Microsoft Courier

It’s not just a lousy font anymore

Gizmodo has broken the story on Microsoft’s top-secret skunkworks project for a revolutionary new tablet. Now, like the old auto-industry concept cars that were always chock-full of super-cool ideas but never actually came to market, this device may just be a clearinghouse for testing ideas rather than an early stage of a real product. Nobody outside Microsoft’s inner sanctums knows just yet. But the 2-minute demo video is, unequivocally, cool as hell. Go watch the video now. I’ll wait.

It’s a “notebook” that’s really about the size of a spiral-bound notebook. But that’s not what makes it cool. It has dual 7” color LCD screens. But that’s not what makes it cool. What’s cool is how it’s being used. It resembles Microsoft Office OneNote in a lot of ways, which is a good thing. OneNote’s an excellent tool if you get the hang of using it, and it really shines when used on a tablet laptop. But the Courier takes the user interface to the next level by incorporating “flicks,” which are little finger-movements that mimic the way you’d actually flip through paper pages, post-it notes and other familiar, physical objects. And THAT’s a big deal. Why?

The challenge in developing a truly useful personal electronic notepad isn’t in the processing, it’s in the interface. We’ve had the technology for a long time to allow you to type in notes, to file away pictures and other documents, and to manage your calendar. But it’s always involved a keyboard and a mouse, which aren’t tools that lend themselves well to portability. OR, other controls have been substituted, but they were always small and clumsy, like on a smartphone. The iPhone made great strides in mixing portability with usability, but then again typing on its virtual keyboard is no joy, to the point where companies are creating slip-on hardware for folks who can’t get the hang of the iPhone virtual keyboard.

No, the challenge isn’t in making the apps work, it’s in making them work like what we’re used to. We’re used to jotting down notes, on paper, with a pen. We’re used to scraps of paper and Post-it notes and little sticky tabs and highlighters. And here’s the dichotomy – we ultimately hate those things, even though we’re used to them, because they’re so limiting. If you write notes in a notebook with a pen, they’re not very flexible. You can’t search your notes except with the old mark-I eyeball. You can’t share them with a classmate except by handing them the notebook (along with all of your other notes – hope you don’t need them). But you CAN doodle in the margins and you CAN go back and write a really small note above another line of text or draw an arrow from one part of the page to another and you CAN put a Post-it note on the page. If you stick a Post-it note on your tablet laptop, it makes it really hard to see your mouse pointer.

So there’s the challenge – making a replacement for pen-and-paper that’s better than pen and paper in every way, without significant drawbacks. Electronic “paper” like OneNote was nice because it let you insert additional lines to add more info if you were taking notes out of order (such as when your professor gets off-topic for a bit, then comes back around to his original point. As a professor I do this quite often. Must drive my students crazy.). But it relied on either using a stylus to “recognize” your handwriting, or a keyboard to type your notes, and it could be both hard to get used to and temperamental to operate. “Flicks” are the first step in making the interface “feel” like how we’d actually use a notepad or a day-planner. And that’s a Big Deal™.

I have no doubt that at some point, paper will be virtually replaced (pun intended). The combination of better interfaces, ubiquitous personal computing devices, and flexible OLED (that's the picture at the right) will make it so easy to use “electronic” paper that it won’t make any sense not to – you’d never resort to plain paper on the off chance that the note you’re “just jotting down” will end up turning into a calendar entry or an email or a To-Do or a contact entry. The question that remains is one of when this will all happen. These advances sometimes race ahead and suddenly you have technologies you didn’t even know were in the works. More often, though, it seems to take a LOT longer than anyone expected. Take, for example, handwriting recognition and related technologies.

According to an online history of Tablet PCs at WebProNews, “In the early 1980s, handwriting recognition was seen as an important future technology.” But nearly thirty years later, it still feels like a nascent technology when you try to actually use it. Granted, OneNote is better than the tools built into Windows XP Tablet Edition, which were a big step up from the tools built into the earlier PocketPC devices, but in all cases getting your handwriting reliably turned into text is a pain in the ass. Especially if you’ve got shitty handwriting, and increasingly it seems that most people do.

One workaround that OneNote uses is that it just doesn’t try to convert your writing to text unless you tell it to. This has the upside that it will continue to look no worse (or better) than when you first wrote it, but it also means that the capacity to search, spellcheck, copy/paste and otherwise manipulate the text is severely limited.

But advances continue to march ahead, and several are relevant to making devices like this an everyday reality as fully-realized, “peak” products that aren’t just limping along but are fully-functional in a way that makes them no longer mere gadgets, but something less. That’s right, something less. We don’t think about paper as a technology or pens as “gadgets.” They’re just pens. Even Post-it notes are long past the point where anybody thinks, “Wow, cool! A Post-it note!” They’re less than gadgets. They’re mundane. They’re bric-a-brac, items swirling around us as not much more than functional debris that we use almost without conscious thought except when we need it and don’t have it handy. THAT’s what these devices need to become. THAT will be the quantum leap forward that changes technological oddities into indispensible parts of our lives. I hope very much that I’m still young enough to appreciate and enjoy it when it finally happens.