Killer Feature I suggest

[desk7]

I love taking notes with Onyx Boox Max but I miss the Handwriting recognition feature of Windows 10 app "Nebo". (http://www.myscript.com/nebo/)
There is Android app "My script Smart Note" from the same software house but it is no longer developed and it is laggy on Max.
With this app you can convert you handwritten notes into Word file, you make them researchable, you can enter math formulas, diagrams and so on.
I noticed that there is no e-ink note-taker with this feature. So if Onyx contacted them and use their SDK (http://myscript.com/technology/#developer-kits), they could adapt the software to e-ink screen and would have the best note-taking app among these devices adding a great feature to their devices.
I think it would be a fruitful investment.

[Jmirko]

I fully agree, but let's dig a bit deeper. Having tried virtually all compatible note-taking apps on my M96, i was disappointed to find that they are either extremely laggy (=unusable), lack the necessary features, or (usually) both. I think Onyx has two possible approaches if it wants to make a killer note-taking device:

1. Add functionality to the built-in Note app.
It is super fast, but even after all these years (its predecessor was already on the M92) it still lacks basic functions such as a Search function (text search in file names), or an option to list note files without thumbnails (so that many more files could be displayed on one screen). I have written to Onyx as well as its European distributor, to no avail - development of this crucial app is going at a snail's pace.
And yes, handwriting recognition should be on the roadmap! Users could search all of their notes, not only the file names. Also, sharing notes with colleagues would become much easier (at least in my company, sharing handwritten notes is frowned upon - so I have a choice of typing the memo in the first place, or retyping afterwards.

2. Make the hardware powerful enough for mainstream note-taking apps. Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, and Evernote are very well known in the market, and all of them support handwriting recognition in one way or another.

Onyx should recognise that all those people going from meeting to meeting with paper notepads are potentially a huge market - but if it doesn't hurry, someone like ReMarkable is going to eat its lunch.

[plusz]

Originally Posted by Jmirko

And yes, handwriting recognition should be on the roadmap! Users could search all of their notes, not only the file names.

2. Make the hardware powerful enough for mainstream note-taking apps. Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, and Evernote are very well known in the market, and all of them support handwriting recognition in one way or another.

It's all about the slow hardware. I had Samsung Galaxy Note, there was the hand writing recognition but I never really used it - it was not precise or smart enough. I had to do very careful slow writing to make it understand me. When I upgraded to Galaxy Note 3 I use the stylus a lot - hand writing is smoothly interpreted to typed text. I think that the app also does a lot of learning, prediction and correction of my ugly scribbling. Now I can write email much faster with the stylus than the onscreen android keyboard. I am sure it is all thanks to upgrading from dual core 1.4GHz to quad core 2.3GHz.

[mdp]

I still use graffiti (the Palm handwriting system)... And on the Galaxy Note series

(Although not on the Onyx tablets. This posts make me want to try and check responsiveness)

[mdp]

Originally Posted by mdp

I still use graffiti [...] (Although not on the Onyx tablets. This posts make me want to try and check responsiveness)

...And it did not take much to test it. I tried on the T68, on QuickEdit. It is very fast. Writing the 26 letters, as I wrote the 'z' I read the 'z'.

The catch: well, I customized Graffiti to overcome a few limitations it had... I am not using a commonly distributed version.

[plusz]

Originally Posted by mdp

...And it did not take much to test it. I tried on the T68, on QuickEdit. It is very fast. Writing the 26 letters, as I wrote the 'z' I read the 'z'.

The catch: well, I customized Graffiti to overcome a few limitations it had... I am not using a commonly distributed version.

Are you talking about this app Graffiti Pro

I have tried it and I failed on the fist "a" letter. I write it as on the picture below but the app insisted it is "e" or "h"...


As a developer I got interested to verify it and maybe to explore the software problem myself in terms of what algorithms are needed to make such app feel good and how much computational resources are really necessary. It's not for one evening though...

[mdp]

Originally Posted by plusz

Are you talking about this app

Yes, I customized an old version of that. Nice to know they finally updated it! (In my version, I had added the CTRL-key, adjustable height etc.)

Originally Posted by plusz

I have tried it and I failed on the fist "a" letter. I write it as on the picture below but the app insisted it is "e" or "h"...

No, it works differently: you learn how to draw the chars - it is a specific alphabet, very reasonable (<rant>and yet apparently covered by possibly absurd patents by rogues pre-dating the palm implementation</rant>). Take into account that it was developed by the great Jeff Hawkins in the mid nineties: it had to work on mobile equipment of that age! So, you learn how you should write (although the software recognizes a few variants of some letters, when relevant). I can tell you by experience, it is a good approach (although I have little experience with the new handwriting interpreters - not very interested, I am satisfied with the old good way). I mean: should you implement deep neural network trained on the MNIST database on a pocket thing because one may not be bothered to learn a reasonable convention?

[Jmirko]

Being a former Palm enthusiast myself, I would be perfectly fine writing in Grafitti - provided I can write anywhere on the screen. But I suspect that using Grafitti in QuickEdit, you need to write in a box. Can you confirm this?

[mdp]

Originally Posted by Jmirko

Being a former Palm enthusiast myself, I would be perfectly fine writing in Grafitti - provided I can write anywhere on the screen. But I suspect that using Grafitti in QuickEdit, you need to write in a box. Can you confirm this?

You write in the "keyboard space" - the bottom slice of the screen (where on most virtual keyboards you would have the virtual keys). Like you did on Palm, layout-wise.

[Jmirko]

Thanks for the info. Actually, I have several old e-readers which support that type of handwriting recognition - the Irex Iliad 2 from 2007, or the Hanvon N800, for example. I always found this to be slower than typing on the virtual keyboard. Also, it's cumbersome to tell the device where you want to write, and part of the screen is covered by the box...
My preference would be an ex-post OCR functionality: you write by hand wherever you want on the screen, and when you are done, you click an icon to run the OCR. It keeps your handwriting, but creates a text file (or a text box in the same file) with similar formatting (indents, bullets, underlines, etc.).