it an obvious smart move to set up a free hotspot. Not only do you attract a more aware if only afluent clientele with that capability and am sure it costs less for the average business to set up a hotspot than it takes to set up the music system that blasts hip hop into the unfortunate cistomers ears.
ummm now am sitting at the corner of 35th street and seventh avenue - at the starbucks which opens later than the one block up, i still haven't found a place in manahattan like paris on the platte in denver, and even paris closes at 2:00 am, something is very wrong with this lack of "internet in the air " picture. I am sure its related to the whole messed up telecoms industry situation. i feel like am part of an untapped , misunderstood opportunity. I miss houston and Barrett Canon who i personally think is a revolutionary on the scale of Ben Franklin. Based on my few experiences i think houston wireless is undoubtedly the most progressive and effective community wifi network promoters ever. They have focus and for that reason , most of houston is fairly covered with over 100 free nodes.
I am still trying to explore/assess NYC wireless and their famed 587 Locations, and 8990 Total Nodes. currently i have not found any one of those nodes and am in the middle of manhattan so am wondering whether nodedb is not the best way to make folks aware of hotspot locations or whether the specific communities should come up with a more get folks to use the AP's strategy. I guess most folks have understood Metcalfe but haven't yet figured out Reed's Law. The story now is not about doing networks, that's a given and thats really a lower level communal function. The tricks is building a more value based thing and communities do that. Its easy to link folks together, in fact me and all the folks having this 3 dollar mochas are a kind of network, but am not sure you can call us a community, there is little group forming here, though i confess i am sometimes by nature anti social , but i really would rather do digital communities than real life communities

and also according to Paul Thurrott

Tablet PCs Set to Soar
"Tablet PC sales only account for about 1 percent of the overall market for notebook computers, making them a niche market at best, but various trends and changes to the underlying platform will see sales surge, analysts say. The original generation of Tablet PC devices was hobbled by two huge problems: Poor performance and poor battery life, the latter of which is obviously a deadly sin for machines that are meant to be used untethered. Both of these problems will be solved by the Centrino platform, which combines Intel's Pentium-M processor with dedicated chipsets and wireless functionality, leading to excellent performance and stellar battery life. Another change involves the common-sense move away from slate designs--which target certain niche markets, but aren't viable for normal office use--toward the so-called convertible laptop, which can work like a normal notebook when needed, or be switched into slate mode for handwriting-based work. Market research firm IDC predicts that Tablet PCs will thus account for 20 percent of the notebook market by 2007"

am not sure whether the centrino will be the savior of this mode of computing, but i agree that battery times are ridiculous and though there are a bunch of promising ideas and trends in computing power management that are coming of age, i still think for some time the demands of the average mobile computa (computa is my term for a human using a computer) will exceed the ability to provide the kind of power experience that hand watches provide (when was the last time that you thought about you watch battery). The one single factor that will make all the difference will probably be the proliferation of "internet in the air", another of my terms that means hotspots. The fact that a place like New York has a minimal number of hotspots available the entire day, actually am not even sure that you can find a 24 hour hotspot location at all , i haven't found one. I continoulsy bashed Denver,saying how the telecoms infrastructure there was horrible, and now in New York city i see the same thinking....that might be the real reason untehered computing is failing and that might be the reason that the Tablet is languishing

nevertheless we exepect to write lots of this stuff since:
1. I hate the tethering that is part of desktop computing( am willing to forego the big display and the mess that is my desk for an ad hoc computing location- and while for some tasks my desk is the more optimized location, often i need to redce the baggage that comes with that location)
2. This is not just about location, its also about a new way of working and though i am typing this words i believe being able to use the almighty pen anywhere and got a bunch of things creates a bunch of opportunities for me that i would otherwise not have had
3 i vowed not to get keyboard related health problems
4. the smallest keyboards are at least 2 inches by 4 inches or something like that , you can write in the air and have that sent back to your virtual built into your glasses display or whatever
5. and its gores on and on

another rainy day in New York - means little development done since i mostly do hotspots and other off base development locations, its really very hard to do any development without some type of internet access. As a result, most of the development will be done tonight, i guess , without internet access

well i found Cosi locations in NY. I wonder if anyone has had any experience with them that they would like to talk about, If so, please post your comments at the WriteFree Site since am sure many folks who might want to contribute to the project may find that information handy. I am planning on checking one of them out tonight since borders wil close at 11:00 and am not planning on using expensive hotel ethernet.

