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Could a Pen Replace the Keyboard?
theluckman writes "Reuters has this story on how new devices like "digital pens" could possibly replace keyboards as primary data entry devices. Maybe so, but I would need my pen to make cool clicking sounds."
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After all these years of typing, I can write way faster and more accurately with a keyboard than I could with a pen. My handwriting is for shit these days. And I couldn't imagine trying to write code with a pen!
I think all of these latest innovations in handwriting recognition and "Tablet" PCs are basically aimed at an older market that doesn't have typing ability. Handwriting is a step *back* from typing. I would love to be able to use a keyboard to take tests in college, because my hand cramps up so much... simply replacing the paper with a PDA or Tablet is utterly useless to me.
Lessee....
I can type for hours and hours on end, barely stopping to go to the bathroom and drink beverage, and my hands and wrists are none the sorer. I can do a modest 75 wpm at max speeds, even while using all the !@#$%^&*( keys.
or....
I can use the crap entry device, the pen, and write for about an hour before my hand cramps up and do about 15 wpm legibly.
Thanks, but no thanks for this crap invention. Just because its hard to make technologically doesn't make it a good idea. Now, gimme the shunt, and we'll see....
Pens? Come on.
Assertion #1: Its STUPID. Here's why. For one, this article infers that a pen can be faster than a keyboard in terms of its ability to provide data to a machine. Wrong. Data entry via keyboard is upwards of 10x faster than data entry by hand. That number increases with experience. 250 WPM is not uncommon among most commercial secretaries. Hell, I know people who can type faster than they can talk, let alone write. Besides, pens and their ilk are better suited for manipulation of PRE-EXISTING data, not to enter that data in the first place.
Assertion #2: Its pointless. The problem isnt with the data. Its with our ability to organize and present that data. If theres anything we DONT need, its to increase the rate at which data is already generated. We've got so much data floating around, whole new areas of computer science have to be constructed to learn how to best deal with the backlog.
Assertion #3: Its Non-Intuitive. Any 4th grader who's ever had to write out sentences as punishment can tell you how much fun manually enscribing data is. Right now, you simply cannot beat the keyboard in terms of its ability to move data from meat to metal. Unless, of course, you want a pen with a little 101-key QWERTY mounted on the side. For people who have to enter loads of data, youre not just asking for carpal tunnel, you're asking for arthritis and loss of manual dexterity as T increases.
Like I said. Stupid, pointless, and non-intuitive.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
The article makes it pretty clear that they are not trying to replace keyboards for desk tops.
(Can you imagine? I have people stealing my pens now and it is a pain. This would make it more than an annoyance.)
And in the mobile market, where a keyboard is really not a good solutions-- someone does need to come up w/something that works better.
We really need something driven by thought. That's a ways off so the pen will have to do for now.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Incidentally, I use a trackball that I hacked to have an external box with the mouse buttons so I can operate the trackball with my right foot and the buttons with my left (due to RSI). So I never take my hands off the keyboard. I can't see myself going back to having to use a hand mouse, pen, or whatever as my primary pointing device.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
"Being good human beings, we've adjusted admirably to contraptions such as keyboard and mouse pointing devices," said Charles Golvin, a mobile phone industry analyst with Forrester Research. "But these are very, very poor ways to go about interacting with such machines."
Well, it's not like we evolved with a pen in our hand either! It's just a very, very poor way of interacting with paper. (and as others are pointing out, a poorer way than interacting with paper than say, a typewriter is)
Kurzweil is betting that voice recognition is the future. I don't know, a full day of talking, and an office full of talkers, could get pretty rough after a while, though I suppose they could pretty quickly get into subvocalizations.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Reuters target those who don't type much. Their readers would probably buy into craps like this and feed the hype with more and more VC money. Don't expect to find tech news worth reading in Reuters.
devices like "digital pens" could possibly replace keyboards as primary data entry devices.
Wonderful. I really miss the light pen I had on my Atari 1200xl circa 1986 or so.
--saint
is everyone so damn intent on replacing the keyboard.
rule # 1: if it works, don't fuck with it.
the fact that in the last 3 months, 3 new PDA's have come out the primary feature of which is an integrated keyboard (yopy, zaurus and new sony)
and one of the top accessories for other PDAs is a portable keyboard should be a hint and a half.
voice recognition is useless in a cube farm environment. handwriting sucks (it is slow and painful).
