Microsoft's Plumbago app promises to make your chickenscratch legible
Think of Plumbago as a stripped-down version of OneNote, with an emphasis on easy doodling and adding art. (Mary Jo Foley made the analogy that Plumbago is to OneNote as Sway is to Word, which isn’t far off.)
In execution, Plumbago is pretty simple: You can configure a “notebook” of up to 25 pages, with custom backgrounds for each page. One of these happens to be a “lined paper” background, which should take men and women of a certain age back to their grammar school days.
The lined paper background and a “handwriting smoothing” scrollbar—basically the only setting available—inidcate that Plumbago is for people who prefer to take handwritten notes on a tablet. On the Surface, that role is filled by OneNote; you can press the button on the Surface stylus to launch the app, even from sleep. But as simple as OneNote is, there’s an apparent risk of getting lost in its interface, with notebooks and other embeddable objects crowding the view.
Plumbago keeps it simple: The radial menu makes selecting a virtual pen or pencil extremely easy, and the “ink” acts like real ink or graphite on real paper. You can import images into the notebook, but only from files stored on your computer. (Sway, by contrast, brings an image discovery tool right inside the app.)
As an experimental Microsoft Garage project, Plumbago is expected to have some quirks. And yes, that's indeed the case.
One issue I found was the inability for the ink to recognize portrait mode, the most natural way (for me) to take notes on a tablet. While the page covered the length of the my Surface Book’s screen, the ink stopped being recognized midway down.
More troubling, the handwriting smoothing feature—Plumbago's primary selling point—did nothing for me at all. I tried out Plumbago on a Surface Book in tablet mode as well as a Surface Pro 4; adjusting the handwriting smoothing slider bar up or down made no noticeable difference, even after saving and reopening the notebook. I’m not sure if I was simply using it incorrectly, or if the feature is actually broken. Needless to say, it was very disappointing.
One of the tips I was given as a young reporter was to toss out my old notebooks after a period of time, as a hedge against being asked to testify in a court case. My real fear, however, was being asked to read my notes, as my handwriting has progressively degraded over the years. Today, I can simply record someone’s voice on my phone, take a picture, or type notes using my PC. But I’ve always felt that I could scrawl a note on my tablet in a pinch. I’m just not sure that at this point it will be with Plumbago.