Jerry Fahrni

The best inking application for Windows that you’ll never see

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Jerry Fahrni

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Recently I posted something about Project Austin, a new digital note-taking application designed specifically for Windows 8 by Microsoft.

Project Austin had me thinking about other cool inking applications. Microsoft OneNote immediately comes to mind, but it’s really not the same. OneNote is overkill for most note taking needs. How about Windows Journal? Journal is cool, but quite limited. I think Project Austin is closer to Journal than OneNote. Nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

The inking app that I think had the greatest potential of any was an application called InkSeine. InkSeine was developed by Microsoft’s Research Team several years ago, but never made it to the market. It was available as a “beta”, but never went beyond that. I put it on my Dell XT2 back in 2009. It was aging even then, but it was really cool. You can see remnants of InkSeine in the OneNote MX radial menu, but that’s about it.

I went back to the InkSeine website – still there, but in serious need of attention – and downloaded the app. I tried to install it on my Lenovo x201t tablet PC running Windows 8 a couple of weeks ago. No luck. Bummer.

Comments

7 responses to “The best inking application for Windows that you’ll never see”

  1. MDB

    Bummer – though I actually do all my noteraking in OneNote instead of InkSeine, I LOVE the ScrollControl widget that comes w/ an InkSeine package and use it on ever pen-enabled PC I’ve ever used. Will miss this big time if it doesn’t work with Windows 8.

  2. Mark Meyer

    Yep – just crashed on my Lenovo Table2 running Win8. Actually that might be the reason to return the tablet and stay with Windows 7 on a Convertible X220t.

    How comes that Microsoft is so good at always throwing away the best things they have? They’ll never make it if they keep copying Apple and Android without focusing on what they have too.

  3. Jerry Fahrni

    Difficult to answer that question. Microsoft does some weird stuff. It was such a great inking app.

  4. Tawanda

    For the record, Inkseine works very well on Windows 8.

  5. Jerry Fahrni

    That’s great to hear. I would appreciate it if you could point me to the appropriate download and instructions. I’ve tried installing on Win 8 without success. Crashed and burned every time.

  6. Tawanda

    Jerry, here’s how I got Inkseine working. I use a PDF markup software called Bluebeam Revu. Without bluebeam installed, Inkseine crashes on launch the way most users are reporting. Install Bluebeam back and Inkseine runs fine. So it looks like Bluebeam installs some Microsoft components that Inkseine requires, I just haven’t tried to figure out which ones. But it works. Install Bluebeam Revu even if you will never run it, and Inkseine runs well. Hopefully other tinkers will key out the components required so that those who do not use Bluebeam Revu do not have to install it. Hope it helps.

  7. How to get InkSeine to run on a Windows 8 tablet « Jerry Fahrni

    […] written about InkSeine before. It’s a great little application for those of us that like inking on a tablet, but it’s […]

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