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
For inputting the english language, i can type far faster than i write, and i believe most people who ultilize computers on a day to day basis can.
However, when I type in japanese, it takes me a lot longer to type the character phonetically and then select the proper character from a list to use. Pen input of complex characters would be signifigantly faster because, assuming the character regonizer is good enough, you wouldnt need to select the character from a list.
The other main advantage of a pen is that you need not lift your hand off the keyboard to reach the mouse to manipulate a GUI. Granted for a "power user" you would have a number of hotkeys/shortcuts handy on the keyboard, but for someone who is already using the pen, its just point and click. Its also easier for someone who is just learning to navigate a computer as it is just like using a mouse.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
As far as handwriting recognition goes, the last Apple Newton was the pinnacle as far as I have tried...
How about better speech recognition instead? Or better yet, eye movement tracking (silent). If I was able to use my monkey-thought input device with something, that would be the best!
The current issue (Apr '02) of MIT's Technology Review has a couple features on the future of mobile computing. This article goes into the details of mobile computer interface design (from laptops to PDAs to MP3 players). The point is that people prefer to use their fingers to push buttons -- no matter how cool Pen Technology Of The Moment(tm) may be.
The full text online costs about US$5, but for that much you can go to a bookstore and buy the whole issue (ironic, isn't it?).
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Damn I missed it. Now if only I had a keyboard...
If the stylus had ever been faster and more efficient than those "lowly keyboards not so different from the ones that powered the Smith Coronas and Ollivettis of yesterday," then nobody would have bothered with those Smith Coronas and Ollivettis in the first place.
I'm not sure why the article starts by making fun of the venerable keyboard, since it serves such a different purpose.
Now, if you told me that this laser pen might replace the mouse (which, in fact, the rest of the article seems to do), that would be a different story. It seems to me that a pen could do everything that a mouse can, and, in most respects, do it better.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
This is ridiculous, and the article on Reuters reads like a press release not an objective article. About what you expect because it looks like someone's just paid to have it stuck on the wire, but hey, worth remembering that.
:-)
With a pen I'm using three fingers to perform data input, with a keyboard I'm using ten. Far more efficient resource usage, and any character can be made with a simple twitch of no more than two fingers, while I line up the rest of my hand for the next characters.
I can't write anywhere near 100+WPM with any legibility, but I can type at that speed with pretty good accuracy (and I'm not exactly unusual...).
Think back to exams, and 5-10 pages of handwritten text in 2-3 hours. Major cramp problems, which I simply don't get producing way more input than that with a keyboard.
Replace joysticks? Come on guys, I've used a pen on a touchscreen as a joystick replacement before, it's woeful. Replacing eyeball tracking cameras as a data input system? Well, if anyone can come up with an example of someone who's physically capable of gripping a pen but who makes any quantity of input by this method, I'm amazed. Put simply, that claim is extraordinary enough that I demand a reference.
PDAs and phones? Well, most PDAs have touchscreens already so don't need anything this complex unless people want to input text to them by drawing on another surface, which seems to miss the point of a portable device. Phones? Cheap, commodity things with little data input that have to be rugged and survive teenagers? The pen makes them expensive and is going to get lost _really_ quickly. And who needs it, exactly? I mean, with decent predictive text we can already write at a pretty good speed for the length of input.
A pen is nice for drawing, some people like them for GUI use. Personally I like a touchpad which I can use without significantly moving my hands from the keyboard but hey, everyone's different
Someone has had a bright idea and has oversold a story to Reuters, who've published it straight. No problem with that, they're a wire service not a newspaper, but this isn't a credible story. These people aren't going to take over the world and their claims are rubbish.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I tell you that the keyboard and the three-button mouse has become indispensable! I could not switch to trackballs back when they were making it big, and I could not go to a pen now. I cannot even figure out my handwriting anymore, much less work the stylus for my Palm.
Click here or here.
