Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Taking the Visual Metaphor to Another Level ...

One of my favorite repositories of bits and pieces is MS OneNote ... I use it for inking at meetings and just letting my ideas flow with a tablet .... when I saw on Daniel Escapa's OneNote Blog, I was blown away ... (stay tuned for more neat things that this led me too ... will have more postings soon) ... one of the problems with OneNote for me was it was a great electronic "binder" for my notes, but it also suffered from the same things that paper has, I sometimes forget where I put things ... (although in actual use, OneNote has great search capabilities and marking) but I like to search visually ...

Daniel highlighted a product of Microsoft Office Labs called Canvas for OneNote ... go to the link to watch the video and see the power of this application ... one note, this is not a commercial product and will not be unless it is added by the powers that be, but it sure is neat to play with and use. I took three screenshots to illustrate the process .. everything is intuitive and smooth .. the screen scales effortlessly on my windows vista machine running a dual core processor ... it is smooth and fast ... shot one is the canvas view that shows the whole book as represented by pages in the notes ...

Second shot shows section which you get to with one click ... and the third click give you the shot showing a few pages, you can then click down to one page and scroll and read .. it is incredible how you can get a great overview and drill down to the info ... I think this could be a very useful addition to the program and ties in to the touchwall that I will talk about in the next post ....

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