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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#17
Originally Posted by Benson View Post
I'm not persuaded that the Newton's way of letting you write anywhere is such a great one; I'm not persuaded against it either, never having had a Newton. (I do know it, even confined to the dedicated area of a hildon-input-method, would spank the Nokia's HWR.) But one thing I can say against it: It inhibits porting of programs from "normal" OSes. When programs expect mouse and keyboard input, stylus and some dedicated text input method is one of the easiest ways to make that work. Maybe it should only be a fallback system, but for a device I use the way I use my N800, it must be there, and it must work right; hence my use of the finger keyboard at present. If graffiti or similar was available, I'd almost certainly switch.
PenOffice uses the same HWR engine as the Newton (well, not exactly. Newtons had two HWR engines: Rosetta, developed by Apple, and ParaGraph, which is used by PenOffice. But I digress); it runs on Windows and basically sends keyboard calls to the operating system.

PenOffice works with every Windows program I've thrown at it. It's not as smooth as a Newton, but the modality is very well hidden and rather intuitive (you need to hold the stylus still for just a tad longer to switch from ink drawing to pointing) and it works with active and passive digitizers.

So it's not that it can't be done -- it has been done! -- but rather that it needs a developer with some cognitive ability.
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