From: R. Dylan Stewart (Bob_Zimmerman_at_myrealbox.com)
Date: Mon Feb 16 2004 - 22:22:10 PST
On 2004-02-17 at 3:33:00, John Charlton wrote:
> Does it do drawings as well? Finding the sketching and sketch editing
> functions of Newt Notes to be indispensable. Wish I had something so
> easy on my Mac. Also makes for a good demo. At work I use Catia, which
> is OK too.
Well, by default, ink ONLY does drawings in OneNote. You don't get
handwriting recognition unless you install the HWR engine and decide to
use it.
The Microsoft way of using HWR is kind of odd. You have this "language
bar" that lets you turn input methods on and off. One of the input
methods is handwriting recognition. It can take the form of a writing
pad that recognizes text, a drawing pad that just keeps the ink, and
"write anywhere" which doesn't recognize shapes, but it will recognize
text anywhere. The writing pad is a little Graffiti-ish, but you don't
have to learn special characters or write caps in a different spot or
anything like that.
The writing pad enters the recognized test after the insertion point,
just like on a Newton. It's been a while, but I think that the Write
Anywhere does that, too. You have to actually tell it to paste the
drawings from the drawing pad into the document. OneNote has its own
inking facility and I haven't had time to figure out if it interacts
well with the drawing pad drawings.
I'll do some more in-depth tests on the interactions of OneNote and the
Microsoft HWR later.
Another input method the language bar has is speech (dictation or
commands). Dictation really isn't that useful, but it's far more
advanced than I would expect. I haven't used Dragon software or any of
the other dictation solutions, but the Microsoft recognizer gets fairly
high accuracy (50% (weird words) ~ 99% (common words and phrases))
considering how hard speech recognition is. And I don't even use a
headset mic. I just use the mic built into my monitor. Interestingly
enough, it almost NEVER gets the word "dictation". Also, the speech
recognizer has an option to let it learn as you use it. That confuses
me because the HWR doesn't.
Speech commands have a far higher recognition accuracy, but they do
profoundly useless things. There's no "Switch to Safari" and it
launches Safari. For the most part, you can just do basic text editing
stuff with them.
OneNote can record stuff, but I'm not sure how that interacts with the
speech recognition.
If this is nearly as cool as Notes, then Microsoft may be able to pull
this Tablet PC thing off. Just imagine them ripping off ALL of the
Newton apps and making Windows versions! Of course, to get a halfway
decent UI for the OS, they need to drop the mouse and switch over to a
fully pen-based interaction system, but that's probably not going to
happen. People are too used to the idea of a computer having either a
mouse or a Graffiti area.
-- Dylan Stewart AC5ZH -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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