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Electronic Class Notebook?
"How about a web-pad like device, with a screen you can write on with a stylus? It would store each 'page' as a vector image, your writing would show on the screen just as if you were writing on paper. Such a device would have several useful features, you could 'highlight' sections for cross-referencing or searching later. Mark your homework assignmments with an electronic tag, and a small gui interface tucked along the bottom margin (or wherever) could be used to display anything marked as 'homework' (or equations, or comments, or whatever) on one page. Date and time stamping would be trivial. You could organise like crazy, download notes from your friend's pad, maybe someday directly from an electronic 'blackboard' where the professor is drawing something hideously complicated.
This device, as I picture it, would entirely replace a paper notebook. You could draw, write, tag, and so on, in a limited selection of colors (16, 32?) so that images would be small. Remember, there is no interpretation of what you write - no OCR or handwriting recognition, just what you write, saved and organised. (Though some sort of OCR or grafiti type recognition may be available to apply to notes if you want to try and export them to some word processing format.)
Logic requirments would be minimal, a few microdrives or future high-capacity memory would store the images incrementally as you write A backlit display would be nice but not necessary. A standard communications inteface (or three, USB, ethernet, infrared) would allow connecting to other notebooks or a PC. Thats all you would need, but I am sure a thousand note and academic type applications could be written for such a device. (Calculator, mp3 player, running as an overlay to your page of notes.)
I'd love to hear other ideas, comments, etc, on such a device. Would it sell? Would it be useful, is the idea practical?
If you have the means to manufacture such a thing, please take my idea and run - just send me one when they go into production.
Thanks all."
First of all, toys are cool. But I am getting tired of juggling laptop, palmtop, pager, cellphone, etc. This would mean one more device to buy, learn, synch, recharge, misplace, dropkick, etc. What we need is more general purpose devices that have the flexibility of a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook.
The first apple newton I bought (the 120 in '93 I think) could do much of what you're descibing. It could save handwritten notes as they were drawn - without the OCR conversion.
It was much smaller than what you are suggesting, though. It sounds like you want something the size of a sheet of paper - and now you're talking about lugging something around that's as big as a laptop but with almost none of the functionality. That was part of the Newton's problem. It was much bigger than a Palm - to big to fit in your pocket, but didn't have the utility of a laptop to make it worth lugging around.
Furthermore, it has always struck me as insane the amount of document printing required to share ideas in every technology company in which I have worked. Printers should be the nemesis of PC's, not the preferred peripheral. It's 2001 people, time to quit killing trees for your expense (and book) reports.
I would not leave out the handwriting recognition. Instead I would have it be an optional feature to be enabled only when desired. Any dedicated real estate used for that function would be reclaimed when that function is not needed.
Also, don't underestimate some sort of local area communication. Infrared is nice, but not that reliable. Blue tooth will be nice if it ever materializes. Imagine walking into a meeting (or mid-term) and having everyone in attendance simply click a single icon and to hold all the notes/diagrams/pictures that you need to share.
It may be a pipe dream, but I hope it isn't!
I personally would like to see the crosspad crossbred with a Palm Pilot!
I believe the fancy pen maker, Cross, made some sort of electronic pad-like device. I think I saw it listed in my PC Warehouse catalog a few times. It was made to look like a standard yellow legal pad, but it also had some buttons and what appeared to be a small LCD at the bottom. I think the idea was that it would store your scratchings and then you could transmit them to your PC for further work.
In the industry they're called pen computers . Most pen computers are Palm-like devices, although some are clipboard-sized (other names are "clipboard computer" or "pen tablet"). Telxon, Norand, Microslate, and Fujitsu make some. There also are notebook-like convertibles which hide or remove the keyboard, such as the Clio.
Well, I've managed to keep my notes electronically using current devices.
It works for everything but a math class.
I have been purchasing low-cost laptops -- my first one was an Epson 486/66 for $1150 about 5 years ago, followed by a closeout Sony VAIO F250 when the Epson died last semester for about the same price.
What I've done is created a nice MS Word style sheet and toolbar. This does everything but doodles. I haven't found a good solution for that.
I think that a good first step would be an application that would run on any standard PC laptop for the purpose of taking notes. Letting somebody with a laptop take notes is a much less intensive project than trying to get the software and hardware both right.
I did some work with this, but I haven't exactly gotten anywhere with it, mostly because of a lack of time. I mostly had the interface and some implementation code.
Gentoo Sucks
I use a 8.5x11 Crosspad from Cross Pen Computing group to take notes in all my classes.