My handwriting is horrible and slow. Combined the fact that I've been forced to write with my left hand on spiral notebooks on many occasions when I was younger, I've never enjoyed writing with a pen.... Though I'd rather create art with a Wacom Pen/Tablet than a mouse, I don't believe I will ever prefer writing with a pen over a keyboard again. I have memories of sweat forming between my fingers after several hours of use, and getting more severe hand cramps than I ever got by typing... maybe it's because southpaws have to push the pen (digital pens don't usually like this, the tip tends to pop and slide thanks to friction on most surfaces) instead of dragging it. Meanwhile, keyboards are born to be "ambidexterous"....
:)
Of course, that's just my opinion.
If the article didn't suggest that these things could replace the common keyboard as well as the mouse, I'd probably just leave the article alone.
It's worth noting that the myth that keyboard layouts were designed to slow down typing (which they weren't, they were designed to prevent jamming without forcing typists to slow down) will not do the marketing departments for these devices any good if they present it like this article just did.
I have been legally blind my whole life, writing things on paper was a problem for me, I just coudn't keep up with other kids. So in 1985 I was given typing lessons (good ole IBM electric...) and the next year I got my first personal computer. My productivity went through the roof after I learned how to type, my marks were up and I had neatly typed notes that were easy for me to read. My typing ability coupled with my love for computers ended up culminating into my "dream job"; programmer.
I, for one, could not imagine writing as much as I do without my friend; the QWERTY keyboard.
crazy dynamite monkey
Keyboard are better, given. BUT, for mobility, they just suck. It would be much easier to push a button on your pen and scribble a text message on the back of your cell phone than txt w/ lot sht-hnd. This can also be practical for automagically transforming notes to your computer. Depending on how much ram is in there you could possibly scribble someone's phone number on your hand without actually using ink. At a meeting you wouldn't have to carry the current bulky electronic clipboards, just your pen and maybe an extra memory stick.
Keyboards will always rock the desktop input world...until we get neural implants. (:
--Roy
The author says:"But users everywhere still work on lowly keyboards not so different from the ones that powered the Smith Coronas and Ollivettis of yesterday" Perhaps the reason people are still using keyboards is that it's a good design that serves it's purpose efficiently, and doesn't need to be modified.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Like most everyone and their monkey has pointed out, this would be useless for coding and so forth. But, man, I would love to be able to input math type stuff with a pen. I managed to hand most of my assignements in university nicely typeset in LaTeX, and I would have to say that a pen interface would have made that less a feat!
I doubt this is the application they were looking for, as mathematicians are a small market, and most worth their salt have secrataries.. umm grad students to do it for them.
If you're really unable to use a keyboard, train your chicken to peck out the letters for you.
Chances are, if you're unable to use a keyboard, you're unable to use a silly pen.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
"Maybe so, but I would need my pen to make cool clicking sounds"
... too bad for you ...
Pens (specifically ball point pens) have been doing that for years.
But I guess you need to know how to write to use them
-Shaunak.
keyboards are great...but only for english and other languages that use the same character set. But when you have to deal with other languages like sanscrit or chinese, most people probably write them faster than they could type.
most character/pen recognition systems kinda suck. But i've heard, and my friend is trying, that a program called atok works pretty well for pen recognition in japanese for the palm pilot.
While I'm a far faster typer than I am a writer, I can see where this might be useful in some situations. If I could plug this into my box on a USB port, and have it "share" with my mouse (ie - move either one, and the mouse pointer reponds), that would actually be useful.
For games, the mouse is still superior - but for graphic work, the fine precision with a pen is still better. Dooling? Pen. Selecting text? Depends - but I think a pen would work better a good chunk of the time. Porn surfing? Um, mouse.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
STFU!@#!$!%@#* :q!
http://www.slashdot.org
cat file | sed s/word/word2/g > newfile
vim file
Take a few minues and actually write those, how did you do?
Yeah, I threw the pen across the room and tore the paper in half as well..
proton != antielectron
Notice that I said in schools. Not in the rest of the world, please!!!!
Hmm... After thinking about this, I think that the real trends will be three-fold--
;)
1: Better keyboards (One CAN type with Dvorak keyboards faster than one can talk-- Remember that QWERTY kb's were designed to slow typing speed so that manual typewriters would not jam).
