I always loved puzzle games and this time I think we’ve got a pretty intersting one at hand: The Microsoft Courier Tablet/booklet project.
Remember a few days ago when the news broke out at Gizmodo I mentioned that the Courier project looked like it was based on Inkseine and the Codex prototype from Microsoft Research. I did some more digging (thanks Lituus) and found some intereting things.
We’ve already seen that the Courier UI in the first video looks like a highly polished version of Inkseine (shown here on the Codex protype):
But the second video demonstrates some sort of scrapbook features which are really close to several Microsoft Office Labs & Live Labs projects:
Canvas for OneNote allows you to navigate and edit notebooks in a new way by providing a high-level canvas-view of all your content. The prototype lets you zoom and pan around; view and organize content in new ways; add new pages right where you want them; and even locate pages in a timeline view.
Thumbtack is a personal repository for information gathered from across the web. It can be used to collect text, photos and links from any web page using familiar mechanisms such as copy and paste. It’s implemented as an Ajax application and runs entirely within a browser. All user data is stored in a web service and is accessible from any computer via a browser.
Ever found yourself lost in the eye of a brainstorm? Lots of great information, but it’s all over the place! Sticky Sorter is a Grassroots Project, developed by two Microsoft Employees, that you can use today to manage such challenges. The inventors, Julie and Sumit, were looking for an easier way to capture, sift through, and organize hundreds of research observations traditionally done on physical sticky notes in an affinity diagramming exercise with researchers from around the world. The result is StickySorter which met their complex needs, supports virtual collaboration, and is now available for you to use in managing your next brainstorm.
It looks like Microsoft took those projects (Codex, Inkseine, Canvas for Onenote, Thumbtack & Stickysorter) mixed them all together to finally come out with the Courier project. Take all these bits & pieces,put them together and you got what we have seen of Courier.
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