Mac OS X Hacks

Dipping Your Pen into Inkwell

Inkwell, Apple’s handwriting-recognition technology, has the potential to put some of the joy back into writing by hand.

The recent launch of the Microsoft Tablet PC was accompanied by major fanfare, hailing writing as a whole new way of using the computer. The Tablet PC is basically a notebook equipped with a graphics tablet built in to allow users to scribble notes on it. Behind the hardware is the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC edition, a souped-up version of Windows XP with handwriting-recognition capabilities.

Unknown to many, surprisingly enough to any longtime Apple devotee, Apple also possesses similar handwriting recognition technology, dating from the days of the now-discontinued Newton message pad (http://www.panix.com/~clay/newton/). In Mac OS X Jaguar, Apple has quietly shipped the handwriting-recognition technology known as Inkwell (http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/inkwell.html). Let’s dip our pens into Inkwell and see how it measures up and how you can make use of it.

First and foremost, to use Inkwell you need a graphics tablet; unfortunately, you cannot use a mouse to simulate handwriting strokes. Perhaps this is one reason why Inkwell has not been widely used, as not everyone has a graphics tablet. For my experimentation, I used the Intuos2 graphics tablet from Wacom (http://www.wacom.com/), shown in Figure 4-35.

Figure 4-35. A ...