InkSeine, a Microsoft research project, available exclusively inhouse at Microsoft during the development stages, is now open for testing. The brainchild of Ken Hinckley, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond, InkSeine is built as a new inking tool addressed at Tablet PCs and UMPCs running whether Windows Vista or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Despite being made available for public testing, InkSeine is still just a research prototype, Microsoft emphasized. Essentially, InkSeine is designed as a tool that takes interaction beyond the mouse and keyboard, while at the same time converging ink, search, and gathering functions into a centralized workflow, with a focus on taking advantage of the fluidity and flexibility provided by working with the pen.

"InkSeine is a powerful and simple tool for thought," stated Hinckley. "We hope people will have fun playing with it. Designing a really good pen interface is a very difficult problem. We think we have a good set of ideas, and there are aspects of InkSeine that have been proposed in the research literature for years, but nobody really knows if they work. The best way to advance the state of the art in this area is to try it out in the wild, so to speak. We want people who do drawings, sketches, and notes on their Tablet PCs to tell us what they're excited about and what may need some rethinking. That's how we learn the most."

And make no doubt about it. InkSeine is not an average Tablet PC or ultra mobile PC application/tool. It is an approach at developing an entirely new user interface, and at revolutionizing the way users interact with their machines. And in this context, InkSeine falls under Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' vision of taking Microsoft on the path of natural user interfaces. Instead of mouse clicks and keystrokes, InkSeine permits users to write in ink and then control actions with pen strokes and pre-programed gestures. Just go ahead and download it, install it on top of Vista or XP Tablet PC Edition on a Tablet PC or UMPC and give it a go.

"The search interface is the most innovative and unique feature InkSeine has," Hinckley added. "It's built on top of Windows Vista Search, so it takes advantage of Microsoft's great search technologies, but it presents that functionality to users in a completely new way. To me, the information superhighway is a notebook page with plenty of wide-open space. There's no speed limit to how fast I can fly around with my pen. We've taken a large number of innovations-some that we've developed ourselves and some that have flowed out of the academic research community and put them together in a novel way. By restructuring the interface to make all those things easy and painless and effortless, we're changing how you use the tool. We're solving all those problems so people can perform whatever task they face in a very intuitive way."