weekend time for WriteFree is almost 50% of my time, there's going to be some work to do , but at least i can say for sure that some stuff will be done this weekend.
The sad thing is that there is little participation in the community. I admit that i feel responsible for the lack of participation since we haven't really come up with a broad enough spec or schedule for the same. As we really get to releases and other value items , there should be more activity, oh well i need the software. The only concern i have is that maybe a better investment in my time is towrite proprietary stuff. guess we wil see how that goes.

ok and it does not help that am doing this on the road most of the time. At least i can report to the folks that the tablet is a viable development platform. The only realistic configuration for development is the Motion M1300 or the Toshiba Portege 3500 Convertible Tablet PC which are both fairly expandable. Using any thing else is painful. I will do the specs for my on the road dev system later, right now they need to close the Borders on 32nd St and 2nd Ave in Manhattan and that was the dev location this evening....yes on the road you need some kind of broadband access...am doing t-mobile

ok and it does not help that am doing this on the road most of the time. At least i can report to the folks that the tablet is a viable development platform. The only realistic configuration for development is the Motion M1300 or the Toshiba Portégé 3500 Convertible Tablet PC which are both fairly expandable. Using any thing else is painful. I will do the specs for my on the road dev system later, right now they need to close the Borders on 32nd St and 2nd Ave in Manhattan and that was the dev location this evening....yes on ther road you need some kind of broadband access...am doing t-mobile

small change of plans, I expected to get about 10 hours per day for WriteFree work this coming week, Unfortunately another trip came up and thats only going to leave me with about 5 hours a day or less. I get some time during the weekend, and thats better than nothing. I guess thats not too good for WriteFree. However i will do my best to do good quality work that others can build on. Might be slower but will be done eventually... now let me put some work in the project so that i can have project relevant stuff to post on this blog

so bear with us, about the delays, we will try to blog more about the project and to move faster to make sure there is stuff that you guys can get to use and play with.

State of the Project :
We have the standard toolbars done and wired into a test form. We have New Note, Open Note , Save Note, Find ,Undo and Redo, that with the Pen toolbar is the R1 Write Free Journal. There is a bug in Open Note so we haven't released it since i haven't had time to fix that.
I will briefly talk about the design of the toolbar, maybe someone can comment or volunteer to fix it.
The Standard toolbar is a Toolbar. with buttons for each of those functions, The toolbar also has a InKPicture property. a CommandHandler object is created with an InkPicture when the ButtonClick event is fired and for each of the buttons the appropriate CommandHandler method is called e.g NewDocument(), OpenDocument() etc
CommandHandler has a constructor that takes an InkPicture and sets a private InKPicture. Thats how we get the Form's InkPicture reference.
I haven't done menu synch, i seriously considered saying shucks nobody likes menus , but after some thought i realized that there is no way to have a Windows app without menus, too many issues are addressed by menus, so we will have menu synch in some form. I think i might go with synching the menuitems directly with the toolbar buttons with like a separate object that maintains the state of the selection thats it. If anyone has done something similar and thinks that design is dumb, please comment.

and of course with the last iteration we are sure that we need to address the issue of what a document is, we have left that out there for too long, we simply got an extension and simply saved isf into that that extension, but we really need to decide what a document is at least as concerns the templates.

ok, it seems like i should be able to get at least 10 hours a day after the trip, so thats a good thing, thats pretty exciting since i met a guy at Starbucks who had considered buying a tablet sometime but went with some Mac laptop, He use it for graphics, I also met a guy at Barnes and Noble that had a TC1000 , Same evening i met the TC1000er i met a lady who said she had thought about it quite a bit. The words of the Mac defector echo in my mind "those things have to come down in price!!!!", i have for some time refused to admit that Tablets are too expensive, insisiting that the problem is lack of software. Maybe its true, but maybe its also true with the right application people will spend the money to get the functionality, I don't know, but the situation remains that there isn't enough , actuallly there isn't any software for the tablet apart from the fairly skewed offerings from vendors trying to expand their existing products and MS stuff. So though the things are too expensive , fact remains that there is STILL no software for this device. The good news is that after my trip (a day) i get my 10 hours a day to work on Write Free whcih as we said earlier is a framework, an enabler, a way for us to be able to make lots of applications for the tablet .....