2: Pens for compact devices (who wants to carry around/set up a keyboard for a PDA?) amd for some artistic input (light pens have been here for a long time and are much better than other means of drawing input, IMO. Mouse input in a drawing program is too much like etch-a-sketch
3: Voice recognition for general operations (not writing code-- writing code using voice recogniction would probably be slower than using a qwerty kb).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
how the fuck am i gonna play quake with a pen? i can't write that many letters that fast, or at the same time.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
I think that's the more interesting question. Keyboards can handle 100 wpm, and there's no filter between the process of writing a character and the computer interpreting the character. Pen and voice would both need this.
But even assume the computers are so fast that there's no slowdown with that interpretation. Will it ever be easy to manipulate a UI with your voice? Possibly for some things, but about more content-focus software like a word processor? How about if you're writing a manual about how to manipulate a UI? Could you imagine the amount of escape characters at work in your dialog at that point?
And even if that first draft was easy enough to do, how about all subsequent drafts? "Computer, go to line 135 and replace the second occurence of 'there' with 'their', and that's 't - h - e - I - r'." Sounds a little clunky to me...
But I suppose the folks at Dragon et al. have already run into these issues and found solutions for them...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
One of the reasons the Palm Pilot did so well is it was easy to learn and use. You can learn Graffiti in an hour or so, and using it becomes automatic within a couple of days.
A piece of equipment that uses familiar input devices (pens) is poised to gather more customers than a keyboard-based one. It may tick-off the techno literati (the same ones who scoff at AOL's customer's as simpletons) but businesses will continue to look for ways to reach a mass market. AOL, Microsoft, Motorola, et. al. would rather have the customers (and their cash) than slash-dotters' approval.
(Besides, the article points out that pens are targeted at mobile phones and sub-notebook mobile computing devices. On-screen keyboards are uniformely awful, and fold-out ones are simply awkward.)
I don't see how I can play Quake III with pen and mouse.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Optical character recognition of text that's been scanned at optimum conditions (high quality scan of mint, original page of text), is hard enough. Even the best OCR packages available off the shelf are only 98-99% successful in these conditions, and that's for straightforward English text, which has comparitively few characters that are easily distinguishable and with no accents.
Many asian languages have character sets that are orders of magnitude harder to recognise, because there are so many more characters in each set and because there are so many more characters in each set that are similiar (which makes it harder to differentiate between them). A few such languages includes Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Urdu.
Now recognition of near-perfect type is one thing. Recognition of an individual's pen strokes is another thing altogether.
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking. Having to rewrite characters many times before the Newton would correctly interpret them was a big turn-off for potential Newton purchasers.
On the other hand, Palm got it right when it went with Grafitti. An easy to learn equivalent character set that emphasised fast and easy entry rather than slow and complex recognition.
I'm sure that there are Grafitti equivalents for many Asian languages (it's hard to imagine that Sony don't have a japanese one for their Clie range) but, again, the large character set problem doesn't disappear (although context sensitive recognition algorithms can help.)
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream. Let's face it, we all know people that have trouble reading their own handwriting let alone that of other people! Yet we expect a PC to be able to handle such tasks at a reasonable speed? (60 words per minute is probably something in the order of 240-300 characters per minute.) Frankly, I just don't see it happening yet.
Bottom line: if you want fast, accurate pen recognition then your probably going to have to learn how to write grafitti or a similar.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
That's right. Keyboards are antiquated, but they allow for fast, relatively accurate input. Text to speech is slower and less accurate [for now] but easier. However, imagine a text-to-speech office- the noise would drive productivity down and cases of workplace violence way up.
What we need is the MindReader6000, a wireless input device to translate brainwaves & EEG data into text and interface controls- replacing both the mouse and the keyboard.
Yes, it would be a steep learning curve at first. And yes, the control units would have to be tuned to the individual people using it. But people have to learn to type, too, don't they?
Now, all I have to do is invent the damn thing...
My doctor has a "light pen"/digital pen that he uses in place of a mouse. The stupid thing has its 'left-click' as the front of the pen, so you have to push the pen against the monitor to click. Double-clicking is nearly impossible because the monitor is vertical and your hands aren't that steady.
