May 31, 2026
Ink or it didn’t happen
Inkstravaganza
Mysterious digital notebook reveal leaves fans curious and critics totally confused
TLDR: Ink & Switch used its anniversary post to tease PlayBook, a paper-like digital notebook it says the team already uses every day. Readers were split between excitement and exasperation, with fans eager for more and critics complaining the announcement was so artsy they still don’t know what the product actually is.
Ink & Switch rolled out Inkstravaganza, a celebratory update teasing its long-in-the-works PlayBook—basically a digital notebook meant to feel like real paper, but with smart, interactive behavior layered underneath. On paper, that sounds cool: sketching, note-taking, music, tutoring, whiteboarding, even marking up PDFs. The post also name-dropped side projects like Portemine, a visual system for solving logic problems, and a custom pen-input setup meant to avoid clunky on-screen buttons. Then things got… delightfully chaotic.
The real show was the comment section, where readers split into two camps: intrigued believers and what-on-earth-did-I-just-read skeptics. One frustrated commenter basically spoke for the masses with a blunt: what even is this? Another went full roast mode, accusing the team of trying so hard to sound quirky and clever that the actual product vanished in a fog of “rune stones” and artsy mystery. Ouch. The recurring complaint was simple and savage: too many project names, too many concepts, and not nearly enough plain-English explanation.
Still, not everyone was sharpening pitchforks. One patient fan admitted this particular post didn’t reveal much, but said they’re still “waiting very impatiently” for PlayBook, which has quietly become the newsletter’s most-hyped unseen star. So yes, the demo sparked curiosity—but also a mini-drama over whether this is visionary design... or just vibes with stationery props.
Key Points
- •Ink & Switch’s March 2026 newsletter highlights recent work in its Programmable Ink research area, centered on the PlayBook notebook system.
- •PlayBook is designed to feel like paper and pencil while supporting dynamic behavior through composable pieces and user-created augmentations.
- •The team says it has used PlayBook internally for over two years across tasks such as note taking, brainstorming, whiteboarding, PDF marking, and tutoring.
- •Marcel Goethals’s Portemine project explores propagator networks as a computational substrate for PlayBook, linking them to SAT, constraint solving, and prior Ink & Switch research.
- •The article also describes PlayBook’s custom gesture and input-event system, including a pen-based firm-press gesture, and briefly introduces the exploratory project DrawDeck.