Electronic Class Notebook?

Kennric writes "I'd like to describe a device I have been wishing for, an electronic class notebook. I know a lot of Slashdotters are college students, how often do you use a laptop for schoolwork? Wouldn't I be great to be able to take notes by hand, draw diagrams, doodle in the margins, and save it electronically?"

"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."

Comments

Newton?

[jerrytcow]

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.

Great idea!

[Pauly]

I've often wanted something like this for general business use as well. Laptops are such over-priced over-kill for most people and how they use PC's.

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!

You mean a Crosspad?

[LinuxBean]

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.

Ultra-thin low-end notebooks

[Mike Miller]

When I was in college (OK, it's been a few years) I started out with a Dos-based 286 Toshiba laptop. No graphics, just text. This worked fairly well for taking notes, and then I'd move them over to my desktop 386 to edit/print/view them. This worked OK, but if the class had a lot of drawings, it was a serious problem. Note, remember with non-WYSIWYG editors, ascii-art was an option.

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:

• Good desktop machine. Get a nice desktop for your dorm/apartment. Plenty of ram, processor power and a really good monitor/keboard/mouse (remember how much typing you'll be doing on it at 2am!)
• Very lightweight underpowered notebook. You don't need to be able to play quake III on your notebook (that's what the desktop is for). Get something used, like an IBM Thinkpad. Doesn't even need to be the same OS. Remember the laptop is just a text/drawing editor. Nothing more, so don't waste money on it in case something goes wrong...
• I'd normally say that the full size WinCE machines like the Vadem Clio or the IBM z50 would be good, but they tend to be terribly expensive.
• Attach some post-its to the laptop on the wrist-rest areas. Then have a pen handy to jot down quick diagrams that the professor is erasing too quickly.
• Alternatively to a underpowered laptop, if you have mostly text, you could even use a Palmpilot with a keyboard!
• Get a good way of syncing files from the laptop to the desktop. There are a variety of ways of doing this. Network/Samba/FTP copies, The windows 'briefcase' or even CVS (my personal favorite). Figure out what works for you, and then use it consistently.
• Figure out how to connect it to the campus network so you can print using the printers on campus. (I didn't even have a printer of my own for the last three years of college. It wasn't useful)
• Back up your desktop machine's data :-)

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