Ink Support in Windows 10 (video)

A potential Lumia 1520 successor with the 1020's camera (but not the slowness of said camera) and a Wacom digitizer just like the Galaxy Note offerings would seriously tempt me into switching to Windows Phone 10, not even kidding. This new API's a great first step toward making that happen.

But I'm pretty insistent on the Wacom part, something that outright locks me into the Galaxy Note series of phones, and it'll take one heck of a phone to win me away from the Galaxy Note 4, which incidentally has a perfect OneNote experience now, just like a Tablet PC that fits in my pocket.

While it's good that they're also trying to push a good inking experience on capacitive-only devices, well, once you go Wacom (or N-trig, or other comparable pen digitizer tech), you don't go back.

As for desktop use, I'm not entirely sure what this brings over the existing Ink APIs that have existed since XP Tablet PC Edition, but if all it takes to implement is one line of code for initialization, that's a very good start.

 

Well, first of all I don't think WinRT apps could fully take advantage of Ink APIs. I know that there was an old Microsoft-developed Sudoku demo program for the desktop that used the Ink API back in the day. When the guy who wrote that demo ported it to WinRT, the handwriting recognition part of it took a huge step backward.

Also, I'd think they just want to unify the ink platform. OneNote 2013 used a different method for ink compared to the OneNote app... and so the two had a different feel. My guess would be that Office 2016 and Windows 10 will change that so that they're both using this new API.

I did notice one slight caveat though in the "What's New" developer page: "Important These classes are not supported in Windows apps using JavaScript."

 

wow, it looks nice !






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That'd be reason enough.

Microsoft's gotta get their APIs in order, and half the reason they're just giving away Windows 10 for the first year is so that they can get enough of an installed base for developers to justify using those APIs. Not just DirectInk, but DirectX 12, Modern/Universal apps, etc. that older versions of Windows don't have, especially Windows 7 and prior. Give developers a market, make their lives easy, and the rest will follow.

 

More info from Build:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/2-681

I'm not really a developer (have messed around in the past with VB and JavaScript, but it's generally just fumbling around), but from this video, it looks like this stuff is ridiculously simple to add. That can only be good news for us pen users.

 

More in-depth stuff here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/3-705

There's a pretty cool demo of a kids book in the first 15 minutes, including gesture recognition.