new sub-$1000 Tablet PC due out this year from Motion Computing

A new Asus tablet was released recently also: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110325/..._taiwan_tablet

The Kno tablet (http://www.kno.com/) is a Linux tablet and it has awesome handwriting recognition.

I don't think it ever actually shipped, and even now it's by "invitation only" due to super low availability. However, I think it's maybe the closest to being an eDGe replacement (other than eInk, it's huge size & weight, and much higher cost...).

Originally Posted by ubergeek

The Kno tablet (http://www.kno.com/) is a Linux tablet and it has awesome handwriting recognition.

Please see the following link....

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...ay-be-no-more/


The Kno was dead on arrival, and never shipped to anyone. In any case it was a gigantic (14" screen) heavy device (although was purportedly available as both a dual screen and a single screen device) that cost a lot, as it was advertised. As this article points out (about a month ago), the company is now developing software for the iPad and Android devices. In my opinion, the Kno was dead before it started because it was too heavily designed only for education (everything about the software organized by courses and semesters etc) thus not friendly outside the education sector.

Further, the problem for it, and other devices (including the eDGe), remains the lack of good content. People are starting to realize that merely providing .pdf files of textbooks is not adequate, nor is it inviting. The market needs specialized content, developed for computing devices. Studying and doing homework from a .pdf file of a textbook is a far different experience from using a paper book. The .pdf may be OK for reading a novel cover to cover (as the success of the Kindle has shown) but a textbook for a course is a very different animal. The best implementation I have seen of that remains books by Inkling (they have a nice free demo for the iPad), which recently got a huge infusion of cash and are developing for medical and MBA curricula in partnership with some major publishers (e.g. McGraw-Hill). Their book are beautiful... and expensive, but have great features to take advantage of reading on a computing device rather than just a .pdf of an exiting text.

I agree with the person on top of me although It is nice having my textbooks on my. Edge.... it is simply too slow to work with in the classroom. WheN we are flipping pages in class looking for info or fliping to the glossery for terms I can't keep up and find myself 1 or. 2 steps behind. It becomes pretty frustrating

Originally Posted by amartyn57

I agree with the person on top of me although It is nice having my textbooks on my. Edge....

I dont think I have ever been on top of you (lmao). Yes, for occasional reading of a text, a .pdf is very nice, but when it comes to studying, doing problem sets, or looking for info (as you point out), a .pdf really is an inferior format. On the other hand, it sure is awfully easy to carry around 2000 books in .pdf format, while 5 or 6 regular books can be a terrible physical burden... far more than the weight of an eDGe, or even a Kno (if it was a real device). Everything is a trade-off.

Originally Posted by alefor

I dont think I have ever been on top of you

Of course, we've all been in situations where it would have been better not to know, but it might be a good idea to pay attention to such things in the future. Admitedly, I don't have any business telling you how to conduct your affairs.

Originally Posted by gecko

.....I don't have any business telling you how to conduct your affairs.

Affairs? Is it that obvious?

Originally Posted by alefor

Affairs? Is it that obvious?

You are absolutely awesome - you pay more atention to this forum than to your, um, physical situation. LIke the programmer who found a frog, and the frog said, "Kiss me and I will turn into a beautiful princess." He put the frog in his pocket, and the frog cried out, "Why won't you kiss me? I am a beautiful princess and will be yours forever." And the programmer said, "I'm a programmer, so I don't need a beautiful princess, but a talking frog is pretty cool."l

Incidentally, are you a programmer? It occurs to me that there's more than one way to read your sig.

dang it i knew i should have put no homo haha

Originally Posted by gecko

Incidentally, are you a programmer? It occurs to me that there's more than one way to read your sig.

Like the frog story.... thanks.

I am not a programmer, and never played one on TV. Actually, I worked my way thru college many years ago (long before PC's) as a systems programmer on a mainframe. I am familiar with that business in some ways.

Regarding my signature, you may recall that this is what President Clinton said when asked, on TV, about a possible relationship with Monica Lewinsky. My point in using it (and it does relate to affairs!!) is that the more strenuously someone denies something, the more likely it is that he/she actually did it. Denial Denial and Denial are the first three defenses whenever someone is trying to prove that they didn't do something. A secondary point, is that proving you DID NOT do something, is virtually impossible. Ask anyone who is confronted by an angry spouse who suspects they are having / had an extramarital relationship. Denial is the only thing one can do, but impossible to prove a negative.

Originally Posted by alefor

Regarding my signature, you may recall that this is what President Clinton said when asked, on TV, about a possible relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

I also recall that the Prez had a, shall we say, pregnant pause, but I don't remember exactly where, either " with ... that woman" or "with that ... woman." Either way, he had to think of a way to refer to her, which was highly telling, I thought.

