OneNote SP1 preview trials

The improvements to OneNote in Service Pack 1 Preview significantly improve OneNote in terms of the way I work. Will they mean I stop using Journal? I’m not sure. Here are some of things that have impacted my OneNote usage the most:

* I didn’t know how much I needed text in the page tabs. What a difference they make in terms of keeping track of what’s in each section.

* The new scratch out gesture makes all the difference in the world when I’m inking.

* The grouping of strokes is vastly improved when working with drawings. I can now select and drag individual strokes around after I draw something–rather than having the strokes all lumped together. The interaction isn’t quite as flexible as Journal still though in terms of repositioning the strokes where I want. Maybe there’s a snap-to setting that’s getting in the way. I’ll have to dig further. I also miss the lasso feature in Journal–especially when I’m trying to select part of a drawing or a few strokes in a mis-recognized word. I guess I should train myself to erase and redraw more.

* The Shared Session is cool. It enables you to share one or more pages live between multiple users. I’ve been wanting a good whiteboarding feature to use with Messenger–this could do the trick.

Lora and I tried editing a text document via a Shared Session with some success. Our first attempt didn’t go well. We had some connection problems when working home-to-home so the next day we tried connecting from work and everything connected perfectly. I haven’t taken the time to figure out why the shared connection failed between our two home-based connections. Sharing a page is as easy as specifying a password and emailing or IMing an IP address to someone you want to invite. They enter the IP address on their end which forms the connection. Once connected any person can directly edit any of the shared pages or use a “Pen as pointer” mode that enables you to scribble temporary notes that automatically erase themselves. In this mode, the ink does not modify the document. The Pen Pointer feature is nice, but we both found that they auto-erased a bit too fast.

At first we used the Pen Pointer to pass messages back and forth to each other, but we quickly realized that this didn’t work well. It’s too easy for each of us to write over each other or miss what the other has written. The Pointer-mode feature is best left for circling things–not handwriting. Instead, we used Skype and Messenger to pass comments back and forth.

The other thing that became immediately obvious is that when trying to do collaborative editing like we were, we were desperately needing ink gestures and control over the text. I wish there was a programmatic interface in OneNote that I could use to manipulate page content so I could try integrating in my ink editing features that I’ve posted here before. Actually, my suggestion is that the OneNote team should try adding this feature themselves and then from this experience evolve an API that can be exposed for all.

* Speaking of APIs, yesterday the OneNote team posted the first looks at an importer class interface for OneNote. It enables a program to insert content or delete content that has previously been inserted. I hope there’s more coming, because many of the things I want to do with OneNote involve enumerating or interacting with the content in the pages. My fingers are crossed.

Overall, SP1 looks like an absolute winner. In terms of my original question as to whether I will stop using Journal: Not quite yet. I jump between multiple machines and I like writing into separate files in Journal so I can fairly easily sync content across machines. However, I have noticed that I am using OneNote more. I’m using it more often to paste temporary thoughts and to save snippets because the pen interaction has improved.

The changes to OneNote are raising the bar in Tablet apps. Yes, Tablets are coming of age.