Although they are discontinued there is linux software to download the files and convert them to postscript. (A google search will suffice)
The new Crosspad2 is in beta testing now (I know at Case Western) and it should be out pretty soon.
I have seen one in use and it comes with a USB (in addition to serial) port plus a holder for the pen (unlike the original crosspad). It also has multiple "memory" notebooks for multiple classes/meetings.
It really comes in handy and I have all my notes catergorized on my computer and I have been able to get rid of annoying notebook paper.
---------------------------------- I like fig newtons...they're tasty
After a year and a half of that, I got an Apple powerbook Duo 210. (68030, 8MB ram MacOS 7.?, 16-greyscale 640x400 <4lb). No floppy, no expansion ports or much of anything. But with a copy of an integrated wordprocessor/spreadsheet/drawing program (either clairsworks or MS-Works, I forget which I was using) I was able to do all kinds of stuff very quickly, and because it was light and small I could take it many more places and get stuff done.
I used it for doing my physics labs writeups in the lab. I used it for a lot of English and other non CS non-Computer Engineering courses. For those it worked really well.
If I was to do it today:
The only alternatives to a two machine system that I've seen so far is the IBM Thinkpad A21p. And it runs around $4K and weighs in at 7.6lb. Don't ask about battery life. The +15in screen eats them alive. :-)
Finally: Don't even try to use it in a math class or other highly symbolic class. Machines are optimized for text, and just don't deal well with inputting differential equations. It does seem a bit odd that Computer Engineers would have the hardest time using a computer to take notes, but that is what I've found. History, philosophy, even chemistry were fine, but all the nifty diagrams and charts made notetaking in upper division CS, CpE and EE classes substantially more difficult.
- Mike
I suppose developing the app would be fairly trivial, but I was too lazy to start development while I was in school (and now that I'm out, why bother?). Just a simple program to record penstrokes/typed text as bitmaps overlaid on the online notes and to associate the bitmaps with each corresponding page of notes.
Oh yeah, to top it off, maybe have the app record the audio portion of the lecture and timestamp each page of notes to correspond with what's being said during the lecture. And of course net access (wireless or in-class ethernet) for quick access to online notes or anything else while bored in class, but I guess that's part of the webpad, not the app.
Anyone want to add anything else?
As if this will get read. I hate being AC because you're always moderated way down. I don't like registering for NYT to read articles, and I don't like registering for /. just so people will read my posts.
I'd like one. I've thought about making one myself. Handwriting is key! I don't like to type so I don't carry the laptop to class. In fact there are a bunch of posts that say laptops can do this. That's nice but not within the specs. The Palm is too small to take notes on but I wouldn't mind writing grafiti to get my notes into the computer.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
There is loads of programs for the Palm which allow you to take notes in image format, you just really need one of those. I use one called Handwrite3 which lets me take notes quicker than I can grafiti.
But what you really need is a bigger screen, Imagine a palmOS based webpad with an A5 or A4 sized screen, Perfect.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
Handwriting recognition - enhanced with programs like Transcriber, which I use on my Jornada - are a great plus, especially since touch-typing is difficult when the keyboard is much smaller than normal keyboards. I don't have room in my budget for one of those fancy folding or flexible keyboards, and tapping the tiny keys on my screen can be difficult when I'm trying to pay attention to the teacher. Being able to look at the board or at the teacher during the lecture really helps me comprehend the notes I'm taking. =)
I can sketch on my screen, and I carry around pad paper for the more complicated figures, labelling them with [Fig N] and referencing them in my notes.
After the day's classes, I usually go over my notes, tidying them up and formatting them for sharing on our groupware system. We use LearnLoop (http://www.learnloop.org) to share our files - it's a cool system. =)
Using a PDA to take notes makes more sense to me than typing my notes up after class, although the latter would help me review better. =) Sure, data entry's a bit slower, but being able to edit my notes - I take notes in a rather non-linear fashion =) - is one of the things I really like about using my PDA.
I think I first saw this design in the movie "2001". Look at the tablets being carried around by the astronauts. HAL seemed to interface to them, although they weren't used much as a computer control -- probably mostly due to people's lack of experience with computer interfaces at the time, and HAL's audio interface was easier for movie presentation purposes. The wireless fullscreen video is still a little awkward to do.
Isn't this exactly the type of device, "A computer notebook" that Gates showed at Comdex last November in his KeyNote? I think it's still avialable at the Comdex website. One of the key features that it possessed was a very high sampling rate with real-time anti-aliasing which also provided the ability to search, format, etc... Looked exactly like what you are describing...