Jo Vermeulen

April 22, 2008

OneNote: a hidden Microsoft Office gem

Last week I discovered Microsoft OneNote 2007, and I am (honestly) impressed. Actually, the first time I ever heard of OneNote was when I read the FAQ of InkSeine.

Here’s part of the product description:

Office OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively.

I have been using a combination of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Notebook and del.icio.us to organize (and capture) information (partially inspired by this setup). The big problem here was synchronization. I ended up copying URLs to Google Notebook since I would never be confronted with them again if I stored them in del.icio.us. There were no explicit links between meetings, documents, and other resources (e.g. websites or short notes in notebooks). I would add gadgets for each of these apps to my iGoogle page to keep an overview. Although I could cope with this setup, it was not ideal. Gmail and Google Calendar are great services which I still love to use, but for quick notes and jotting down ideas I often resorted to paper notes.

Although OneNote is not perfect either, combined with a laptop (or tablet PC) it has the potential to eliminate most paper note taking. To get a good overview of what’s possible with OneNote, have a look at these resources:

Max Zuckerman’s OneNote: the Mega-Tool for Learning
Dian Chapman’s OneNote Introduction
the OneNote 2007 Guide if you have OneNote installed on your PC.

A lot of people have been impressed with OneNote and have blogged about it.

Here are a few of OneNote’s features that I like:

text search in images and audio
audio and video recording with synchronized notes
shared notebooks
embedding any file as a printout
screen clippings
the ability to write and draw anywhere on a page
tags (e.g. todo, important, question, etc.)
calculator support
inking support (if only I had a tablet PC)

Here’s an example of how I used OneNote to summarize an intuitive explanation of Bayesian Reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

March 21, 2008

Gummy UI improvements

I am currently working together with Jan on improving the Gummy tool (website still under construction). We have come a long way since Jan wrote the first version for his Master’s thesis. I figured it might be interesting to share a few screenshots of different phases in the development:

Here’s the first version (June 2007):

A version with roughly the same UI but lots of architectural improvements (November 2007):

The current version with an improved UI (March 2008):

I think the most significant improvement is the new toolbox. Designers can now more easily distinguish between different widgets. In previous versions, some widgets were hard to distinguish. We added labels to each widget in the toolbox, and improved the inline rendering of the widgets. Notice that these images are still not predefined icons, but real widgets rendered to a bitmap. However, in the current version we chose to render them at their optimal size and then scale the images down.

Rendering widgets to bitmaps also forced us to migrate to Windows. We started our development on GNU/Linux using Mono but had to switch due to an annoying bug in Mono’s implementation of Control.DrawToBitmap. Future versions should be able to run in Mono again when this bug is fixed though.

Update: Jan sent me a screenshot of an even older version of Gummy, dated back to December 19, 2006:

March 18, 2008

Job interviews and the attraction of excellence

Steve Yegge (known amongst others for porting Ruby on Rails to JavaScript) has a great article on job interviews. Although these guidelines are targeted specifically towards landing a job at Google, they are probably applicable for most technology companies. Certainly an interesting read …

Steve used to work for Amazon (he is at Google now), and has blogged before about Google’s recruiting strategy. He wrote about the importance of mouth-to-mouth advertising (“you can’t fake being cool”) and how Google has turned the whole recruitment process around:

The term “recruiting” implies that you’re going out and looking for people, and trying to convince them to come work for you. Google has managed to turn the process around. Smart people now make the pilgrimage to Google, and Google spends the bulk of their time turning great people away.

There have been many stories on Google’s unique mix between the atmosphere of graduate school and a startup, although there was also a more neutral testimony from a former employee who now works at Microsoft.

In summary, it seems that one of the most important factors in being able to hire smart people is “excellence”: being able to work in a stimulating environment with smart people who are good at what they do. In my opinion this is true for research and academia as well. I guess most researchers wouldn’t turn down offers from the major labs that publish at the main conferences in their field year after year. Well, at least if it’s feasible to work there, e.g. moving to another country might be a problem

As an example from the academic world, have a look at this promotional video for Microsoft Research:

At about 2 minutes and 30 seconds, Bill Buxton mentions that at MSR Cambridge he got to have lunch with his “hero”, Turing-award winner Tony Hoare (the inventor of QuickSort), and goes on to say that “the history of Computer science is walking down the corridors”. The movie ends with a listing of all awards and honors MSR’s employees have received.

February 21, 2008

Full paper on Gummy accepted at AVI 2008

Our hard work before the holidays has paid off We just heard that our full paper submission for AVI 2008 has been accepted.

Gummy

Jan Meskens, Jo Vermeulen, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx. Gummy for Multi-Platform User Interface Designs: Shape me, Multiply me, Fix me, Use me. To appear in Proceedings of AVI ’08, the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May 28-30, 2008.

In this paper we introduce a multi-platform user interface design approach, and Gummy, a design tool to support that approach. This work originated out of Jan Meskens’ Master’s thesis, in which he created a UIML GUI builder. While there are several tools for developing multi-platform user interfaces, these have a number of problems: (1) the resulting user interfaces often lack the aesthetic quality of manually designed interfaces; (2) the tools are not intuitive since designers have to deal with abstractions and do not directly manipulate the user interface design; and (3) designers can not accurately predict what the resulting user interface will look like. Our goal was to allow designers to reuse their skills of existing user interface design tools (such as GUI builders) as much as possible and try to maintain a high level of fidelity (unlike sketch-based design tools).

Gummy design process

We also had a short paper/poster about Gummy accepted to CHI 2008 Work-in-Progress. In this paper we explain how the tool can be used to involve domain experts in the user interface design process.

Gummy domain expert workspace

Kris Luyten, Jan Meskens, Jo Vermeulen and Karin Coninx. Meta-GUI-Builders: Generating Domain-specific Interface Builders for Multi-Device User Interface Creation. To appear in CHI ’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008.

We received lots of input on the prototypes and early drafts of the papers, so thanks to everyone at our lab who contributed in one way or another Additional thanks go to Karel Robert for creating the Gummy logo (have a look at his portfolio).

More information about the papers can be found at my publications page.

February 18, 2008

How to give a great research talk by MSR

Lode recently blogged about a seminar by Microsoft Research on how to give a great research talk, starring John Krumm, Patrick Baudisch, Rick Szeliski and Mary Czerwinski.

Some other resources I recommend are “How to give a good research talk” by Simon Peyton Jones, and the Presentation Zen blog. These should already provide you with the basics for giving a good (research) talk. Here is what I personally found useful in the Microsoft Research session:

Use animations sparingly: animations are only useful to illustrate a process in your system, or make something more clear to the audience. Don’t overdo it. In my opinion, I offended against this rule with my EIS 2007 presentation. Some animations were useful, but a lot of them were unnecessary. When I gave part of this presentation to a few other researchers some time after the conference, one of them commented that I should contact George Lucas about the effects and transitions
Use pictures for related work: Patrick argued that a lot of people remember pictures from papers they read, so using a visual representation of the related work is more useful than a list of references.
Try to demo the current status of your future work: Rick showed the future work demo of their photo tourism paper he gave during his talk at SIGGRAPH. This way you give the audience evidence that you’re actively improving upon your work.
Tactics to handle rude questions: Mary gave a few tips for dealing with rude questions such as repeating the question that was posed. This is always useful to indicate how you have understood it. Furthermore, it gives people in the audience a second chance if they did not understand the person who posed the question.

All in all an interesting seminar, might be useful to organize something similar at our institute in the future. Thanks to Lode for sharing the link on his blog.