I’m a visual thinker, so every time I want to capture an idea (which is about every 20 minutes) I find myself reaching for my pen and paper – not my laptop. I prefer the old school way of doing things, because I find that writing down ideas, having access to ‘blank canvas’, and – more importantly – free form drawing, allows me to capture the essence of an idea by quickly describing relationships between objects using my own personal notation system. This is good for committing information to memory, however I often find that my original drawing would be rather useful, plus I hate having to transfer information from my notepad to my laptop because its not very good use of your time.
How to solve this problem?
Today I stumbled upon the Livescribe SmartPen, courtesy of Bruno Giussani’s blog, LunchoverIP . The pen is essentially a computer and a pen at the same time. The coolest feature is that is records what you write down, not in text form, but actually the image of what you’re drawing. It also has a tiny camera if you’re doing some industrial espionage, a microphone and recording system, audio playback and a few other things as well. It’s a really cool concept, however what I hope is only iteration number one has some significant drawbacks.
1) Cannot sync Wirelessly – If this thing is going to record all of my stuff it should at least support bluetooth. If you can cram a bluetooth trasceiver into this headset, then you can fit it in that pen.
2) Its HUGE – Pens are nice because you can stick them in your pocket, they don’t need recharging and they *arent* computers. A big bulky pen is going to remind me that its a computer, and you shouldn’t have to think about that, not to mention you’ll need a carrying case because…
3) It costs 200 dollars. For that much money it better be able to forge signatures as well.
4) It appears as though you need special dot-paper to facilitate image tracking.
5) There’s no Mac desktop software – Are you kidding? You’re selling a device, not a software package. Open that stuff up.
It’s not quite there yet – but give it a few generations and I can see this being the future of writing things down.
