Remember the ole ActiveX-based inkable search tip I wrote awhile back which enabled you to search Google using hanwritten queries?
Well, now it has a cousin: a Silverlight-based version. You can test it out now if you're running Windows or a Mac with a Silverlight capable browser by clicking here.

Like its predecessor, you can ink what you want to search for in a panel and then have your handwriting recognized and the query sent off to Google. In this case however, Silverlight is used rather than requiring a user to download an ActiveX control. Much nicer in my book.
Also, the handwriting recognition is not done on the client side in this situation--it's all done on the server. So you don't have to have a Tablet PC or Vista SKU to get it working. You can even use a Mac. The ink you write in the Silverlight panel is translated into an XML packet that is sent over to the server via an AJAX request, which in turn is processed by a web service which reconstructs the ink from the XML packet, recognizes the ink, and then sends the reco result back to the client. I'll talk more about how this is done in another post. I'll walk through the code and how I had to configure the server and the like.
Note: this is just a test app I'm working on to experiment with ink reco and Silverlight. I may take it down or rearrange things later. I thought people might enjoy trying it out in the meantime.


Incremental Blogger