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A new smartpen app called Paper Tablet gives the new Livescribe Echo smartpen some of the functionality of a dedicated graphics tablet, letting you write on the computer screen in real-time and add manuscript text to files already on your computer.

“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

Paper Tablet is Livescribe’s first effort expand to an area Marggraff calls “enhanced communication and collaboration” in paper-based computing. The application costs $14.99 from Livescribe’s online app store.

Typically, you use the Echo wirelessly, writing notes, recording audio and running apps using special notebook paper. Then you dock the pen with your USB cable to upload the notes to the computer. Only then do you get to see what you have and save or export your notes.

With Paper Tablet, you keep the pen plugged in. The notebook is the input surface: the output is what you see on screen. You can draw, write notes, and sign or annotate Microsoft Office or PDF documents. You can also use the pen like a mouse, hovering over the notebook to move across the screen, tapping to left-click, holding the pen down to right-click, and drawing a line to make a selection or drag a window.

Because of the USB connection, Paper Tablet is limited to the new Echo smartpen; it won’t work on the older Pulse, which connects to the computer using a dock. Marggraff said that the company was working on solutions where the pen could connect to the computer wirelessly, although he wouldn’t specify a release date or a specific technology.

Click “Continue Reading” for screenshots of and my reactions to my hands-on with Paper Tablet, just after the jump.

PowerPoint Slide Annotated with Paper Tablet. Credit: Tim Carmody

First, a disclaimer: Because I use a Mac, I didn’t get to try everything that Paper Tablet can do. For Windows 7 or Vista, Paper Tablet can mark up and save Office 2010 documents of all kinds (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). For Mac, even using the new Office 2011, it can currently only annotate PowerPoint documents, and can’t save them. Marggraff said he hoped to take advantage of better ink support in new versions of OS X, but for now the big push is for the higher-volume platform. (Also, because Windows Vista and 7 are designed to run on tablets, they’ve got pretty robust inking support baked-in.) The company’s also rolling out support for Google Docs, Evernote and other cloud services before the end of the year.

I was actually surprised at how well the pen worked as a mouse or trackpad substitute. It’s an absolute positioning device: once you bind a sheet of notebook paper to the screen, the top left corner of the page maps to the top left corner of the screen, and so on. A mouse or trackpad is a relative positioning device: if you move to the top left corner of your laptop trackpad, it just moves you slightly up and to the left of your current position, not all the way across the screen.

After years with a mouse, this takes a little while to get used to — not least because you find yourself trying to keep an eye on the screen, the pen and the notebook simultaneously. For different tasks, you have to train yourself to ignore one or the other. If you’re annotating a document, it’s better to concentrate completely on the cursor’s movement on the screen so you don’t inadvertently write over what’s been written. If you’re doodling, it’s better to focus completely on the page of paper. And sometimes, you need to do both: for electronic signatures, you watch the screen to get the cursor into the proper position, then turn your attention back to the page to make your signature as naturally as possible.

I didn’t get a chance to try this, but the best of all possible worlds might be to print or copy a document you want to annotate onto smartpen-sensitive paper, activate Paper Tablet, and try to mark it up just as you would any other printed document. That’s a pretty complex workflow, without many advantages over just scanning an signed or annotated document, but might be useful in some real-time collaborative contexts.

For instance, I tried to mark up text, like a teacher might do with a student’s writing. (I had to copy it into PowerPoint first, since Paper Tablet doesn’t work in the Mac version of Word.) It didn’t turn out so well:

Screenshot of an annotated PowerPoint document. Credit: Tim Carmody

I don’t think this is the fault of the app as much as the limitations of using the cursor pen function in MS Office. Above, my annotations using the Echo are in blue, my trackpad in green: neither of them look terribly smooth.

In the drawing/collaboration webapp Dabbleboard, both manuscript and drawing turned out much better:

Dabbleboard screenshot. Credit: Tim Carmody

I can’t take credit for that perfect isosceles triangle though: Dabbleboard recognizes common shapes and snaps them into a sharp, regular form.

If you’re doing serious illustration, I don’t think Paper Tablet makes an Echo a replacement for a dedicated graphics tablet like Wacom’s Bamboo series. Like the pen is already, it’s really good for taking notes. Real-time collaboration is a killer app if you’re using teleconferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx and need an extra tool to either think on paper or draw attention to something within a document.

And being able to electronically sign a document in Adobe Reader finally closes one of the last holes in going paperless. Instead of printing, signing, and scanning, you can sign on screen, save and hit send. That’s a lot of time and a lot of ink saved.

None of these are really arguments in themselves for buying a smartpen and a bunch of notebooks. Instead, they augment an already versatile tool and add another suggestive layer of capability to alternative input devices.

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Livescribe’s Smartpens take manuscript and audio notes. Evernote backs up and syncs multimedia notes across devices and platforms in the cloud, even doing basic OCR on photos. Now the two companies have teamed up, making for an extraordinarily versatile notetaking solution.

“Many of our customers have been asking for this capability, said Livescribe’s Byron Connell in a press release. Livescribe is dedicated to improving the way people capture, access and share information, and will continue to identify strategic partners, like Evernote, where software integration will allow consumers to get even more value from our technology while using their preferred business applications and information management tools.

