[NTLK] [OT] HWR App

[Greg Hankins]

I have not found a useful HWR app for the iPad, though I’ll admit I quit looking a year ago, so perhaps something useful has been created since.

I am a newspaper reporter, and use the iPad mini as my primary note-taking device. I use a note-taking+recording app called Notability. Most of my input is done by typing on the iPad’s screen-based keyboard. But I do occasionally conduct brief post-meeting interviews, standing, using a stylus. Notability has a zoom window, much as Steven Frank described, that allows the inevitably super-sized handwriting to occupy less space.

I have not tested the bluetooth enabled styli, but have tested many others, and settled on the Musemee Notier. 

http://musemee.com/us/notier.php

It has an awkward-looking plastic disk on the business end. Not sure why, but that seems to help it work better than all others I tried.

The great advantage of Notability, for a reporter, is that it links the sound recording with the text that you type or write on the screen. In review, this allows you to quickly find a quote that you want to use verbatim in your story.

I should add that I do not attempt to do actual story writing on the iPad or in Notability. For that, I use a simple text editing program on my Mac.

Cheers!

Greg
____________________________
Greg Hankins
Happy Hank's Honey House
Mt. Gilead, NC
greg at greghankins.com



> On Jul 15, 2015, at 8:32 PM, Steven Frank <stevenf at panic.com> wrote:
> 
> My experiences with at least a half-dozen iPad styluses has been that they are not great for drawing and terrible for handwriting.  Even the fancy ones that connect via Bluetooth and purport to have palm-rejection technology.  It's not even close to an active digitizer like the Surface or a Wacom tablet, or even a resistive one like the Newton.  There's no accuracy at the size you would normally write, so you're looking at 1-3 words taking up the width of the screen.
> 
> There are some handwriting apps where you write at that gigantic size at the bottom of the screen and it re-renders at scaled-down "normal handwriting" size in a box somewhere else on the screen, but it's kludgey at best.  There's not even anything like Ink Text (at least, not that I've ever found).
> 
> Steven
> 
> 
>> On Jul 15, 2015, at 5:18 PM, Tony Kan <tonykan at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> My colleague has an iPad and often gets a little envious of us as we scribble down notes in meetings with our Surface and ThinkPad tablets.  
>> 
>> He says he wants to do the same too and explains that he doesn't want to get a stylus for the iPad because it can't tell the difference between an accidental brush with his hand and an intended contact with the stylus.
>> 
>> Our Windows tablets use active digitizers that turn off the capacitative touchscreen when the stylus is within a few millimetres of the screen.
>> 
>> I'd be interested in hearing from other iPad users if they use a stylus regularly and whether my colleague's misgivings are unfounded.  TIA
>> 
>> Tony
> 
> 
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