Naquada

I’ve always been a great fan of TabletPC’s I’ve had one since they first came out, and gone through a Fujtisu, and a Toshiba. They’ve been great for a number of reasons. Firstly.. I have a memory like a sieve. In my day to day work role, I have to record tons of information about customers, projects, conversations, phone-calls to name but a few, and to be bluntly honest. I forget half the stuff once it’s written down in a notebook someplace. Not to mention the fact of forgetting to bring the particular notebook you need to the office when someone just wants to know that vital bit of information you recorded 3 years ago..

I became a good IBM citizen a few weeks back, by dropping my Toshiba M200 off the IBM LAN and going with my ThinkPad T60p, reverting to the old ways of paper and pen, sticky notes and scrabbling for notes when someone rings me up asking about a meeting.

Years ago I saw some technology from Anoto, providing a Digital Pen and Paper technology that allowed quick transmission of hand written text from paper to digital media. The technology is based on a special digital pen and a paper printed with a pattern that is almost invisible to the eye, combined with advanced image processing.

The digital pens use ink and works just like a normal ballpoint pen, but it also contains a tiny digital camera, an advanced image processing system, some memory and a some sort of communication to a master device (say your PC or for some pens mobile phones or wireless)

The paper is the clever bit, it consists of an a dot pattern, almost invisible to the eye.The displacement of the dots, 0.1 millimetres in size, from the relative position enables them to be programmed to tell the pen the exact location on the page, pad, or pads you’re working on.

By registering the pen’s movement across the paper, and also the pressure, the writing is interpreted and digitalised. Meaning that you dont have to write in a special way, in fact you dont have to write at all, everything and anything you write on the paper is digitised.

Just like real paper, since it is real paper, since the pen’s movements are stored as a series of map coordinates and the paper defines where on the paper you’re writing, it’s possible to go back and complete previous notes in a pad (regardless of if you’ve already uploaded ink into the PC)

The paper is even smart. It enables different parts of the paper to be assigned different functions such as writing an post-it note, and ticking ‘done’ when you’ve completed that task, or want it added to a to-do list. Add to that gestures or tags that you can add through pure software.. the solution seems pretty advanced.

I decided to get a pen a few days ago, and see if it really did what it said.. I picked up the Logitech IO2 Digital Pen it’s fairly cheap, a good weight, and seems to be a fairly good implementation of the Anoto technology.

Now the other fly in the ointment is Lotus Notes, again being a good IBM employee, this is my choice of email client, love it or hate it, it does have some things other application don’t, normally it’s support from vendors. They tend to add some support for notes as more a token gesture than a feature. I was actually very surprised to find excellent support out of the box for Notes.

I needed to do two main things with the pen, firstly record notes and have them saved digitally on my PC, and secondly, be able to convert these into a form that was useful. On my TabletPC I used OneNote, which was an excellent application, but without a pen interface on the screen, it’s pretty useless to me. This offered me full search capabilities, ink to text and a place to store all my notes. Thankfully people have grasped onto the ink this time round and a number of applications support the .pen format provided by Anoto.

Logitech provide you with some software out of the box that uploads the ink from the pen into the PC, it provides a tagging system so you can start to organise your ink notes (keeping in mind you still have the paper copies as well). The whole upload process is smooth as could be, drop the pen into it’s cradle, and the ink is silently uploaded into the application, appearing as its own page per ‘real page’ view. This is the other nice thing. your digital ink is the same as your real ink. the dot pattern uniquely identifies your books, pages, pads, notes etc, and yes you can swap from book to book, A4 for meetings to A5 or BL for on the move stuff.

Now comes something I was very impressed with, IOTags. Lets say I’m in a meeting and I need to assign a to-do, or i need to send an email based on something from the meeting. I can assign an IOTag to a block of text, sorry, writting on my paper. By drawing a tag (e for email, t for to-do, w for convert this section to word) I can automatically cause something to happen when the ink it transferred.

if you take the example of email. I put in a to: someone@uk.ibm.com re: subject and the body of the email onto the paper. I then draw a small E circle it, and draw a single line down past the writing I want in the email. When the ink is uploaded into the PC, the software spots the IOTag, and converts the writing to text, builds an email and has it ready to go. The same with a to-do note.. little T, circle, mark.. done, To-Do items appearing in my Lotus Notes client as soon as the pens docked.

The pen and software does do a pretty good job of converting to text, even with my scrawl, although I still like ink, especially as it’s searchable!

The pen holds about 40 pages, and last for about 3 hours of constant writing, which is probably more than enough between docks. the special pads are readily available (ebay, amazon and other sites) for reasonable costs..

As for the TabletPC.. it’s ready to hit ebay later this week, it’s not because I dont love the TablePC idea, its just I cant get an IBM Tablet, and the Pen seems a great replacement

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