Blog:: Craig Pringle

Wow – I’m a very happy little blogger today!  The BlogPad tool I’m working on got a mention in the latest onTheRun with Tablet PCs podcast.  This is a great show (not just because they mentioned me) as Marc Orchant and James Kendrick are interviewing Robert Scoble.  For me the coolest thing about being in this show is the calibre of people who were also discussed (and the calibre of the people doing the discussing!)

I would like to clarify a couple of the points that were discussed in the podcast.

Firstly BlogPad is not going to actually put the post on the server as ink.  This is for two reasons. 

The first is that though it is technically possible it requires a control on the server to render the ink and you would probably give a lot away in terms of cross browser support.  You would also be severely limiting the number of servers you could post to as the target server would have to have that control installed. 

The second reason is that when I sat down and gave this some thought I realised that the purpose of a blog post is to try and communicate my thoughts.  Being in ink gets cool points but it does not actually add anything to that goal and may even detract from it (if you’ve seen the screencast with my handwriting on it you will know what I mean).  Thus what I really wanted in an ink blogging tool was the ability to easily pen a post and post it in the format that has the best chance of being interpreted as I intended – text, maybe with some ink embellishments (as images) where they add value.

One of the questions asked during the podcast was will the ink be searchable.  It will be – because it will have been recognised and posted as text.  Searchability was something I would absolutely not give away – even though Google sent my boss to a lingerie retail site when he was looking for my blog. J

Another question asked in the podcast was will I be supporting the major blogging engines – absolutely!  I’m starting off getting it working with the MetaWeblog API for the first release.  I plan to add Blogger and MovableType after that.

Just to set expectations – there is still a fair bit to do so it may be a little while before I have a release.  Some outstanding features include:

• Category support.
• Improve the correction interface – I want the alternates in the context menu so I don’t need to rely on the TIP.
• RTF to HTML conversion – this is a biggie.  Right now it only supports text and drops formatting.  I want to have support for formatting and images so you can copy and past text in and paste in snipping tool snips.  Some work to do there.
• Ability to include an ink drawing. Have not even looked at how I will do this yet…