To spur developer interest, Dumky (in a comment to Peter’s post about TabletPCDeveloper) suggests that The Leszynski Group open up its form recognition code. It might work. (Although I’d rather The Leszynski Group make some money off of its efforts to encourage them to keep going.) I have another suggestion: Microsoft should open up the source to Journal.
OK, you can stop laughing now. I know it’s not going to happen. So instead, what I suggest is an Open Source Journal-like project. The structure of the program would seem to be a good starter app for many people. Plus the program would give everyone a chance to create an open file format–a major drawback to Journal. Down the road, who knows, maybe it could form the basis of an alternative OneNote-like application of the form that so many seem to be envisioning.
Bryan thinks it’s a crazy idea. What do you say?
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Yup, let’s start a workspace for it!
Seriously though, the one coolest feature of Journal is the fact that it can recognize stuff written in at an angle! Still trying to figure that one out. 
I wish I’d written my photo notepaper app in C# rather than C++. It would be a starting point.
Photo Notepaper App? The program that let’s you captuer images from a web cam and draw on them? C++ for DirectShow to capture?
I’m going with InterOp on that with VB.Net for my M2PhotoJournal
I think its a great idea with a lot of potential. Microsoft does a great job with software but like apache foundation has proven , some software is best produced by communities of volunteers. Journal is languishing in mediocrity primarily because of the lack of an open document format but more due to the lack of an programmatic interface. What we need is an all round ink editing framework that might evolve in the way of vi,ex,ed,sed,grep and so on.
A project like this might initially emphasize on the principles of the effort not the final product. The priniciples that would govern the architecture. I would suggest that one of the main ideas be simple base interfaces, and real object orientation in designing components. It would be make possible to build everything from ink line editors to complex IDE type editor ….and yes it would be free as in freedom.
I wasn’t saying the Leszynski Group should publish all their source
But they or others could make some code available or could publish some papers (rather than the source).
The Journal would certainly be a great application to learn from. Having an open file format and open layout analysis component would be great.
Like I ranted about before, the Ink itself could use an open format
In terms of recognizing at angles, if you could group strokes to find words and then find lines, you could start guessing lines directions by looking at individual words and neighboring words. You could then remove the angle and try to recognize horizontal text.
I found some information on ink stroke parsing in http://www.fxpal.com/PapersAndAbstracts/papers/chi98.pdf
From what I understand, the Tablet PC SDK offers a Divider component that can do pretty much that: group the words, lines and paragraphs even at angles ( http://www.msdnaa.net/Resources/display.aspx?ResID=2181 ).
Iggykin, I agree in that I see multiple tools within the application that could be spun off or developed first and then wrapped into an app. Codeproject.com has done well inspiring the development of re-usable tools. And with tools, other unthought of apps are sure to follow.
Hmmm. There are lots of good starting points. Maybe it suggests a couple well segmented sub-projects: The app itself, document format, and ink sdk.
Actually, I bet in a community effort that the rationale of the development process is often more obvious in hindsight and based on what gets done.
Marauderz: “I’m going with InterOp on that with VB.Net for my M2PhotoJournal”
I used VFW.
I put together some old code–hence the C++ nature of the app.
I think it’s a great idea and will pitch in a couple of hours per week. Who wants to take the lead in creating a gotdotnet workspace for it?
Thanks Larry, i’ll check this thread this weekend and if no one has created a workspace or set up another type of online facility to further this effort i’ll do the same. any suggestions for names? Open Source Joutnal might be a bit bland but it might be it.
On a separate but related note, does anybody feel like Windows is slowing ink and the Tablet. Using Windows apps on a tablet today is a frustrating experience. I know that Microsoft had developed a whole bunch of ink/stylus centric software prototypes that of course didn’t look like traditional windows apps, but junked them after usability studies showed that most people didn’t think it was a windows pc when they used it though they were often times more productive using these ink/stylus centric apps.It makes sense from a marketing point of view for a new product.
“Microsoft had developed a whole bunch of ink/stylus centric software prototypes…but junked them after usability studies showed that most people didn’t think it was a windows pc when they used it though they were often times more productive using these ink/stylus centric apps.”
That’s very interesting. When I met with the Tablet team last year, I asked “What about radial / pie menus?” which have been shown to be faster with pen input. Their response was along the lines you suggest — “Well, we don’t want to confuse users.”
Shall we go with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/legalcode
And can it be an Open Source project without a goofy name like “Journalike”?
>> And can it be an Open Source project without a goofy name like “Journalike”?
Darn. That was my favorite.
In terms of licenses, yeah it seems that Creative Commons license has become quite popular, but I’d have to defer to others. Does anyone know what’s the best license to use nowadays for projects such as this?
I set up another thread for picking a project name.
http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch/archives/000653.html
I think this is an excellent idea Loren, and I’d be happy to do what I can to help this along. I’m just now learning C#, so if that is the language used then you would have to bear with me.
As much as I support Microsoft, this is one of the major things I think is missing on the Tablet PC platform right now. The ability to used Journal like functions in other applications, and the ability to build add-ons to Journal.
One thing we have to be wary of though… the ink really needs to interoperate with the Tablet PC ink datatype. So that the ink can be used not only in Open Source Journal (or whatever the name is), but can also be copied into other programs that support ink. If we lose this capability, none of open source ability will really matter at all… no one will use it.
I agree with Spencer, first of all that it should use the MS Ink datatypes, because for one it would mean OpenJL (Open JournaL) would get all the new features that will hopefully come with the next Tablet updates, and of course make the work for any developers ALOT easier. Also, I think the abilility to have add ons could be a major step forward, for instance I would love to integrate Ink AniEd into Journal so that you could have animations and such mixed in with your notes. A good add-on system could not only allow for all the features meantioned above, but also allow you to choose and pick which ones you want dynamically. Possibly even have profiles of different add-ons.
Anyway, I think for dynamic add-ins, it would probably be easier to write the project in C#, this could even allow for a macro scripting add-on and such. Not to meantion that while I love C++, writing C# code is easier than falling off a rock.
-Lewey
I have a lot of experience coding in java, but I have been doing some C# tablet pc development over the last month or so. I would like to help as much as I can. Let me know if it gets off the ground.
I’ve created a GotDotNet workspace, using the working name “FreeWrite Journal”:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=8d646dd0-f52b-4e25-a9e9-7d5a4f5f22d0
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