Smartpen App Makes Paper as Mighty as the Mouse
Technology has come a long way. Being able to draw virtual lines on your computer screen and also write on paper at the same time. The new smartpen app that is called Paper Tablet has the ability to give the Livescribe Echo the same function of a graphics tablet. It lets you write on the computer screen in real time and add manuscript text to files that are already on your computer. Paper Tablet is Livescribe’s was the first way to try and expand to an area Marggraff calls “enhanced communication and collaboration” in paper-based computing. The Livescribe’s application is $15 on Livescribe’s online app store. Usually you can use the Echo wirelessly, writing notes, recording audio and running apps when you use special notebook paper. Then after that you dock the pen with your USB cable to upload the notes onto the computer. Then you have a choice to see what you have and or save or export your notes.
When using the Paper Tablet you can have the pen plugged in and keep it that way. The input surface is the actual notebook. The output is put to the screen and that is what you see. The pen allows you to draw, write notes, and sign or annotate on Microsoft Office and PDF documents. The pen can also be used as a mouse, when you hover over the notebook it moves across the screen, then tapping it to left-click, holding the pen down to right-click, and then you can draw a line to make a selection or drag a window.
Since the pen us used from a USB connection, Paper Tablet is limited to the new Echo smartpen, it will no longer work with the older Pulse, which would connect to the computer through a dock. Marggraff said that the company is working on making the pen connect wirelessly as another solution, but he wouldn’t release any information on when that technology would be released.
The first downside in this product is that it couldn’t complete all the tasks that it is capable of on a Mac. On the other hand, in Windows 7 or Vista, the Paper Tablet can mark up and save Office 2010 documents, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. On Mac it was only able to annotate PowerPoint documents on a Mac, even when it was tested on the new Office 2011 and it was also not able to save them. Marggraff is hoping that he can support the
As a review, they were surprised at how well the pen worked as a mouse/trackpad substitute. When you are very used to a mouse, this will take a little while to get used to, only because you try to keep an eye on the screen, the pen and the notebook while doing so. It depends on the task on which one you should focus on the most. You have to basically train yourself to look at one or the other. While annotating a document, it is recommended concentrating on the cursor’s movement on the screen so you don’t re-write over anything that has been written. If you are drawing, it is better to keep focus on the paper entirely. At other times it is better to look at both. For signatures it is a god idea to watch the screen to get the cursor into the right position and then look at your paper to make the signature as natural as possible.
