Microsoft Garage has a program that encourages employees to create their projects, and even though the project has nothing to do with Microsoft's main business, it has led to several notable Microsoft apps, such as Plumbago for painting, Your Weather, and the Microsoft Launcher, which is well known on Android.
This year, the program launched a new project: Journal, a handwritten notebook app for Windows touchscreen devices. At this point, many people will immediately think of the "son of OneNote" or will think of the automatic text recognition of Nebo; I believe that many users are already using these two applications as the main handwritten notebook applications.
There are many similarities between the two apps, but there are some things that stand out. Let's take a look at them.
Like its peers, Journal is organized as a notepad. Users can personalize the notepad's cover colour and ICONS, though with a relatively limited number of features, unlike the myriad emoji Notions that can be used to pick from.
In terms of note page management, OneNote gives a wealth of hierarchical options such as tags, pages and even tag groups, which can be regarded as an encyclopedia. While Nebo is more traditional, with each notebook divided into many separate pages, Journal takes an entirely different approach. As the name suggests, it's more like a journal or a paper, with a coherent set of pages added as needed but is always related.
What differentiates Journal from other note-taking apps is its functional recognition of handwriting.
If you know Nebo, you will know Nebo allows the user to override the sliding pen up and down, to control the deletion of the text, line feeds. Other functions, Journal and some similar, and writing to delete, select to select the handwriting of these two kinds of gestures, Journal can also identify specific format to organize the directory and generate the corresponding card, we can filter these CARDS in the menu.
For example, by drawing a line under the handwriting, Journal will recognize that this is a title. The menu will automatically generate title cards for users to quickly jump through. Journal generates list-type cards using numbers or dots to form an ordered or unordered list; Draw a star next to the critical content, and it will be recognized accordingly.
The Journal recognizes graphics, drawings, highlighter highlights, and inserted PDF and handwritten notes. A Logo button will appear next to the recognized handwriting. Click the magnifying glass, and you can directly screen the handwriting of the same type, which is very suitable for quickly switching titles or searching important star content.
In terms of input experience, Journal supports three kinds of pen, highlighter and pencil, each of which can be selected in different thickness and colour. However, in terms of support for pressure sensation, the Journal is still not perfect. The application itself can recognize pressure sensation, but it does not affect both signature pens and highlighters. The effect can only be found on pencil handwriting, and just the colour is different, which cannot affect the thickness of the handwriting.
If your stylus is equipped with preset penholder keys, such as preset functions such as eraser and selection in the system, it can also be recognized and used generally in Journal. It is worth mentioning that Journal is not suitable for drawing particularly complex illustrations due to the presence of gesture manipulation, and the "overwrite delete" operation is often triggered when a colouring operation is performed.
Finally, the Journal also supports handwriting to text. In addition to handwriting paper input fields (such as notebook title change and card search), Journal can even directly recognize handwriting and convert it to text by using the stylus or clicking the handwriting button. But in notepaper, it can not be converted now like Nebo or OneNote; after selecting the corresponding handwriting, you need to use the "Copy as Text" function to paste to other places.
We can see from the search results that all the paper's handwriting is recognized as the text to be searched. However, because the Journal is not positioned as a traditional notebook, only handwriting is allowed on the paper.
In the Journal, there are tutorials for all the gestures and handwriting features mentioned above to help you get started quickly. If you have a Microsoft work or campus account, you can also log in to Journal for more powerful collaboration features.
Unfortunately, Journal doesn't yet support regular account login, nor does it have cloud synchronization or handwriting export capabilities, so if you want to use it for the long term, you can wait for a while. From an experience perspective, the Journal has all the features of a laptop application. Given the Microsoft Garage program's freedom and flexibility, it is likely that the Journal will add more features and features in future updates.
