phatpad
Latest
PhatPad offers decent handwriting recognition and numerous sharing options for digital inkers
PhatPad is a note-taking app from PhatWare with a long history that extends back to the early days of Windows Pocket PC. It transitioned to the iOS platform with an iPad app that debuted a few years back. The company is known for its digital inking solutions, which let you write on a tablet device with a stylus and then convert the handwritten notes to plain text. This handwriting recognition is the selling feature of PhatPad and it really shines. The latest iterations of the app build upon this solid handwriting foundation and add niceties like cloud syncing, voice recording and presentation mode. PhatPad opens with a plain white slate that you can use for taking notes with a stylus. The app is geared towards inking and includes palm rest rejection technology, which tells the app to record your writing and ignore the marks from your palm resting on the screen while you write. There's also a setting that'll ignore single point strokes, which are usually made by your fingers briefly touching the screen as you write. The stylus is your main tool for input, though you can turn on a keyboard option if you need to type. The pencil is your main writing tool in PhatPad, and you can change its color and thickness. There are five thicknesses ranging from fine point to marker size and five colors including red, green, blue, yellow and traditional black. There's also an eraser and a lasso tool to select blocks of writing. When you select an area, you can chose to copy, cut or delete the item. You can also convert the handwriting to plain text or change the ink options. Handwriting recognition is good, but not perfect. I write in chicken scratch, and the app was able to detect about 75 percent of my scribbles. When there was a mistake, it was very easy to tap on the text and let auto-correct fix the mistakes. You can also use the keyboard to type in the corrections. PhatPad is not all about writing, though, and lets you insert images or record voice notes that you can use in presentations. The app supports multiple pages within each document so you can get as wordy as you would like and not skip a beat. When you are done writing, you have several options for sharing your document. If you are preparing a presentation, you can use the presentation mode to export the contents to a VGA monitor. The app will send over the text, images and audio recordings. You can also save the document as a PDF, export it as an image, print it via AirPrint, share it directly via WiFi or send it as an email attachment. And that's not all --- PhatPad supports several cloud syncing services like Box, Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote. PhatPad is for anyone who prefers to write instead of type on their iPad. The app has a robust multilingual handwriting recognition algorithm that's been under development for many years and it shows. There are numerous cloud storage options, so digital inkers can write to their heart's content and always have a copy of their documents backed up somewhere in the cloud. You can download PhatPad from the iOS App Store. It costs US$4.99 and is compatible with any iPad running iOS 6 or later.
PhatPad giveaway, just in time for the holidays
TUAW recently published a review of PhatPad, a new and very useful note-taking app for the iPad. Among the unique and useful features of PhatPad are handwriting recognition for converting handwritten notes to digital text; a shape recognizer for turning your hand-drawn circles, rectangles and triangles into nicely rendered shapes; and integration with Dropbox. If the description of PhatPad and the accompanying video excited you about the app, that's great. Now PhatWare and TUAW are teaming up to give five lucky readers their very own copy of PhatPad. To enter this giveaway, just leave a comment below with your favorite phrase or line from a book, movie, TV show, song or poem -- one that is memorable enough that you'd love to write it into a PhatPad notebook. Here are the official rules: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. To enter, leave a comment with your favorite phrase or line from a book, movie, TV show, song or poem. The comment must be left before midnight on Friday, December 24, 2010, 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. You may enter only once. Five winners will be selected. All will receive one promo code for PhatPad valued at US$4.99. Click Here for complete Official Rules. Good luck!
PhatPad: a Newton-like note-taking app for iPad
There are so many good note-taking apps out for the iPad that it's hard to believe that someone just came out with one that will probably take the place of the ones we've already installed. That's the case, though, with PhatPad (US$4.99). From PhatWare, a long-time developer of apps for handhelds and smartphones, PhatPad brings the best of Newton MessagePad note-taking to the iPad. That's right -- I just compared the ahead-of-its-time Apple Newton MessagePad of the 90s with the sleek and powerful iPad. Two things that the later models of the Newton did very well were to convert handwriting to editable text, and to provide a way to sketch diagrams freehand and have them "cleaned up." By that, I mean that the built-in Newton software was able to take a scrawled circular shape and turn it magically into a perfect circle. It did the same for squares, rectangles and triangles. PhatPad provides the same capabilities, and then it adds in the sharing capabilities that weren't available even in 1998 when the Newton product line was canceled by Apple. You can take handwritten notes and convert them to text later on, enter text via handwriting into text boxes placed in specific places on a blank page and annotate photos or other images with text or drawings. PhatWare's long experience in the handheld arena definitely shows in PhatPad. The app has many features that haven't been added in other note-taking apps.
TUAW TV Live: EyeTV HD, MacBook Air, and a Newton for the 21st Century
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another episode of TUAW TV Live! This should prove to be a lively and fun episode of the show, since I have a review of the Elgato EyeTV HD "Mac DVR" queued up to show you. This is a great idea if you have a traditional cable or satellite TV box and you wish to view or record TV shows in full HD on your Mac. I'll have a full review of the EyeTV HD soon, along with a giveaway, but you can get a preview of the device today. In addition, I'll entertain questions about the 11" MacBook Air. I've had it for a week now, and find it to be a very fast, capable and compact Mac. Finally, I'll show a video and demo of a new iPad app that brings back memories of the Apple Newton MessagePad. How can you join in on the fun? From your Mac or PC, go to the next page by clicking the Read More link at the bottom of this post, and you'll find a livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments. If you're driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you're stuck in traffic, please don't -- keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone by downloading the free Ustream Viewing Application. We haven't neglected our iPad users, since you can tune in to TUAW TV Live on your iPad! That link will send you to a non-Flash page, although you won't have access to our chat tool. And one final note -- if the show has started and you're seeing a previously recorded show instead of the livestream, you can always pop on over to ustream.tv/tuaw to join the show in progress. See you there!
