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The Tour de France, bicycles, math and OneNote

  • Artigo

As far as sports go, I love the Tour de France. The colors, speed and scenery are always fun to watch - Go Tyler Farrar! On a related note, I also saw this equation that governs how a bicycle actually works (courtesy of https://www.physorg.com/news196870641.html – well worth the read):

 

clip_image001

 

Whew. Riding a bike never felt so complicated!

 

Anyway, I thought this equation would make a nice little test for equation support in OneNote 2010. It took me a little bit of time (just under 5 minutes) to enter this, but I restricted myself to only using the commands in the ribbon to create the equation, with one exception. The term v2 I entered with "v^2 SPACE" purely from "muscle memory."  The underlying equation functionality parsed it into the superscript format for me.

 

It's also nice to see that our equation support can handle this type of “real world” equation. When I get some time, I may add this to my automated testing, but from a pure testing point of view, I have matrixes, superscripts, subscripts and basic operators already being tested. There is not much "new" content here. After a little bit of examining this, I will probably wind up equivalence classing this to tests that already exist. I'll keep this in mind as a user scenario, though.

 

A final piece of the puzzle here is pasting this article from OneNote (where I write all my articles) into Windows Live Writer (which I use to publish them).  The equation in OneNote is an editable equation, but Live Writer does not support equation objects.  We planned for the capability of pasting equations into applications that don’t understand that format by placing an image on the clipboard as well as the equation.  So when I paste into WLW, the image gets used (and that is what you can see above).

 

All in all, this is just something that caught my eye and since it looped back to testing OneNote, I figured I would share.

 

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2010
    So every time you copy the equation to the clipboard you copy an image as well, regardless of whether or not you need it?  Seems like a waste of memory.  Granted, I can't think of an elegant alternative solution, but if I am constantly copying formulae into applications which do support them (and thus don't need the image), them I am wasting memory (and cycles) every time.  How big are the images (e.g. the one in the blog post)?  Maybe you can make an option setting to "Allow pasting formulae into apps that don't understand them" or something, though that may be too confusing for the average user.

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2010
    For what it's worth the image isn't showing up in the blog or on the rss feed. Clicking through on the graphic  also leads to a 404 error which isn't going to help either ;-) Using ie 8 as web browser. Running in compatibility mode doesn't help either but the image placeholder gets bigger

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2010
    Odd.  I can see all content with IE8 on a separate machine from the one I used to publish.  Server error?  Can you refresh?

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2010
    Odd.  can you refresh?  I just tested on an IE8 machine separate from the publishing machine and it shows correctly.