Inkbase: Programmable Ink (2022)

If someone can find a way to seamlessly pivot the same data structures into at least 3 views, you'd have a hit:

1. Spreadsheets with arbitrary calcs and display

2. Notebook style calcs, explanatory & UI controls

3. Pure code text

In spreadsheet mode, you can free form layout everything you need to prototype a solution. In notebook mode, you can create a literate refinement. In pure code mode you can tweak everything to a production device.

I fine notebooks are great, until you're trying to figure out connections between disparate code locations and I want pure code to fix an overview. When I'm trying to take an existing spreadsheet, I'd love to start by copying pasting and getting data in to then refine and regularize rather than figure out some importing issue that becomes a pin to code flow.

Overall, it seems doable but requires things like named ranges, what the ordinal placement is from one locale to the next.

If you are into this kind of thing, you might like these essays from 2021:

1. https://mlajtos.mu/posts/new-kind-of-paper

2. https://mlajtos.mu/posts/new-kind-of-paper-2

3. https://mlajtos.mu/posts/new-kind-of-paper-3

4. https://mlajtos.mu/posts/new-kind-of-paper-4

I mention various tech (APL, Sketchpad, RAND tablet, Pascaline, VisiCalc, etc.) while showing of demos of calculator designed for iPad & Pencil. I hope writing about Apple Math Notes when I get my hands on it.

Pretty cool ideas. If simple calculations were built into the apps I use, I would make daily use for napkin math.

I've dipped my toe into the pen input tablet world a few times (often unimpressed), but recently committed to a new iPad Air with the latest Pencil Pro.

I write on paper and whiteboards every day for software design and todo lists and just general musing. But recently had an itch for the advantages of digital. And I'm really happy so far. A lot comes down to the app you choose and how convenient the UI/UX is, but the killer features I'm going to hate living without:

1. Infinite canvas. Never have to truncate a sentence or messily cross the spine or flip a page. So much context, I just pan and zoom to what I want to focus on.

2. Rearrange rather than rewrite. Long-press turns my pen tool into a lasso, then I drag however.

3. Very productive erasing. Using the new squeeze gesture, my pen is instantly an eraser and only takes one pass.

In my opinion, nothing beats a whiteboard for conversations about software. It's one of the biggest losses from the pivot to remote work. My ultimate goal is to bring convenient whiteboarding to zoom calls. But so far I'm really enjoying it in place of the pad of paper that's on my desk.

Really surprised that the references skip from 1988 (Viewpoint: Toward a Computer for Visual Thinkers) to 2010 (INK-12) totally overlooking:

- Momenta

- Go Corp.'s PenPoint

- Aha! Inkwriter (which became the basis for Microsoft's Journal)

- Dan Bricklin's pen software

- the academic exercises Denim and Silk which were written in Java

or even extant tools such as:

- https://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html

- or the facility to do math in text input fields drawing software such as Freehand or Illustrator

- or https://ryven.org where one can drag in programming elements and annotate with a pen

I've been a big believe in this sort of thing for a long while now, and would be glad of it becoming more workable and available and popular.

I'd love to have a piece of software which was:

- freeform, allowing both writing and drawing

- yet still allowed capturing data structures and referring to things by some meaningful handle

- programmable --- even just a formula pane such as Lotus Improv had would be great

Dont forget write by styluslabs in prior art. It doesn't do anything really interesting with pictures but the way it handles words and text on lined paper is really interesting.

Looks similar to the new iPad features in the next OS.

Watching the demos, I thought this was related to Ken Perlin's ChalkTalk, but they appear to be independent efforts. Inkbase cites Chalktalk in the Prior Art Section it's it's definitely worth watching those videos. Inkbase, ChalkTalk, and other similar interactive tools really emphasize the "bicycles for the mind" aspect of computers. One thing that is nicer about ChalkTalk is that it cleans up the handdrawn lines by default which makes the resulting diagram look nicer. Sutherland's Sketchpad also did this and it looked mindblowing the first time I saw that.

I guess Apple's new calculator and notes app on the iPad sort of do some of these tasks at a smaller scale for calculations. Where has this project gone?

I am a big fan of LiquidText (https://www.liquidtext.net). It lets you link across and move conceptual blocks around rather intuitively, but is not a generic note-taking application.

Bet I’m not the only one who thought something’d spilled on my screen…