A digital pen that operates horizontally would have a tremendous advantage over current generation light pens. Granted. But it's not a replacement for the keyboard (as everyone here has argued), and it's certainly not a good substitute for the mouse.
It might be useful as a replacement for Waccom tablets for digital artists, but that's about it.
I'd much rather have a fingernail mounted virtual mouse that had its own cursor on screen that tracked my every vertical/horizontal movement, and at the touch of a 'synch cursor' key, snaps the real mouse cursor to the ghost cursor. That way you could type and ignore it, then when you want to use the mouse, don't even move your hand, just wave it in the air and snap the cursor to your position when you're done.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Hmm..I dunno, how would I be able to strafe, change weapons, and jump using this thing...There goes CounterStrike for me.. :-)
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Of course we all know that the QWERTY keyboard was invented to slow down typists who were causing their typewriters to jam up. Keyboards were invented because writing was too slow.
Now with computers we no longer have to worry about metal bits getting jammed, we just have to worry about electronic bits jamming. That doesn't happen too often unless you use Windows 98. (Sorry, had to do it).
So, says Slashdot, what keyboard should we use? Why, an ergonomic Dvorak keyboard of course. The letters are layed out to provide for the fastest of typing if you learn how to use it.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
In order for pens to be useful the whole UI will need to change.
Take a palm device for instance. I can't see any need for a keyboard (yes they do have them). I don't enter in large amounts of data into my palm, I only do small notes. Most things I do are all point and click things so a pen is useful in this case.
However as I TYPE this message to slashdot, I think that the keyboard is more useful. It is easier for me to type after doing so for so many years than using palm's grafitti(sp).
One thing to remeber is that most Americans who go to school learn to use a pen before they learn to type. (Most not all). I am not sure how it is in other countries. Also typing is known to be a cause of CTS, or at least believed to be. If I had a handwriting recgonition input device for my desktop I may be tempted to switch to it even it it was slower, because in time I would probably get better with it as I have with typing. This is assuming that the UI was geared to handwriting and not mouse and keyboard input.
I'd agree that it is probably not true, and I too will hang on to my keyboard for now, but I look forward to the day where someone creates an effect GUI that does not require a keyboard.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Q: Could a Pen Replace the Keyboard?
A: No.
Perhaps the keyboard is so efficient that it makes it a little too easy to produce a lot of words when one would do. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking.
Heh. Good thing you're not modded up, or you'd be perpetuating this myth- one that is especially blindly spouted here on slashdot.
The first few models of the Newton's HWR sucked. Pretty bad. After a year and a half, Newton OS 2.0 came out, with new HWR recognizers, and it got it right. Far faster input than Graffiti or other character and stroke based methods.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. ParaGraph's CalliGrapher exists for WinCE, providing a more efficient, real HWR based, means of inputting on a PDA. There is also a version for the Windoze on the desktop called PenOffice. Unfortunately there is no such thing as real HWR for the Mac or Linux platforms though.
Having used both a Newton 2100u and an iPAQ with CalliGrapher, both a Newton and Palm device with Graffiti (originated on the Newton), Jot, the built-in character recognizer in PocketPC, as well as various programmable character recognition means, I've quite a bit of experience with HWR in the real world.
It appears that you don't have experience with much in the way of HWR, except perhaps on a Palm. That's fine, but it isn't very scientific to pull stuff out of your rear without any
experience to back it.
After 3 months of using my Newton and iPAQ (w/ CalliGrapher), I found I can get between 40-60 WPM. That was not counting any words fewer than three characters, so that number may be higher, but I wasn't sure how to determine WPM for sure. That's including making corrections. Around 99% accuracy for words, 90% for punctuation.
I tend to get higher WPMs on the Newton, mostly because the larger screen accomdates more words at a time, and that the recognition is rolling, rather than happening at once when I lift the pen. That is, if I write "hello my name is armondo," it will have recognized as text "hello my name" by the time I am writing the word "armondo."
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream.