Exporting Livescribe notes to PDFs and uploading them to Evernote is an extremely popular workflow for smartpen users, as we saw in our Livescribe Echo how-to earlier this month. Livescribe has its own Evernote-like cloud backup and sharing services, but Evernote’s versatility and the value of having all of your notes (manuscript, text, photos) in one place has been more appealing.

With the new version of Livescribe Desktop, available now as a free download for Windows and Mac, that workflow is streamlined to a single click. Users selecting “share to Evernote” from the can upload audio, images or both to their Evernote accounts, which are then indexed for search in Evernote. Pencasts (a little movie that plays notes with corresponding audio in sync) can still only be uploaded and viewed using a Livescribe account and the Pencast Player.

Livescribe and Evernote describe this initial feature as a “first step” in their partnership and promise more to come.

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Livescribes smartpen has two primary features: It records ambient audio along with every pen stroke of your handwritten notes. But not all its uses are immediately obvious.

I bought the new, higher-capacity, more ergonomic Livescribe Echo in August and have spent the last few weeks putting the pen through its paces. Ive also gathered up testimonials about the device — mostly from other journalists, who understandably love it — and questions and tips from ordinary users.

Just like our How to Do (Almost) Everything With A Kindle 3, this is a list of (almost) everything you could do with a Livescribe Echo smartpen — plus a few Q&As at the end.

Indexing Audio

Among journalists, the Atlantics James Fallows has been the most enthusiastic and eloquent supporter of the Livescribe. In The Pen Gets Mightier, Fallows describes his love for the smartpen, particularly its ability to match handwriting with audio. “The result is a kind of indexing system for an audio stream,” Fallows writes. “For me this means instant access to the three interesting sentences I just write ‘interesting!’ in the notebook or put a starin the typical hour-long journalistic interview.”

In my experience, as in Fallows, this is absolutely game-changing. Ive tried a number of devices to record interviews, from traditional recorders to my iPhones Voice Memo app, even Google Voice for telephone calls. None of them are as reliable or useful after the fact as the Echo.

It captures ambient speech remarkably well, even at distance. It even works fairly well recording a speakerphone-to-speakerphone conference call, a feat that gives a good deal of trouble to most peoples ears, let alone their recording gadgets.

You can play back recordings using the pens built-in speaker, or by uploading the pencast to your computer. There the Livescribe Desktop application (on Mac or Windows) can print your written notes to a PDF file or export your audio for archiving or editing.

Its particularly useful to export written notes to online notemanagement applications that can handle PDFs like Evernote for remote storage.

Recording Speeches and Classroom Lectures

In The New York Times, Wired columnist Clive Thompson profiled Brian Lacata, an Oakland math teacher whose students all use Livescribe pens in his class.

In the classroom, the smartpen is a curious mix of the traditional and the high-tech. As Thompson notes, the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. But while audio recording has been used for some time (not without controversy) to tape lectures and meetings, it changes with the use of the smartpen.

When Lacata’s students take notes, “the pen alters their writing style: Instead of verbatim snippets of Lacatas instructions, they can write ‘key words’ essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream.” Essentially, it offloads the raw-data–recording component of note-taking to the audio stream, while placing the tagging, indexing, thinking and questioning components firmly within script. Instead of notes, you’ve recorded a mind-map.

Source:wired.com

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Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

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Livescribe’s Pulse smart pen that can automatically digitize written notes is a big hit among students and business professionals who want to move away from paper.

Now the company has introduced a slimmer version of the its pen called Echo that offers more storage and improved features including support for PDF files.

The Echo pen has double the capacity of the Pulse and is available in 4 GB and 8 GB models that record 400 and 800 hours of data respectively. The 4 GB version will cost $170 and the 8 GB version is priced at $200. The 2 GB Pulse pen will cost $130, down from $200 when it was first introduced.

Livescribe has also added a 3.5 mm audio jack so consumers can use their own headphones, instead of having to buy specifically designed ones from LiveScribe.

Livescribe introduced its first smart pen Pulse in March 2008. Users write notes on Livescribe’s sheets of paper, just as they would on a notepad. The Pulse pen captures everything the user hears using a audio record feature. As for the notes, they can be accessed by simply tapping the pen at any point on the sheet of the paper or through a computer using the Livescribe desktop software. The only drawback is that the pen will work only with Livescribe’s proprietary paper. The company also launched an app store that now has more than 60 apps including study aids and dictionaries.

With Echo, Livescribe has updated the user interface so it is easier to access apps, added features such as password protection so the audio recorded on the smartpen can have more privacy, and introduced the idea of custom notebooks so users can group and organize notes more easily.

Later this year, Livescribe plans to add new software called Connect, which will allow users to email notes, audio and PDFs from the smartpen and paper when the pen is is docked to a Mac or PC.

The company also plans to introduce a collaboration software called Paper Tablet, that will allow consumers to communicate directly from a Livescribe notebook to a computer using the Echo pen and a USB cable. That means if you draw an image on the Livescribe notebook then it can directly appear on the screen in real time–a feature that should be very useful for creating graphics and for artists.

Check out Livescribe’s video of the Echo pen and some of its key features:

Photo: Livescribe

Source:wired.com

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