powertoys: Print to Onenote, Web To Onenote (both as graphics)

[flibbertigibbet007]

www.analogreality.com/
These people did a great job at making their power toys. The MS IE to one
note, just doesnt cut it. Yeah, it's great to get the text, and to be able to
search the text, but the content and the feel is lost. You can scale the
images you get, to fit your onenote session.
Also the Print to onenote, is a print driver like win-journal, which prints
a graphic.
Since you get graphics from both, these are easy to manipulate, and great to
use, because you can then set it as your background, and ink over the image
itself, without moving it, or accidentally fiddeling with it.

MS Onenote guys, take a look at these power toys before making anything new!
The users of Onenote arent idiots! Don't make us feel like ones with dumbed
down controls!

-James

 

[Chris_Pratley \(MS\)]

James, we certainly don't think the users of OneNote are idiots! Whatever
gave you that idea?

We designed the little API we added in Sp1 to enable the very sorts of
PowerToys you describe as so useful. We knew that people like Devon at
AnalogReality would build great PowerToys to take advatage of it. Given that
had a limited amount of time and dev budget, we decided that rather than
build just one of these features ourselves (all we could likely afford to
do), we would build in the extensibility so that others could provide 10
times as many features for importing things into OneNote.

Some people prefer getting text into OneNote because it is reusable,
searchable, etc. Others want images of web pages and do not mind that they
can't then re-use the text, or search for it. Both approaches are
reasonable.

Chris (MS)

 

[flibbertigibbet007]

You're right. I just feel like everything that comes from microsoft is dumbed
down for users. But i never looked at budgeting issues. But why can't you
onenote dev's make "freelance" stuff? make onenote and other ms programs
better in whole for the community, for free! I mean if these people at
analogreality can do it..
I guess I always though of software that is developed is finished stuff, but
i never think about the fact that it needs to be let out early to get
budgeting issues worked out. I just dont understand why these "wishlist"
issues arent worked out? If you're the dev team, why can't you just build
something? Build a power toy. I would love to see you dev's do stuff just for
the hell of it, just for the users, not because bill gates signs a check for
you to do something.
I know one day Bill is going to read something i write, and somehow get
ahold of me.
Maybe I'm just irritated with everything, and this is just my outlet.
I don't mean to offend, I just say how i feel, to get my point across, but
isnt effective.
-James

 

[flibbertigibbet007]

You're right. I just feel like everything that comes from microsoft is dumbed
down for users. But i never looked at budgeting issues. But why can't you
onenote dev's make "freelance" stuff? make onenote and other ms programs
better in whole for the community, for free! I mean if these people at
analogreality can do it..
I guess I always though of software that is developed is finished stuff, but
i never think about the fact that it needs to be let out early to get
budgeting issues worked out. I just dont understand why these "wishlist"
issues arent worked out? If you're the dev team, why can't you just build
something? Build a power toy. I would love to see you dev's do stuff just for
the hell of it, just for the users, not because bill gates signs a check for
you to do something.
I know one day Bill is going to read something i write, and somehow get
ahold of me.
Maybe I'm just irritated with everything, and this is just my outlet.
I don't mean to offend, I just say how i feel, to get my point across, but
isnt effective.
-James

 

[Chris H.]

There's probably the total rub, James. Software is NEVER finished, complete
or even totally satisfactory to the creators. If it were to be, the
programmers and developers wouldn't be doing their jobs.
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -

 

[Chris_Pratley \(MS\)]

James, I wrote a bit about why software never seems to have all the features
you want here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/31/65606.aspx

The development team doesn't kick off to Hawaii for 6 months a year - they
actually work all the time. If you are asking why they don't produce extra
stuff in their spare time, well, most of them just work longer hours as
their "spare time" because they're so dedicated to making the main product
great (whether that be more features or more stable or whatever). When there
is some time, some people on the team make a PowerToy - in fact one of us
was working on a Print to Onenote PowerToy when Devon at AnalogReality
released his. That person then poured their time into working on the next
version of OneNote. In general, it doesn't make much sense for us to build
PowerToys because we can actually build thing into the actual product. The
PowerToy concept is mainly for people not on our team who want to extend
OneNote (sometimes they are other MS employees who are just fans of OneNote,
as with the Outlook to OneNote PowerToy)

Chris (MS)