It is fairly easy to blog with text, photos and audio, but what if you want to add a sketch, scribble or doodle? Simon remarked that one approach is to draw with pen and paper, then take a photo and blog that. It is a clever idea and with a quick search you can find quite a few people doing this kind of thing, but it’s a rather cumbersome process and doesn’t utilize the potential of mobile devices as drawing tools.
Before RAMBLE started, I came across Pocket Chronicle, a fairly simple event recorder (diary etc), but with a number of interesting features: first, all the entries are stored in a database file, actually a compact Access database, which means you can practically store and retrieve all your diary notes. It also has a doodle pad, so you’re not limited to text. However, it wasn't suitable in its existing form: there is no communications built in - the only way to get the text to a blog would be via other applications, either going online and copying and pasting into a web browser or sync'ing the database with a desktop PC and then using an application to read that data and post to the blog server. Also, the doodles aren't saved with the text.
Despite the limitations, I find the interface very user friendly – the main page presents an entry with all the details to hand – date, title, text body and doodle underneath. At the touch of a button the screens slide smoothly back and forth allowing you to enlarge and focus in on any one of these. The two screenshots below are sketches of an earlier plan for a Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby, an unusual design inspired by a nautilus shell.
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The graphics aspect is clumsy, though, as you can only save files as a bitmap, which is very inefficient and not appropriate for the Web. PNG or GIF would be an improvement, but actually much better would be some vector-based format and I immediately thought of InkWriter on Handheld PC, now incorporated into Pocket Word in Windows Mobile. You can alternate between typed text and doodles and the doodles have bounding boxes that enable you to resize, stretch and rotate. The resulting file sizes are small.
It is really quite powerful, but the format is proprietary. A more convenient form for exchange is the XML-based standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, Scalable Vector Graphics. So can the Pocket Word doodles be converted to SVG? I’m not able to find anything for Inkwriter, but there are options for MS Windows Journal used in the Tablet PCs, which appears may have been derived from it, e.g. the use of Journal Reader Supplemental Component to export as SVG.
However far more convenient would be a PDA application that handles SVG natively. For such devices, W3C has specified SVG Basic. There seems to have been a lot of activity back around 2002 and some clients were launched quickly, particularly commercial ones designed for sophisticated architectural diagrams and the like - such as PocketSVG. However, all that is really needed is a simple drawing tool that can save to SVG. After a quick search, I found deltaJot a Pocket PC application by Christoph Sommer.
Even though it is only version 0.02, it looks very promising.
- Easy to install
- Program is very compact (though you do need .Net Compact Framework
- Easy to use: I like the way the directional pad allows one to cycle through or jump to entries.
- Looks like standard SVG files produced (only guess)
If you have SVG-enabled browser, you can see a version of the design that I scribbled using deltaJot:
There is still much that could be done: at the moment, the only way I found to save is to click [ok], after which the program exits. At the moment there’s not much in the way of editing apart from an Undo – perhaps future version will allow objects to be selected with bounding box and manipulated - resized, stretched, enlarged, copied, pasted, deleted etc. But overall, it’s a good start :-)
There’s also Open SVG Viewer a Java offering from the University of Minho in Portugal (aimed at Sun’s Personal Java, 1.1.8, I think, which is no longer supported, replaced by J2ME...)
As the most common desktop Web browsers have either native support or plug-ins for SVG, it means that these files can be uploaded to a blog and viewed there. (For Firefox, until version 1.1, you may need to read the FAQ in its project area; for IE/Win use Adobe SVG Viewer). It can already be done via http file uploads, but it would be nice and convenient if everything could be stored offline and at a press of a button the text body and SVG were transferred by a web service to the blog server which unwrapped everything, stored the SVG’s XML file somewhere and created the corresponding link. Once this process is in place, then you can even create and share animations very easily, e.g. using Pocket AniEd.
Furthermore, once suitably stored in a blog, these become sharable objects, which can be worked on in a similar way to text because these are encoded in XML with a well-defined schema. Who knows? Perhaps the latest sketch for an environmentally-safe motor car may soon be appearing at a blog near you and you get the chance to share in its design!