handwriting
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The Galaxy Note 10 S Pen is also a wand that controls your phone
Today, Samsung confirmed a poorly kept secret. The Galaxy Note 10 S Pen will offer gesture controls, or "Air Actions." This goes one step further than the Note 9 S Pen, which acts as a remote control. Now, you'll be able to control the Note 10 (and Note 10+) with a wave of the stylus. The S Pen will allow you to activate shortcuts and perform specific actions by drawing shapes above the screen. As you can with the Galaxy Tab S6, you'll be able to swish-and-flick to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras and toggle through camera modes.
LG's Q Stylus phone is a budget Galaxy Note rival
If you're looking for a stylus-equipped smartphone without spending Galaxy Note 8 cash, LG has an answer with the Q Stylus. As the name suggests, it's equipped with a pen for note-taking, sketching, and touching up images and videos. It has a number of other premium features as well -- you get a metal body with a 6.2-inch FHD+ display, a 16-megapixel rear(max)/8-megapixel front cameras with phase-detect autofocus and the same DTS:X 7.1 channel 3D surround audio found on the V and G series phones.
Windows 10 preview shows big changes are coming
Microsoft promised big changes to Windows 10 with the Fall Creators Update, and it's backing that up in spades with a new Insider Preview. Available to brave testers on the "Fast Ring," the release brings redesigned notifications in the Action Center, much improved handwriting and stylus support, upgrades to Cortana and the Edge browser, improved HDR support and more. The release may be Microsoft's biggest Insider Preview yet, judging by the massive post explaining all the new features.
A computer program that can replicate your handwriting
Handwriting is a skill that feels personal and unique to all of us. Everyone has a slightly different style -- a weird quirk or a seemingly illegible scrawl -- that's nearly impossible for a computer to replicate, especially as our own penmanship fluctuates from one line to the next. A team at University College London (UCL) is getting pretty close, however, with a new system it's calling "My Text in Your Handwriting." A custom algorithm is able to scan what you've written on a piece of paper and then reproduce your style, to an impressive degree, using whatever words you wish.
Now Android devices can understand your chickenscratch
Tired of typing on your tablet? Sick of speaking to your phone? Well, if you've got Android 4.0.3 or higher, you are in luck because Google Handwriting Input for Android has just hit the Play Store. This utility app supports both printed and cursive writing styles, understands 82 languages and can even decipher hand-drawn emojis. What's more, it doesn't require you to use a stylus -- though for languages not based on the Roman alphabet (like Japanese, Korean or Hindi), a writing implement definitely helps. I just downloaded this to a Nexus 6 and it understood my scrawlings reasonably well. The only issue of immediate concern is the warning that Google will be saving all of the input text -- including any passwords and credit card numbers -- so take care with what you write.
Fujitsu's ring lets you write in the air with your fingertip
Head-mounted displays are frequently supposed to keep your hands free, but they only sometimes live up to that promise. You can't really dictate a message in a noisy warehouse, can you? If Fujitsu gets its way, you won't have to. It just built a smart ring that not only allows for motion control (something we've seen before), but in-air handwriting. All you do is trace letters with your fingertip, and the motion sensor translates those scribbles into usable characters -- supremely helpful if you need to send a quick reply when you don't have access to a keyboard. There's an NFC tag reader in the ring, too, so you can get instructions for working on a device just by tapping it.
Microsoft's Android Wear keyboard has you drawing every letter
Microsoft's support for Android Wear smartwatches isn't limited to a handy OneNote app. The company's research wing has slipped out Analog Keyboard, a prototype input app that has you drawing individual characters on your wristwear instead of trying to hit tiny keys. It's not the fastest solution (and triggers a few flashbacks to old-school PDAs), but it's very straightforward -- you get a relatively big drawing area, and there's a smart auto-correct system that you turn off just by pausing for a while between letters.
