Re: [NTLK] Found this on engadget...

On May 6, 2007, at 9:46 AM, Alan Balas wrote:

> I can totally understand that. My gripe is that it's no fun to
> write on
> glass (or a screen protector). I mean it's a just a dead end for
> me. As
> great as my 2000U is, I just can't write anything of length on it.

I hear you. Probably the only reason I was ever successful in writing
longer documents on the Palm is that after a certain point I stopped
thinking of Graffiti as bad HWR and started thinking of it as a one-
handed form of typing. It's sort of backwards, but Newt being sort of
notebook-sized as well as the handwriting-based form of input makes
me compare it to writing in a notebook, and the experience comes up
short. Palm was never 'paper-like' enough to invite that comparison,
so ironically I could sit and pound out the words.

> The best solution that I've seen for note-taking - inelegant as it
> is - is
> something like this: http://www.digi-memo.com.

Actually, while I don't have any desire to use one of those, I think
it does present some interesting possibilities. In combination with
digital paper

http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C2393/

and a good operating system, like say, NewtOS, and we have some very
intriguing avenues to pursue.

What I'd really like to see come out of this is an on-the-fly font
that gets built in conjunction with the HWR. You write something on
the screen and the recognizer interprets your handwriting, but
represents each letter using a newly-created glyph that comes from
the word it just recognized in your handwriting. In this way, we
could end up with a file that looks like your own handwriting but is
machine-readable as unicode. I'm not sure whether it would save space
to convert the strokes to vectors for this "on the fly font"--I'm
guessing it would depend on the resolution of your digitizer and
whether it's desirable to have the display be resolution-independent.

The end result of this is would be the capability (for example) to
publish a blog in your own handwriting, but still allow it to be
indexed by search engines. I can think of numerous other
applications; that's just a teaser.

Ah well, just thinking out loud here. That is what I love about Newt
tho--it makes me think about the possibilities instead of just the
practicalities. I guess that's the heartbreaking part too--seeing
that no one in the industry gets it.

Steve

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