Try a real HWR system for a while, meaning a month or two. The same amount of time is required to get used to Graffiti, so I think that's fair. During that time, correct it. The real HWR schemes of which I know train a neural net against your corrections, and learn your HWR style over time.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Actually, I thought the Newton had Grafitti built in as a default, but used natural writting as a fall back. I've used them all from the MP100 to an upgraded 2000 (I believe it worked the same as the 2100). I swear I had Grafitti cards that I kept putting on the back of the case, and I don't think they were 3rd party upgrades but licensed into the OS.
Anywho, yes, grafitti is better for fast entry...if you can remember all the symbols and everything else. Alphas aren't too hard, but past that I have a hard time remembering how to get anything without pulling the damn thing out of its case and looking at my cheat sheets on the back of it.
BUT the Newton handwritting was still hard better than people gave it credit for. Its like when a doctor writes you out a prescription and you get the wrong meds because they can't write worth shit, are you going to blame the pharmacist or the doctor (discounting of course that the pharm could simply call the dr if there was confusion). The newton actually forced me to learn to write a little more ledgibly...people complained that it didn't learn, but forced you to learn...no shit. Learn to write ledgibly and you won't have problems. Learn to spell correctly (something I don't do well) and the software will more accurately figgure out what you are trying to say.
Ok, I'm sure there are a few dozen Newton posts like this by now attached to different comments...especially since this device is always knocked by folks that only played with one for 5 minutes...so feel free to mark this as redundant. All I know is I wish I had a Newton the size of my Clie, cause its hard to wear cargo pants to pocket your PDA when you are forced to wear a tie and jacket every day.
clif
Actually you can get much more than 10 notes coming out of a piano. in addition to using more than one person (2 sets of hands), pianists very often use the sustain pedal, that sustains notes that are hit without the key being held down. in this matter, the amount of notes you can play within a short period of time is virtually unlimited.
you probably knew this, but many slashdotters do not.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Still, for a "thank you," birthday, or other special, personal event, I will almost always hold the handwriten note in higher regard than the quick e-mail. One conveys some effort and care; the other, an afterthought (though I do get a kick out of it).
As for this technology, a company called Anoto is developing a similar technology. The pen is about the size of my larger founts, but a ballpoint (the bid downside). Under the point is a small camera. You write on paper with a special grid patern. The camera records the strokes, and transmits them to another device using bluetooth.
One of their main applciations would be to capture information on filling out a form, then uploading it to an device.
I haven't seen anyone selling it, though some big names are involved: Cross, Pilot, Sanford (who owns rotring, Parker, and Waterman) are providing the pen know-how. Others for the tehcnology, Logitech being one of them.
I have a pentablet, not the one described in the article naturaly, but the ergonmics of it are the same.
:)
The problem with pens is CLICKING. If the pen has buttons on it in addition to a tip, then those buttons are going to be arse end small anyways.
But just pushing down the tip of a pen without moving it off of the icon is a challenge. The pen / pencil form factor was designed for MOVING not for sitting still.
A lot of work went into the design of the mouse so that it could be both moved AND held still. Clicking with a mouse is easy, you have a nice thick base to work with. With a tool with a pen form factor you are basicaly screwed. Yes it can be done, but it is not nice. Double clicking is almost impossible, ugh.
OTM must overcome a legacy of failure for digital pens.
False. Digitabs are VERY popular.
For drawing.
DUH.
They are called digitabs because they are digital tablets. The best out there (to my knowledge) is the Wacom Intuos. Most of their other digitabs are highly over priced, but these babys rock. Of course you have to get the airbrush accessory (another few hundred) to realize their true potential.
Tilt sensoring.
w00t.
Annnyways. They rock. Ok actualy I have never USED one, but everybody else says they rock and they are kind of like a 56" trinitron screen. Yah you cannot even afford to go into a store that showcases them, but damnit, you can still drool just THINKING about them.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Making the oft-made mistake of reading the comments, I've noticed that there is a lot of ignotance in regards to handwriting recognition (HWR).
It seems people equate real HWR with the HWR on the first Newton model, as seen on the Simpsons. That's not the case. After a couple years, when the Newton devices reached the Newton OS 2.0 version, HWR had progressed lightyears. HWR has come a long way in the last 9 years since the original Newton MessagePad.
Fortunately, real HWR didn't die with the Newton. On the downside, it seems that the ParaGraph system is the only provider that exists today, with the same engine (derived from the Newton OS system) in a few implementations.
