19 Feb Microsoft Launches Plumbago, A Paper App Competitor That Lets You Sketch & Handwrite Notes
Microsoft’s Office suite already has a popular note-taking app with OneNote, but today the company is turning its attention to how note-taking should work on tablets that support stylus and touch-based input. The company has now released Plumbago, a digital notebook application for Windows 8.1 and 10 tablets that allows users to handwrite text, highlight, plus sketch and draw using either pen or pencil strokes across a device’s screen.
The app, like many of Microsoft’s new releases, is the latest to emerge from the company’s internal incubator, Microsoft Garage. And also like many Garage projects, it takes inspiration from well-known apps already on the market. For example, in Plumbago’s case, the app appears to be an attempt to compete with Paper by FiftyThree, a top note-taking and sketching application for iOS devices.
Plumbago – whose name is Latin for graphite, in case you’re wondering – doesn’t simply capture and record your pen or pencil strokes, however. According to Microsoft’s announcement, the app also utilizes a technology called “handwriting beautification,” which involves efficient stroke-matching across thousands written by users. These strokes are averaged to produce more consistent and easier-to-read handwriting, Microsoft explains, resulting in a more consistent look for your handwritten notes.
In addition, Plumbago supports “infinite paper” – meaning your writings or drawings can span pages.
“How do you naturally go from one page to another? With a notebook, you flip the page over. With Plumbago, you swipe the surface of the page as though you’re flipping the real thing to navigate throughout the notebook,” explains Gavin Jancke, Microsoft Research’s GM of Engineering, who served as the user interface software engineer for the app.