yes the project is running late, but i have a trip to make and need more compute cycles for the automated building and stuff like that. On the technical capability front, I think we are in very good shape , all we need is some time and am working on getting that fixed so that at least someone can code for at least 10 hours every day. That would make it possible for us to achieve my dream of a release a day,

the approach we are taking with WriteFree Journal is a a document centric application approach. Control is expected to be provided at the document level. A document currently is a series of ink strokes probably with a background image -the all important template

sorry having been blogging more about the SDK, dell and other stupid shit like , that, Toolbars were done, The model for the tollbars is a CommandHandler with a method for each toolbar buttton, and thats it. Its really the only simple model to take with toolbars since the buttons do not have any events

with the a target feature set are seeing more interest in activity in a time when a lot software creators are complianing that the demand for software coupled with jobs being exported to India is killing software. I am on most days optmisitic, and believe that software will always be a growth industry. Its hard for me to believe that we will have enough software soon. In about 100 or 200 years we might have developed every concievable information system and humans might have advanced to a more advanced type of communication and collaboration that may not need physical devices or whatever. But for now and the next say 50 years or for anyone thats alive today's lifetime, There will always be demand for software. Intel has plans to squeeze another decade into Moore's law, and 80% of the human race have never used advanced information Technology devices. We still have many many problems that will only be solved by computers. I could go on and on. I would say to whining folks in software, forget your me too mentality and do your noble thing. So long as you are me-tooing, so long as you believe in you own BS(if someone tells you that you are smart-you really shouldn't believe them since smart is relative), you will be part of the dperessing thinking that is a result too many me tooers who are too lazy to try and provide real solutions -they believe that IT is a game and they are the players and the customer are suckers. If you think what am saying is stupid remember MS,ORCL,Weblogic(competing with the spec maker, and free software) still make profits. And many many more and guess what like they say at MS , "we have barely scratched the surface." Unless you believe that you will still be using the same computer you are using right now in 2007, you know am right.

People LOVE ink and Notepad was never about taking notes. Windows Tablet PC Edition's Journal is the first real notes-like notes done on a computer. Creating notes with Microsoft's digital ink is the first real credible attempt at making it possible to forget that its a computer and focus on capturing your thoughts, or whatever people take notes for.
About 4 weeks ago
Loren proposed " Open Source Journal-like project" with an open file format . Many folks thought that it was a good idea with lots of potential. I confess i had previously thought that it would help if there was a way to get at the internals of Windows Journal.
Bryan Flamig thought it was a crazy idea, and Peter was sure it was an almost silly idea. I suggested doing an ink editing framework that would spawn all manner of ink editing applications. on the second day of this month I set up a workspace at gotdotnet after several names for the project were suggested and we were on our way with 8 volunteers signing up almost instantly. Today we started development after a final R1 Feature freeze development Team meeting last night. The initial initiative will focus on a componetized ink editing application and control to be released by the end of the week. That is the subject of this blog.

People LOVE ink and Notepad was never about taking notes. Windows Tablet PC Edition's Journal is the first real notes-like notes done on a computer. Creating notes with Microsoft's digital ink is the first real credible attempt at making it possible to forget that its a computer and focus on capturing your thoughts, or whatever people take notes for.
About 4 weeks ago
Loren proposed " Open Source Journal-like project" with an open file format . Many folks thought that it was a good idea with lots of potential. I confess i had previously thought that it would help if there was a way to get at the internals of Windows Journal.
Bryan Flamig thought it was a crazy idea, and Peter was sure it was an almost silly idea. I suggested doing an ink editing framework that would spawn all manner of ink editing applications. on the second day of this month I set up a workspace at gotdotnet after several names for the project were suggested and we were on our way with 8 volunteers signing up almost instantly. Today we started development after a final R1 Feature freeze development Team meeting last night. The initial initiative will focus on a componetized ink editing application and control to be released by the end of the week. That is the subject of this blog.