I’ve finally released a video of what I’m working on. No longer will the question “what are you up to?” be answered with vague references to “digital annotation” and hand-waving explanations of “reflow.” The product is called Ink for Word, and it’s an addon to Microsoft Word that introduces some cool Tablet PC related functionality. More info and a video are at inkforword.com.

Hopefully this application can complement some of the other third party applications for enhancing Office with Tablet PC functionality. Two of the most notable are Josh Einstein’s Tablet Enhancements for Outlook and Loren Heiny’s InkGestures for Word.

Right now we have support for standard ANSI proof-reading marks for research purposes, but I think we’ll transition the editing features to use Tablet PC gestures. They’re more recognizable for users and a lot easier to code.

Ink for Word has been covert for awhile, but now that it’s online, I’ll start writing about the development experience of writing a huge addin to Word and dealing with the Tablet PC SDK. It’s been an interesting ride so far! I’ve written it as a Visual Studio Tools for Office addin for ease of debugging, but we’ll be transitioning to a standard COM addin before release because VSTO v2 doesn’t allow you to deploy application-wide addins. VSTO v3 looks promising in that department, but it looks like it will only include application-wide support for Office 12. Blast! That’s a shame because VSTO rocks. We’d love to keep using it to develop our application.