[NTLK] iOS Einstein submitted to the Apple App Store

[Larry Yaeger]

At 1:13 AM -0500 2/10/11, Ken Whitcomb wrote:
>Hi Larry,
>The model that I used for that little experiment was the Wacom 
>CTE-430b (Sapphire). I've been using MPs for well over 10 years but 
>typically I input in cursive rather than printing so this was a bit 
>outside of my box. I'm comfortable marking on the tablet and looking 
>at the screen. I think that most of my problems were related to my out-
>of-practice printing skills. After about 10 minutes of practice, 
>accuracy improved dramatically.

Urgh.  I don't remember the Sapphire line at all.  Guess I've been away from the area too long now.  Umm, 6 1/2 years?  Yow, how did that happen?!?  I see they go down to some pretty small sizes.  Size can make a difference just due to spatial resolution.

Glad to hear it got better with a little practice.

>I'm a little confused about the "Write anywhere" and "Ink in any 
>application" options. I presume from my tinkering that these choices 
>allow one to "send" handwriting from the ink window to any application 
>waiting for input, but I expected to be able to write in the active 
>application. Can you confirm which it means?

"Ink in any application" is the write-anywhere mode.  I think we originally were going to say "Write Anywhere" or some such, but the UI police wanted it phrased in a non-jargony way.  You're contaminated with knowledge of the right buzzwords, so that made it confusing for you. :)

As long as that is on, you should be able to write anywhere on the screen and have the recognition results flow to the current insertion point.  A little lined, yellow, translucent, borderless, transient window will fill in underneath what you right, to make it easier to see your handwriting on a potentially cluttered background.  To mouse, press and hold the pen to the tablet until it beeps (and the cursor changes, I think?), just like with the Newton.  If you turn that off, you have to write in the "Ink Window" and click "Send" to have the text go to the insertion point, and outside the Ink Window the pen is just a mouse.

There are some special places in the interface that are treated as "instant mouse" locations, even when "Ink in any application" is turned on... scroll bars, buttons, window titlebars, the menubar.  If the pen lands in one of these, it just behaves as a mouse, instantly, even in write-anywhere mode, because if you click or drag any of these things, we figured you want it to respond immediately.  That bit was tricky.  Hopefully it's all still functional.

HTH.

- larryy