Originally Posted by amartyn57

dang it i knew i should have put no homo haha

It's just as well for you that you didn't put that in. For an explanation, please see (Mr) alefor's message, above, regarding his signature. In fact, that line often backfires, so to speak.

Also, remember, (Mr) amartyn57, that gender isn't always obvious here.

regards,
(Dr) Gecko

Originally Posted by alefor

Please see the following link....

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...ay-be-no-more/


The Kno was dead on arrival, and never shipped to anyone. In any case it was a gigantic (14" screen) heavy device (although was purportedly available as both a dual screen and a single screen device) that cost a lot, as it was advertised. As this article points out (about a month ago), the company is now developing software for the iPad and Android devices. In my opinion, the Kno was dead before it started because it was too heavily designed only for education (everything about the software organized by courses and semesters etc) thus not friendly outside the education sector.

Further, the problem for it, and other devices (including the eDGe), remains the lack of good content. People are starting to realize that merely providing .pdf files of textbooks is not adequate, nor is it inviting. The market needs specialized content, developed for computing devices. Studying and doing homework from a .pdf file of a textbook is a far different experience from using a paper book. The .pdf may be OK for reading a novel cover to cover (as the success of the Kindle has shown) but a textbook for a course is a very different animal. The best implementation I have seen of that remains books by Inkling (they have a nice free demo for the iPad), which recently got a huge infusion of cash and are developing for medical and MBA curricula in partnership with some major publishers (e.g. McGraw-Hill). Their book are beautiful... and expensive, but have great features to take advantage of reading on a computing device rather than just a .pdf of an exiting text.

Totally agree with you about the content.. but the Kno did ship to a few outside Dev's.. It's big but fast and does page turns smooth and quick...

Originally Posted by fgruber

how is handwriting recognition in Linux? Is there a Onenote replacement?

Finally got "a round tuit" and updated the LE1700 to opensuse 11.4. Same deal here as with opensuse 1.3, it installed "like buttah". Wacom support was surprisingly available early in the install, so the pen was usable instead of the mouse to navigate the installation dialogs.

Xstroke, cellwriter, and yudit (yudit includes something called freehand) were available from the packages for installation. There are several virtual keyboards, too.

I'm half-lazy. I'd prefer a magical AI process that psychically divines the intent of continuous scribbling. Then again, if I can't read half of what I wrote it's unrealistic to expect a computer to do it. So, I'll tolerate the extra time needed for writing incurred by character-by character interpreters as long as the stroke patterns makes sense. Having used several other systems with stroke entry software I've found these things are often exercising in delivering annoyance by forcing users to write letters precisely a certain way. That's pretty much what killed my use of those platforms and where my laziness kicks in -- I'm not going to spend a lot of time retraining myself to remember to write text in nonsensical ways just to fit some other lazier programmer's view of text entry.

Disclaimer: I only spent a couple hours working on this. (Hey, I said I was lazy.) So, over time results should get better.

XStroke didn't work out too well for me. It is supposed to be trainable, but on startup there was only an icon to turn stroke recognition on and off. I didn't look hard, but didn't see anything else obvious to do the training. I'll try again later sometime. So, out of the box many of the Xstroke default patterns don't make sense to me, so character recognition was about 60% and there were a few characters I just couldn't figure out. I do like that is allows writing directly anywhere on the screen, not in a specific input window, so when I can do the training it should work out well.

CellWriter accepts input in specific squares inside a window. One of the nice things about cell writer is that on startup it recognized it had not been trained and forced me to train it. After that it did about 95% in recognition. After fixing a few ambiguous and sloppily trained letters it then ran through the entire alphabet, upper and lower, and numbers without mistakes. Most cool.

I'll assume for now it is my fault xstroke doesn't work well, since I hadn't trained it. The operational difference between the two is that Xstroke characters are typed directly into the active app as they are written. CellWriter accepts input into a grid of boxes in its own input window and the collected text is delivered all at once to the application when the send button is clicked. There's pro and con about both methods. On one hand XStroke's full-screen input method is faster, but in the event of mistakes it can take longer to edit especially when it means going to a virtual keyboard in order to move a cursor around and delete/backspace of characters. In Cellwriter the input is a little slower, since it has to be put neatly into little cells, however, correcting mistakes is only a matter of writing over the errant cell again until the proper letter appears.

I did not have time to play with Yudit's handwriting recognition. There is also a program called Penreader not included in the openSuse install packages which I'll have to hunt down and install later.

As far as OnNote goes, I don't use it much myself, so I'm not sure what qualifies as a good replacement. According to others depending on what you do with OneNote there are lots of possibilities mentioned on several other sites: Jarnal, TheNoteTakingTool, FreeMind, Compendium, Freeplane, Xmind, Vue, Zim, TiddlyWiki, BasketNotes, Newton, Tomboy, Keynote, and WikiPad. Given the number I found, there are probably a lot more, too.