Eric Mack continues with a discussion started on Gottabemobile about which apps should be ink enabled.
In his post yesterday, Eric explains why he thinks that Lotus Notes should be designed with a pen and Tablet in mind.
One comment I'd add to Eric's list is that ink enabling could benefit from a richer set of tools provided by the OS. In my mind there's still more to do.
Some of this is coming in Vista. For instance, in Vista developers will be able to display drop lists of possible anwers as a user is handwriting. This little change will make a huge difference in how easily and quickly somebody can use a pen. IE 7 uses this new feature. As you handwrite a URL, previously visited URLs will appear in a drop list that match what you've entered up to that point. We've been able to do this with the keyboard for quite some time, but now we'll get these incremental drop lists with the pen too.
There are a bunch of little ink enhancements like this in Vista. Many of them may not be as visible as the introduction of the TIP was in SP2, but to the developer they are very welcome. It'll mean you'll start seeing more apps with richer pen and ink experiences.
Like I mentioned earlier though, there's more needed. There ought to be cross-browser ink support, for instance. Right now, "ink" (polylines) in Flash is practically the ink standard on the web. Tablet PC ink should be the real winner here, though. You should be able to ink in GMail or just about any DHTML editor on the web.
The Tablet SDK would also benefit from a solid note page component. Currently, if a developer wants to add notes to their app, they have to either code their own note component or possibly purchase Agilix's note tool, which is .NET based, rather than C++-based, which many existing commercial apps are. I'd also like to see the recognizer extended. What about equations? User-trained shapes? And so on.
Vista is definitely a step in the right direction. The ink experience is even better than in XP. The new Vista APIs offer greater control of such things as the TIP. And the new InkAnalysis recognizer will enable a new generation of "smarter" looking ink-enabled apps. However, there's still more to do.
As the Tablet customer base grows and the breadth of the Tablet "APIs" increases as well as the Windows shell including even more improvements for handling the pen, I imagine we'll see more and more ink-enabled apps. My guess is all three are essential ingredients to a growing collection of ink-enabled products.


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