Pratley: You can do things like capture notes on a page [and then] rearrange [them]. [In addition to] pages of notes, there are dividers in a notebook -- sections that are essentially sets of pages -- so you're seeing all the stuff you'd normally work with. You can have folders as well [and] jump directly to any page you're interested in. We did a browser-like navigation, so as I move around in my notes I can also go back and review things that I've [done] recently. If you want to refer back to something while you're taking notes, you've got a whole history, just like a browser. Because these are all pages, unlike [with] a scroll bar I can jump through to the exact beginning of different ideas. Say I take my sales meeting [notes] and I want to put it at the top; I can rip it out and put it at the top and re-order my pages however I like. Everything you do is always stored on disk; you don't have to choose to save. This is different from other applications, where it's not stored on disk and then when you crash they try to figure out what was in memory and save it correctly. [OneNote] saves every couple seconds so you don't lose your information. When you quit, [it] saves that automatically too.
InfoWorld: Am I right that you don't have any kind of macro or object model capability?
Pratley: Right. In this release we wanted to get the application functionality first. We didn't want to introduce the possibility of [security] holes and viruses. The nice thing about having no programmability is you can't mess with it; you can't actually get code to run if you send someone a file from OneNote. So we think it's going to be one of the more secure applications around. That's part of the idea: Keep it simple. The other thing was we kept looking at the way Outlook was done. They wanted to do everything, then when they shipped, people said "It's nice that you've got this and that, but that area is over-designed and I don't even need this whole section, and what were you thinking?" They had to do a lot of repair work afterwards to try to adapt to how people really worked. We [went] for the core stuff. Version 2 and 3 [will be] where we go deeper on certain areas that we see people actually [using].
InfoWorld: Did you build on XML?
Pratley: The file format is not XML, but it's a very structured binary format that can quickly become XML. We decided not to do XML on this release because it wasn't core to the basic note-taking. But we architected it for the ability to do XML in our next release very easily.
InfoWorld: Is OneNote's ability to handle ink as well as text intended as a selling point for the Tablet PC?
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