A new little lock icon has been added which when activated locks the writing canvas to make it easier to write without disruption. Windows tries to ignore other touch interactions like palms or bumps, but sometimes a manual lock is what is needed. I’ve always wanted this feature in OneNote for the same reasons so now I brought it to Ink Calendar and Journal!
Additionally I have improved the way items like image and text work with tap to deselect or tap to select. Hopefully this whole experience is better and more robust. Bugs have been found and fixed as well!
As always thank you for using Ink Calendar and Journal, and if you have any questions, feedback, or issues please reach out!
Work has been underway for a few weeks now on the next update to Ink Calendar and Journal. Two new features are working and a going to be great! One is an easier way to get images on to your calendars, and the other is a way to be more productive by converting your handwritten ink to text.
Adding images to Ink Calendar has been an option for a while but it required a few taps. Now you can drag and drop one or more images from File Explorer right onto your calendars and they will drop on! It is a fun and easy way to make your calendars even more personalized!
Dragging and dropping 3 images onto the Day View
While I have been using Ink Calendar I have wanted the app to be more productive when it comes to meeting notes. The first step in this process is making it possible to copy Ink as text, then use that text elsewhere. Copying meeting notes from Ink Calendar and pasting them into the body of an email or into a Word doc makes it so much easier to take advantage of the handwritten notes.
In addition to new features I am always working to make Ink Calendar less buggy and more stable. Hopefully this release makes good progress on that front!
As always, thank you for using Ink Calendar and always feel free to reach out with questions, concerns, or comments.
It should be no surprise a major use of Ink Calendar and Journal is open pages where free journaling can occur easily and naturally. A good way to prime yourself for the day is to journal about your day to get your thoughts out of your head and in front of you. Give it a try, make a new morning journal and take 10mins at the beginning of your day to write your thoughts out.
2. Get an overview of your week
Looking at your week view provides quick insight into how a week’s overall going to feel. Bogged down with appointments every 15mins? Have lots of open free time? The hectic feeling of a week can change drastically from week to week. So early on I like to take an overview of what my week is looking like. Do I have a trip the upcoming weekend? Are my evenings full? All these questions are answered at a glance in the week view.
3. Find blocks of open time and block it out
Free time is a valuable thing when there is work to be done. Frequently that time can get chopped up with meetings, but if you block out chunks of time to focus and get work done, hopefully a more productive flow can be achieved. Ink Calendar makes it easy to plan out chunks of time and keep it for focused work.
4. Write down the little things
Most of the time when looking at a calendar we leave off little things like lunch break, or when you are planning on leaving, but with Ink Calendar there is no need to make official appointments. Just writing out all the little things can help make a day or week plan feel complete and more accurate to how the day actually goes.
5. The classic to-do list
It is hard to beat the simplicity and effectiveness of a to-do list. Ink Calendar enables quick, easy, and chill to-do lists without all the strict details other apps require. Rearranging a list is super easy with a tap and drag. Since it is ink first, Ink Calendar and Journal is an open canvas to draw inspiration, sketches, or more detailed plans.
These are some of the ways I use Ink Calendar every day to be more productive, how do you use it?
I am publishing an update tonight which removes Visual Studio AppCenter. I have narrowed a persistent bug to the UWP AppCenter package, so now I must cut it out. This was done by turning off AppCenter when Ink Calendar initializes. Removing this package has an added benefit of Ink Calendar now launching faster, and hopefully crash free.
As always, feel free to reach out if you are having any type of issue, I would love to help.
I have had a couple of users email me saying that Ink Calendar does not open any longer. The app will show the loading screen for a while, then close. I had been confused because these crashes were not showing up in my app analytics tool AppCenter, then it happened to me and here is the fix!
Navigate to this folder:
C:\Users\<insert your user folder name here> \AppData\Local\Packages\40087JoeFinApps.InkCalendar_b262nqv4g3cq4\LocalState
And delete the file “Microsoft.AppCenter.Storage” (or move it to your desktop or somewhere if you don’t want to delete it)
Open Ink Calendar, now it should work fine.
This solution is much easier than manually backing up and restoring the app and its data. I am not sure why the AppCenter data is causing the app to crash or how this state occurs. Mostly I am just glad I figured out what was causing some users pain and I was able to fix it.
As Ink Calendar has evolved over the years it has become a surprisingly complex app. There are different flavors of complexity and different ways to expect and handle what is going on in the app. Some of the types of complexity found in Ink Calendar:
Date Time
Regional and language
File access and saving
Settings data validation
Memory leaks
Broken Windows APIs
Control formatting and layouts
Rapid control creation
Bad error messages
Overly simplistic feedback
Each one of these types of issues poses their own challenges to solve and catch before Ink Calendar crashes. Solving a single bug report can take a huge amount of effort and before the work begins it can be difficult to predict the amount of effort needed.
Data from users or Microsoft AppCenter crash reports is invaluable when it comes to making progress in a timely manner. So much of bug reports however end up being “Unspecified Error” or “The error message for this failure could not be found” etc. The best thing is getting an email from a users who has an error and working with them to get it fixed!
I am the only one working on Ink Calendar, so progress is limited by my time, but I am dedicated to fixing every bug I can identify! Please reach out via email or “Contact Me” on this website. I always love hearing from users!
I have been hard at work on the next feature version of Ink Calendar. This version is bringing Journals, a feature which many users have requested for a while now. Unlike the other calendar views Journals do not have dates and are not tied to dates in any way. There are a few different styles to choose from and offer the flexibility to make Ink Calendar work for you!
Journal Builder PageBullet Journal and Graph paper backgrounds
The app has been submitted to the Microsoft Store now all I do is wait! As always thank you for using Ink Calendar and it brings me so much joy knowing people use this app every day!
A couple of new features and bug fixes are rolling out in Ink Calendar 2.2.21. The features are focused on improving making Custom Views easier to find and jump to. Hopefully this makes them more useful for more people. For bug fixes this update focuses on syncing updates and making the multi-device experience more reliable.
Up next for Ink Calendar I will begin working on the most requested feature of Ink Calendar, more pages for writing.
Ink Calendar and Journal 