The tech in MyScript Smart Note is perfect for stylus users
MyScript Smart Note is a note-taking app for iPad geared toward stylus users who want a comprehensive solution for jotting down handwritten notes that actually function like physical, organized notebooks rather than like sketches. It recognizes your handwriting and treats it like text, allowing you to highlight and define words. Plus with a variety of other gestures, MyScript Smart Note proves to be pretty powerful for a free app. It requires iOS 7.0 or later. As the app explains in its 3-page tutorial, MyScript Smart Note analyzes your handwriting. This isn't the type of app you've probably seen in which what you write actually converts to text using a predetermined font. Your handwriting remains as you wrote it and the MyScript technology realizes it's text. Pressing and holding a word highlights it. Dragging the left and right points can even select individual letters. In practice, the handwriting recognition is extremely accurate. In fact, MyScript Smart Note managed to correctly identify every word from my neatest handwriting to my very-sloppy-yet-still-readable handwriting. There's also a zoomed-in mode that focuses in on each word you write before moving on to the next if you find that to be your preference. Gestures make it easy to edit handwriting in the same way it's easy to delete or replace letters or words you've typed. Strike through individual letters or words to erase them. Draw a vertical line in between two letters to put a space in between them. Repeat this in a space to bring the two letters together. Then of course there's my favorite gesture: writing a letter over another letter to replace the one underneath. It works near flawlessly. In addition to handwritten text, MyScript Smart Note allows for regular sketching using the drawing tool, custom selections using a selector tool and of course provides an eraser for those pesky mistakes that a simple gesture might not fix. Notes can also have audio clips, images and even complex math equations. Your notes don't need to start from scratch either; import PDF files to draw or write over them. As for the notes that do require a blank canvas, even that's customizable: line patterns, backgrounds and margins are all adjustable. Also important for powerful organization is search and this app nails that too. Everything you write is searchable. The app searches through multiple notebooks, displays the notebook your query is in and highlights the word on that page as well. When your task is complete, pages or entire notebooks can export out of the app in the form of text, an image, a PDF, a printed page and a few other options. The only downside I see with MyScript Smart Note is the limitation for free mode. Without reaching into your pocket, you get 10 pages in one notebook to work with. You hit the wall quickly, but I suppose it's sufficient usage for a free trial. Unlocking the full app requires a US$1.99 in-app purchase. The go-to app for taking notes is typically Penultimate. However, there's no question that serious note takers should give MyScript Smart Note a try instead of rushing to what's most common. Penultimate has more options for sketching and drawing, but if you're avid for writing with a stylus, MyScript Smart Note is frankly top-of-the-line.
Bic boils down the world's handwriting into one average typeface
As time marches on and the world grows smaller, we're left with the understanding that we - you, me, and folks across the globe - are more alike than we realize. Except, you know, when it comes to handwriting. To commemorate selling billions of pens you've seen countless times in your life, Bic has set out to create what it calls the Universal Typeface: a series of characters created by basically averaging thousands of writing samples from people across the world.
Evernote's Penultimate for iPad now behaves more like a real notebook
Penultimate is supposed to mimic a notebook on your iPad, so it only makes sense that the app's interface should mirror the pen-and-paper experience as much as possible. Right? Evernote thinks so, as it has released a Penultimate update that gets closer to the real thing. You can swipe from off-screen to turn pages, and you can set a color for every pen width; effectively, you now have a collection of favorite pens. Not all of the updates are meant to simulate analog drawing. Penultimate notes look much nicer when seen from Evernote, and there are improvements to ink rendering, palm recognition and connections with Jot Script pens. The upgraded app still won't replicate the feel of actual notebooks, but you might not miss them quite so much.
Bond for iPhone sends gift notes hand-written by robots
Remember when domineering relatives would sneer at both your wrapping and penmanship when you gave them a gift? Thanks to moveable type, such humiliations are a thing of the past, but perhaps there's a better way to win your pedantic folks' love. Bond, for instance, is launching an iOS app that sends gifts with beautifully handwritten notes in the package. The only difference is that Giles the Bond Robot is doing the hard work for you. The company hopes that Giles will bring some of the real warmth and human contact back into choosing nice items for your loved ones, just in the same way that we expect our robotic bartenders to listen to our every problem and offer sage advice.
Evernote intros Penultimate 4 for iPad, explores synced and searchable handwriting
Evernote acquired the Penultimate app for iPad last year with the conspicuous goal of making handwritten notes as easy to synchronize as to-do lists and snippets from the web. After several months of silence, the newly reworked Penultimate 4 is the result. The drawing tool now treats Evernote not just as a sharing option, but an integral part of its being. While it's possible to skip the sign-in, those who link their account get both cross-platform access to their work as well as cloud-based searches of their more legible writing. There's likewise a simpler interface with more realistic pen input. Truth be told, however, we suspect that many of Penultimate 4's would-be adopters will just care that the app is now free -- as of today, the biggest cost is that of an optional Evernote Premium account. As long as they're using an iPad running iOS 6, note takers yearning for the flexibility of a pad and paper in an era of cloud syncing and tablets can give Penultimate a try at the source link.
