One of the big announcements at Mix07 this week is the inclusion of ink in the Silverlight platform. Yes, ink. Whether you're on Windows XP, Vista, or a Mac, you'll now have access to ink in the browser. Think smooth strokes, Tablet-friendly rapid collection of stylus points (although the mouse is equally supported), and scalable vector-based ink.
There's no built-in recognition, however, for the first time Microsoft is tipping their hat at using their recognition engine on a server. Want to add handwriting recognition to a cross-browser app? Collect ink in Silverlight and then Ajax the ink to a server and get back the recognized text.
Microsoft is promoting the technology as an image and video annotation technology, but it goes so much further than that--or at least has potential to. Just like there are numerous Flash-based art drawing and art sharing apps, I imagine we'll see a similar pool of Silverlight art-oriented ink projects in the browser. I talked wtih a couple developers that are also contemplating adding ink to their DHTML-based Rich Internet Applications. We'll have to see how this goes. My guess is fairly well. Down the road as the .Net CLR is added to Silverlight, we'll see ink extensions like this even more. What will be the difference? People will be able to do more with their Silverlight "applications," and part of that will mean adding ink support.
I have a couple ink samples that I'm wanting to post and I'll do my best to get them as soon as possible. In the meantime, check out the Tatoo example on the Silverlight site, which gives you one non-traditional example of ink in the browser. In order to get the sample to work, you'll need to be running on Windows XP, Vista, or a Mac using IE, Firefox, or Safari. The browser will prompt you to install Silverlight if it is not already installed or a previous version of Silverlight was installed.


Incremental Blogger