For desktop Windows, there is PenOffice; for WinCE/PocketPC, there is
CalliGrapher; and MS Transcriber, a free version with the same core as CalliGrapher, but with fewer handy features.
With either CalliGrapher or the Newton, the experience of myself and others is that with 2 months of training the neural net by making corrections brings the accuracy up to 99%+ at 40-60 WPM. I tried to use Graffiti and other character recognition (CR) methods before finding real HWR for longer periods of time with pitiful results.
I have horrible handwriting. The great thing about real HWR is that it's incrementally trainable. A neural net learns your handwriting style better than even programmable stroke-based systems can.
Pure real HWR isn't always the best thing when writing code for languages with an overly complex algol-ish syntax. However, used in tandem with programmable a stroke system or macros within the HWR system, it can work out very well.
For example, a program called PenCommander comes with CalliGrapher for PocketPC. PenCommander allows you to program macros. I like to hack Smalltalk, Scheme, and perl on my iPAQ. Smalltalk and Scheme aren't problems, due to the fact that there's almost no syntax and punctuation, and that the function, method and class names are more word-like.
For perl, I have macros set-up. For example, to create a new sub, I have write the word "sub" and circle it, which expands to:
sub SUB {
my ($x, $y, @z) = @_;
return 0;
}
It's a shame that real HWR is confined to the one implementation by ParaGraph. I imagine this is due, at least in part, to the mythology of the Newton, and the impressions of the first three models. As a result, there is only real HWR for the Newton, WinCE, and desktop Windows. I reccomend you try one out for a few months, if you have a PPC or a tablet-based Windows machine. If there was real HWR for Linux, I could dump WinCE on my iPAQ. The only reasons I use WinCE is for the real HWR- I can't imagine putting up with Jot, Graffiti, xstroke, wavvy, &c again!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I have atrocious handwriting. That's part of the reason I got a Visor and an accompanying keyboard for it. I can input text much more quickly with the keyboard than I can using the stylus and Grafiti. The stylus definitely has it's uses though.
On my computer I really rely on my keyboard and mouse. For the same reasons I relay on the keyboard on my Visor. My handwriting is atrocious. I don't think any company (especially M$) is capable of overcoming this huge obstacle.
I do have a Wacom tablet, one of the cheaper ones with 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. It's useful for some of the Photoshop work I do, but very little else. I can't imagine using a stylus for all of my computer input needs. Seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.
Pooty tweet
That's where you are wrong. OCR might be more difficult, but this is not OCR. That's even a bit of what allows grafitti to work. The whole point is that it's recognition of the drawing of a character.
In those 'harder' languages, the people are very touchy when it comes to writing the language. Each of those complex characters has an exact number of strokes, with the order and even direction exactingly specified. Given all that, recognition of Kanji characters turns out to be much easier than of English characters (just think of how many ways one can draw the lower-case letter 'a').
That's one of the reasons that PDA have been a huge success in Japan. The Sharp Zarus line has been huge over there, due much in part to their successful Kanji recognition.
One could almost argue that grafiti is a success exactly because it applied the order of Asian language writing onto English characters.
Palm has had this for many years, and everyone wants them to move to the thumb keyboard. Why would we want to move our main systems to this?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I've been using a Wacom pen since I got one free with a draw program. It beats the stuffing out of any mouse or trackball I've ever used and, despite what others have said about video games, it's great for shooting things if your game supports it, which some don't, unfortunately. It's awesome in the shooting range sequence in Bladerunner, for example. Something about 5000 years of practice with a stylus-like device versus how many years with the Xerox Parc mouse? Were they drinking that day or what?
As a replacement for a keyboard, though--that's another story. Might I suggest a one-handed keyboard for the left (or right if you're a lefty) hand and a pen in the right? Or some kind of popup window with a keyboard in it so you can click on the letters with the pen? Two of these, one for each hand, might be interesting to experiment with. How many people are two finger typists anyhow? The neat thing about the all-in-one concept is that it gives you a whole hand full of fingers to use for something else. It's the moving back and forth that makes the current system so stupid.