iTrace offers kid-friendly stroke-ordered handwriting tutorial
Last week, the TUAW back room got into an incredibly extended debate regarding the merits of iTrace (US$3.99), a kid-centric app that teaches kids basic letter-writing skills. In the end, I pinged the developer and requested a promo code to give the app a try. I'm glad I did, because even though the app centers around finger-drawing, it offers a good learning tool for new writers. Dotted animations guide the student through each stroke, enabling them to learn to shape each letter. The app is brightly illustrated and well designed, certain to appeal to young students. Meant for the core 3-7 age group, kids can learn to trace uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers. A series of adult-targeted settings are hidden behind a math-based CAPTCHA system (although I suppose in this case, CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) should really be CAPTKAA (distinguishing Kids and Adults). There, you can choose between left-handed and right-handed drawing, optional letter customization (although not the two-strokes-down "v" that I grew up using -- iTrace only does down then up), control background music and sound effects, and reach an adults-only tutorial that explains the app in more detail. The app was built for educational environments. It automatically tracks each user, so parents and teachers can view milestones; see daily, weekly, and monthly usage; and see how much effort each child is investing. The interface is easy to understand, use and fun to play with. Although the $4 price tag may strike some as premium, I found the app well worth the cost. If you're an early education teacher or a parent to young children, I think you'll find this a good tutorial. I do, however, suggest that children try using a stylus while playing with the app instead of using it exclusively with fingers. A developer-supplied promo video follows below:
Google Handwrite gets better at interpreting your multi-lingual finger scribbles
When Google's Handwrite feature launched this past summer, we welcomed the ability to compose our queries instead of pecking keys. Problem is, Handwrite had a bad habit of confusing our 1's and l's -- and despite the growing size of smartphone screens, it's still difficult to fit written words on them. Well, Big G has solved those problems with the latest Handwrite upgrades. The system now provides alternative interpretations of ambiguous characters so you can choose what's propper, and it lets you write letters on top of one another instead of spelling them out across the width of the screen. Not only that, folks who search using Chinese characters are no longer limited to single-character input. Want to know if it can interpret your chicken scratch? Head on over to Google.com and enable Handwrite under settings on the iOS or Android device of your choosing.
Panasonic mobile devices to use Anoto's pattern-based pen input technology
Panasonic is pushing further into touchscreen technology at CES, and it's not content with finger control alone. Thankfully, Anoto is more than willing to help with a deal to drive the pen input behind multiple Panasonic mobile devices. Its technique, which tracks a stylus' position across a near-invisible grid of uniquely positioned dots, lets would-be artists draw on Panasonic's 4K tablet and other hardware with higher accuracy and fewer worries about the touch surface's size or composition. Anoto hasn't said how long the partnership will last, but the initial scale suggests that it's more than just a short-term union.
Livescribe Sky WiFi Smartpen review
More Info Livescribe unleashes new Echo smartpen Livescribe outs the Sky WiFi Smartpen Smartpen leads to airport chaos For a relatively niche company that has only been around for five years, Livescribe has grown quickly. Its smartpens -- which cleverly digitize handwritten notes and audio -- have already attracted a million users. However, just because these customers prefer to write their notes the old-fashioned way, that doesn't mean they aren't also obsessive about technological progress. In fact, many of them have been waiting on one new feature in particular: a totally wireless workflow, which would allow them to write a note with their smartpens and then -- without any docking or syncing -- see their scribbles appear in the cloud and on their mobile devices. Well, as you've probably guessed by now, that is precisely the gap that the new Sky pen is looking to fill. The first half of its operation is identical to that of its predecessors, the Pulse and Echo: it contains a camera and microphone, which enable the capture of handwritten notes and time-linked audio files. (You can choose between 2GB, 4GB and 8GB of built-in storage.) But what happens next is totally different. You use "buttons" printed inside Livescribe's proprietary stationery, in conjunction with the pen's OLED display, to select a local WiFi network, enter the password and sync your files directly to Evernote. The popular online note-taking platform then handles everything else, automatically filing the text and audio in the cloud using a time stamp, making it available on whatever devices run Evernote's apps or web interface. What's more, it makes the note searchable through optical character recognition (OCR) of your handwriting. If there's a downside to users getting what they've been asking for, it's that they are the ones expected to pay for it. The Sky's base model matches the Echo's $170 launch price, but that older pen came with twice as much internal storage, and can also now be had at a discount. Moreover, the 4GB and 8GB Sky pens rise to $200 and $250, respectively, which means this is only likely to be sensible if you really, really dislike writing or typing on a screen. Even assuming that you're totally stuck in your pen-and-ink ways, could a $170 pen ever be worth it? Read on to find out.
