OneNote and Magic Pen

Microsoft seem to be doing something pretty cool here. Tight integration of a custom UI device (the stylus on their latest Surface tablets) with their note-taking app. OneNote.

Obviously I'm sticking with OWL, but this is pretty nice. And you can imagine them taking it a lot further. Extra buttons on the pen. What about a chording-keyboard on a pen? Other apps. accessible through OneNote etc.

Pen Colours

Found the pen for my old Genius tablet which had been lost (in an unopened box) since we came to London from Brazil in 2008. It's fun to doodle.

Apart from experimenting with input devices based on real pencils, and digital flutes, I'm still keeping half an eye on what's going on with magic wands.

Here's one that controls an LED candle.

Of course, I have a lot of thoughts and fantasies about doing a project in this direction. But not quite yet. I've got an essay to write, a masters project to do, and an application for the Goldsmiths DPhil programme to make (including a thesis proposal). Of course I want to play with it all : wands, swarm music, desktop manufacturing, magic. But I have to focus ... I think wands are out for the moment.

Still, they're coming. From someone.

More details here.

Playing with pencils as input devices.

The Asus Eee Tablet looks very tempting : reflective, black and white LCD screen (ie. usable out-of-doors), cheap, longish battery-life, pen-input, Linux.

Big question : is it possible to write apps. for it?

Some very, very nice looking UI ideas on this M$ tablet mockup.

Round up of Pen interface research.

LiveScribe at JavaOne

Another digital pen

Lion Kimbro's PaperAnnotator

Related to pens?

Added BldgBlog and OrangeCone to my "following" blogroll. BldgBlog is so darned good and I never remember to read it regularly. Now, I hope I will.

Update : OrangeCone just linked a Midified Roombas video

Update 2 : And this is even more fun. Roomba controlled by MacBook accelerometers.

Thinking about that for a second. One interesting thing you see repeatedly is the transformation of a recording technology into a user interface : for example, vinyl records used to be a music storage device. Then DJs discovered scratching and turned them into a manipulable instrument. Now you can even hook turntables up to a computer and use one record as an interface to scratch an entirely unrelated MP3.

Pen and paper is likely going the same way with tablets and Livescribes etc. (And arguably the typewriter became the computer keyboard and printer)

Now here's a guy turning a laptop into an input device for a robot. Daft? Sure. Any dafter than scratching records?

Crayon Physics is beautiful

Update : downloaded the original demo, and yep, it's wonderful.

Making pens

Of course, this one loses a little bit of the charm of innocence of the whole thing. There's a little bit too much of hard sell about it. And also, buying the blanks, ready made, seems like cheating.

But there's something quite fascinating about it ... I've always like lathes. I understand that sense of "magic" as the shaped thing jumps out of the raw material.

I'm not a gadget freak. I'm too poor, and too anti-consumerist to obsessively spend my time reading Gizmodo et. al. and lusting over the latest gear.

However, this weekend I bought myself a present.

As you can see from the reviews, this pen-instead-of-a-mouse is at the decidedly cheap and cheerful end of the market. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying using it. I've played with the paint program and it's fun. And I'm adapting myself to using it instead of a mouse for all activities.

Why?

Well, last year I did get very impressed by this interactive whiteboard demo. And here's something even more spectacular. Obviously a pen-mouse isn't in the same league as cool interactive whiteboards and giant touch-screens, but the important common element is the use of fluid gestures in your interface.

And that is something you can't really explore with a mouse but you can begin to with a pen. Flying around Google Earth with the pen feels different from the mouse. Whereas the mouse involves basically waggling the wrist, the pen brings in the forearm and elbow too.

A mouse is normally only about going to a place and selecting it. Typically, objects which are static and visible on the screen. A pen can be about how you go to a place. The dynamic movement of the body. A gesture is something which can be always available at your finger-tips without cluttering up screen-space with a visible representation. (OK, that makes it harder for the naive user, but can make the UI more clean and elegant.)

I loved teaching with a whiteboard (and never used PowerPoint). Whiteboards work even more of your body. I guess the Wii controllers are going to make the body the issue in video gaming too. The hype almost guarantees that this will be a big theme of this year.

Last year, I started doing "Bamboo", a kind of locally developed mixture of yoga-like stretching and climbing exercises. I'm still a fat, lazy, geek hunched over my computer, but I'm starting to become more conscious of my body and its movements.

Even I'd like to have my computer require more physical movement. I'd like to be able to program the way I scribble on the whiteboard in front of a class or in a meeting. I don't have cool giant touchscreens but at least I can get a cheap pen and start to play with the idea of gestures in my software.