Doug!as [sic] points to this interesting Computer Arts article that quotes Apple’s Larry Yeager about the unlikely possibility that Apple will come out with a Tablet PC :
“A pen-based Mac would be the best way to deploy Inkwell,” says Larry Yaeger, the developer behind Apple’s Inkwell technology. “However, since such a computer system has never been a priority at Apple, we justify Inkwell this way: one of Apple’s core markets is graphic designers. Many graphic designers work extensively with graphics tablets. It is an inconvenience for these people to have to put down the pen, go to the keyboard, type a little bit, and then return to the pen, just to enter a caption, a headline, a filename, a few notes, etc. Inkwell allows graphic designers to enter such text using the pen, thus avoiding the interruption of their workflow.”
Oh well. Don’t hold your breath for an Apple Tablet.
Douglas hopes though that Apple will at least improve their Inkwell technology. In fact, his blog (complete with misrecognized words) is handwritten using Inkwell. The mistakes can be rather humorous.
By the way Doug, I wrote this whole post using Micosoft’s Ink Recognition on an… IMac. (Yes, I’m using an iMac running the Tablet PC OS.) I didn’t type a single word, but I did copy paste the quote rather than handwrite it. I also made a handful of corrections using the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). For instance in a couple words I had to change the case from lower to upper. Also, I scratched out and rewrote a few misrecognized word — I’m guessing 10. Most of these misrecognized words were due to my extremely messy handwriting. I am trying to write fast. I also had to use the correction comb to manually change Douglas to Doug!as[sic].
Anyway, I agree with you that the Inkwell handwriting recognition needs some serious updating. It falls far short of the Tablet PC’s recognition. In fact, if Microsoft wants to help get this point across they could integrate their handwriting recognition into Live Messenger or Office on the Mac. Hmm, maybe Vista will accomplish the same thing if Vista (with its tablet bits) can be run with Bootcamp on a Mac that has a digitizer.