What saddens me, though, is the lack of imagination on the part of folks who claim to be on the cutting edge of technology. Reminds of my old man complaining about pocket calculators because they led to a decline in arithmatic ability. One can only imagine what the stone cutters said when somebody showed them their first piece of papyrus. I can hear it now: "They can have my chisel when then pry it out of my cold dead hands." And it always was....
SF
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Kids coming out of schools will soon all have better typing skills than writing skills - there's no reason to make all new equipment use pens and slow down input to computers. Even a crappy typist that types 30wpm cant match that with a pen, not for extended periods of time. I can type for hours with no problem, but I remember writing exams being quite painful.
We need increased speed of input devices to computers, not pens.
Hell, we should be criticizing the keyboard for its short-sighted 'one key at a time' input and go to a chord system which some people have gotten up to 200wpm on on custom versions.
And there's no reason to have a pen when keyboards
can now be projected onto a surface according to a recent slashdot article....
One of my pet dalliances is internationalization, and I've finally got an editor where I can put in text from multiple character sets. However, entering in Chinese is a VERY slow process (guess where to find the character, pick it out of a line up, double click), whereas with a pen, one could enter in several dozen characters per minute...
Maybe its not that big an issue, but I know that myself and everyone else who has suffered through 2 hour long essay tests finds that their writing hand is in a great deal of pain. I don't have this problem with a decent keyboard.
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Also there's another issue I hav't seen mentioned. Unless the pen functions as a mouse as well, you will either have to learn to use a mouse with your off hand or switch back and forth.
If it doubles as a mouse, would that mean you'd be tapping the pen against something non stop while playing quake? That would require a lot more muscle movement than a mouse finger click. It kind of reminds me of when everyone thought touch screens would be a great idea until they discovered Gorilla Arm.
How do you tell the difference between characters like this:
", ', |, l, 1, `, \
-, _,
(, [
You could probably get some of the above using context but that will only get you so far.
The Anoto pen is not yet introduced to the market, it will be around this summer I think. But I think it is really an amazing invention. Actually, I think it has the potential to be really big. Big like Palm or Nokia even. Imagine, instead of writing your email on a screen, you write it on a special paper form, with subject, recipient and message fields, and then check the "send" box. The Anoto pen sends the message with Bluetooth to your mobile phone, which forwards it to the internet.
Or, you use your old fashioned Rolodex to keep track of appointments. The difference is, this Rolodex uses Anoto-prepared paper, so that when you write down your appointment it know not only what you wrote, but also where you wrote it. So it sends an "appointment message", via your phone, to your central calendar application somewhere on the net. When time for the appointment comes, the application will remind you, perhaps with an SMS.
Also check out the other product from the same inventor, the C-Pen: www.cpen.com.
What's interesting too, tying all of this back together, is that the first typewriter was designed based on the piano.
I avoid using the mouse whenever possible. I have function keys (in various combinations with Control and Shift keys) mapped to warp to my various windows such as xterms, netscape, xdvi, gv, etc. The mouse slows me down too much. I mainly use about 10-12 of those mapped function keys to get around my desktop; it takes very little time to get used to, and is easy and fast.
I can't imagine that using a pen would be any faster than a mouse, so I wouldn't be very interested.
I'll also have to say that people are more open to the pen table today than they were years ago. There are many more such devices and many are used in the medical industry where all you need is a pen touch. Also UPS uses them, and so do other places like that.
In coding and word processing or email or the likes, the keyboard is probably the necessary medium. But when filling out a form that has all check boxes, like a medical document where they have mostly what medicines you are allergic to and they are just checking things off here and there the pen may be a good choice. Or even someplace that all you need is a signature like at cash registers a pen input is good.
I doubt that the pen will replace the keyboard anytime soon, but it may become another replacement for the mouse like the trackball is.
Only 'flamers' flame!
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And handwriting was only the most visible problem. There were endless stupid bugs and design flaws. And conspicuously bad prioritization. My Newton didn't understand that punctuation characters weren't part of the alphabet -- but did know where I could find Elvis! If they had spent a little less time planting Easter Eggs...
Handwriting recognition may be more feasible than WIAKywbfatw thinks. But you have to acknowledge that Apple did a lot of damage to its reputation.