Note to Self: May Be Best to Stick With Pen, Paper
I carry a notebook computer around with me almost everywhere I go, and I often use it to take notes when I’m in meetings. It’s fast and efficient, but there’s one problem: Some people seem to be annoyed by the clicking of the keys, and I worry that they may think I’m paying more attention to the PC than to what’s taking place at the meeting.
Of course, I’m not the only one taking notes, but the others are typically doing it the old-fashioned way--with pen and paper. They may be more unobtrusive than I am, but when I get back to the office, I have a computerized document that I can edit, print out or include in an e-mail message as part of a report or article. They have a bunch of handwritten notes.
Well, the company that makes Cross pens, A.T. Cross, in collaboration with IBM, has a product that lets you take computerized notes without having to peck at a keyboard. The $399 CrossPad Portable Digital Notepad looks and acts like a typical pad of paper, but it captures your writing in an electronic format. You can then transfer the electronic “ink” to a Windows PC, where you can, in theory, translate it into computer text, store it or print it out.
You can also use the CrossPad to save drawings, which can be imported to any PC graphics program to be edited and included in a document, posted to the Web or sent as e-mail.
For many people, this is a wonderful concept, and I know people who have been relatively productive using the CrossPad. But it strikes me as a technological solution in search of a problem. For people like me, it may not be a necessary tool.
Not only do I have terrible handwriting, but I am not particularly comfortable using a pen. I learned to type when I was about 8 years old and can type about five times faster than I can write. What’s more, writing tires me out a lot sooner than typing does. Maybe it’s a result of being the son of an attorney and a legal secretary, but I was the only kid at Erwin Street Elementary School who typed his arithmetic homework.
So, for me, the concept of handwriting recognition--even if it could be done perfectly--is a step backward. If handwriting was such a great way to capture text, Christopher Latham Sholes wouldn’t have invented the typewriter in 1868.
Having said that, I take my hat off to Cross and IBM for crafting some elegant hardware and software for those who want to take handwritten notes and drawings without being denied the benefits of electronic editing and filing.
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The device itself consists of a 2.2-pound note pad that, at first glance, looks like the paper variety. In fact, you actually take notes on a standard 50-page writing tablet that you attach to the pad, and use an electronic pen designed by people who understand how to make fine writing instruments. The Notepad itself looks like a 3/4-inch-thick clipboard, with a small LCD panel and some icons near the bottom that let you issue commands by tapping them with the pen.
The pen looks and works exactly like a ballpoint pen. In fact, it is a ballpoint pen. But in addition to regular ink, it has an electronic transmitter that sends signals to sensors embedded in the Notepad. Unlike the cheap plastic styluses that come with the Palm III and most pen-based organizers, this one has expensive electronics. You can buy your first replacement pen for $39. After that they’re $79 each.
The CrossPad shouldn’t be confused with a personal organizer like the PalmPilot, the Palm-Sized PC or the Apple Newton. It isn’t designed to keep track of your schedule or your phone list. It’s designed to capture handwriting and drawings. You can do that with the aforementioned organizers, but the writing surface, the quality of the pen and the software that accompanies the CrossPad is far better at capturing writing and drawings. Besides, the CrossPad has the look and feel of a regular pad of paper.
Once you’ve captured handwriting or drawings, you transfer them to a PC by plugging one end of a serial cable into the PC and the other into the CrossPad. Tap an icon on the CrossPad with your pen and the IBM Ink Manager software, which comes with the device, automatically transfers the contents of the CrossPad to your PC. You can then use the software to recognize the text or keywords you have circled.
Handwriting recognition isn’t a perfect science, especially with writing as bad as mine. Even if you have good handwriting, you’ll need to spend a couple of hours to train the device to recognize yours.
Reviewers with better handwriting than mine have gotten between 70% and 90% recognition. However, you may not need to use the software for the device to be useful. You can simply store your captured writing as an image file and index it by keywords so you can refer to it later.
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Even those who like taking notes by hand should consider other options before spending $399 for a device like this. One option is to use standard paper and then transfer it into your PC using a scanner. The sheet-fed PaperPort Strobe (about $200) from Visioneer is especially suitable to quickly scanning loose sheets of paper.
The Strobe’s software won’t attempt to recognize your handwriting, but it will capture it, allow you to index it and capture your drawings too. It also serves as a general-purpose color scanner and comes with software that will turn printed or typed documents into computer text.
Another option--and I realize this seems awfully low-tech--is to just use paper as it’s always been used and, if you need to capture your data into a PC, simply type it in later.
That’s what I do on those rare occasions when I actually do take notes on paper. Because I type a lot faster than I write, the process doesn’t take long. Besides, transcribing my notes also forces me to read them, which means that I might actually get something useful from whatever it was I wrote down.
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Larry Magid can be reached at magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com or keyword LarryMagid on America Online.