IRISNotes 2 is like a cheap version of Livescribe minus the special paper
Companies have been trying for years to make it easy for users to write on a standard notepad and capture that text in a digital format. I.R.I.S., a company that specializes in optical character recognition software, is back at it again with its new IRISNotes 2 lineup of digital pens. The battery-powered pens capture text and drawings using a receiver clipped to a sheet of standard paper. The receiver records the motions of your hand as you write and uses OCR technology to convert the handwriting into electronic text. Each pen can store up to 100 pages of text and can download the data to your computer or iOS device. The IRISNotes system is similar to the LiveScribe smartpens, but is less expensive and lets you use your own paper. The IRISNotes pens are available now in two different models. The $99 Express 2 uses standard batteries and includes an aluminum carrying case. The Executive 2 costs $149 and has rechargeable batteries, an executive design and a 30-pin cable to connect to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Executive 2 owners can also use the IRISNotes app to mock up a photo taken with their iOS device and share that image on Facebook or Flickr. [Via Engadget] Show full PR text Just in Time for Back-to-School, I.R.I.S. Digitizes Writing with IRISNotes 2 Intelligent digital pens that transform handwritten notes into editable text Delray Beach, Fla. – August 21, 2012 – I.R.I.S., a leading innovator in optical character recognition (OCR)software, is excited to announce the availability of their IRISNotes 2 lineup, digital pens that capture handwritten notes and convert them into edible text on a computer. "Our IRISNotes 2 lineup saves time by eliminating the countless hours it takes to transcribe notes," said Jean-Marc Fontaine, Director of Sales and Operations, Americas at I.R.I.S. "IRISNotes 2 are the perfect solutions for students taking notes, businessmen transcribing meeting minutes, designers quickly sketching a new concept and more." As simple as putting pen to paper, the IRISNotes 2 captures notes and drawings anytime, anywhere without a computer. Using a battery-powered pen and receiver clipped to the top of a standard sheet of paper, hand movements are tracked and recorded. No special paper needed! The receiver stores up to 100 pages of text, downloads the information to a computer and then I.R.I.S' Optical Character Recognition application converts handwriting into electronic text that can be sent to Word, Outlook, Notepad, etc. It's available in two different versions: Express and Executive. The IRISNotes Express 2 is a battery powered pen that comes with 4 replacement batteries and aluminum carrying case. The IRISNotes Executive 2 has an executive style finish and comes with rechargeable battery, leather carrying pouch and 30-pin connector to share notes directly to your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. With IRISNotes Executive 2, users can write and draw on photos taken with their iOS device and can be shared immediately on Facebook or Flicker. The IRISNotes 2 Express and IRISNotes 2 Executive are now available for $99 and $149 respectively at www.irislink.com/usa.
Daily iPad App: Handwriting Without Tears encourages kids to write on your iPad
Handwriting Without Tears is a paper-based writing program that teaches children how to write by organizing letters into groups, such as Starting Corner Capitals, Center Starting Capitals and more . As part of its multi-sensory experience, the handwriting program also uses a chalkboard and the Wet-Dry-Try method to teach kids how to write. The Handwriting Without Tears app is a virtual adaptation of this popular handwriting system. The Handwriting Without Tears app teaches children their capital letter and numbers by emphasizing proper letter formation. Just like the physical chalkboard provided in the writing program, the iPad app looks like a wood-bordered slate and includes a piece of chalk, a sponge and a paper towel. There's even a personalized audio coach Marcy that steps your child through the formation of each letter The app follows the HWT method very closely and, in one mode, introduces the letters in groups such as the Frog Jump Capitals, Starting Corner Capitals and more. There's also a pick and practice mode that lets your child select any letter to write. The Handwriting Without Tears Wet-Dry-Try app is available for the iPad 2 and the iPad 3. It costs $4.99 and includes capital letters and numbers. As for lower-case letters and cursive, the company says "we will be evaluating the incoming customer feedback on this app to help us sort out the need for lowercase letters and cursive."
Google Handwrite lets us scribble our way through mobile searches (video)
Not eager to hunt and peck on a keyboard? Google Handwrite is here: the search engine's mobile pages will now let you draw letters on the page to conduct searches with the writing method you learned before this whole computer fad took hold. There's no special plugin required -- it's just the flick of a settings switch. As long as you've got an Android 2.3 or later phone, an Android 4.0 tablet or an iOS 5 device of any sort, you can immediately remind yourself of just how much you've forgotten about handwriting since elementary school while you're searching for the local sushi restaurant.
N-Trig pen tech whittled down to single DuoSense chips and sensors, shrinks scribblings to travel size
As much as N-Trig is an old hand at supporting styluses, it's had to focus on tablets and other larger devices due to technology limits: the HTC Flyer is about as small as the company has gone to date. A new version of N-Trig's DuoSense chipset family could be the ticket to going to much smaller sizes. The new 4000 series condenses both pen input and multi-touch finger gestures into a combination of one chip and one sensor, letting any entrepreneurial device maker stuff the two control methods into a handheld device with as little as a 5-inch display. Naturally, the chip line scales all the way to 15.6-inch panels for creatives poking at the screens of laptops and larger Ultrabooks. We're told that both Android and Windows slates will get N-Trig's tinier touch tricks before the end of the year -- whether or not that includes phablets with the same girth as the Galaxy Note or Optimus Vu, however, is left to our wild imaginings.
