Dylan Schiemann

For Christmas, I received the wonderful Logitech ioPen, a digital pen. The pen works with a specialized notebook and a Palm-like syncing cradle to transfer everything you write to digital format. I’ve been making great use of it for drawing out schematics for web sites.

In the past, I would have to scan the pages that I write on, and my weird penmanship would scan poorly, making most schematics illegible. With this tool, I just stick the pen in the cradle and the diagrams are saved to disk where I can export them to jpeg format (too bad not svg), send an e-mail (a jpeg attachment), or open with Word and try to convert using character recognition software. And they are far more legible than my old scanned diagrams.

The pen has a few drawbacks. It can only be trained for uppercase text, making text recognition impractical. Entering an e-mail address on the e-mail field of the paper also has to be all-caps which looks unprofessional when you choose the email option. It currently only runs on Windows (understandable, but hopefully that will change), and the appointment system only works with Outlook or Lotus Notes, not Palm Desktop, mozilla, or Ximian Evolution.

Logitech customer support seems to know very little about the product. Upon writing to ask if there were plans to support mixed-case text, I was told to try it and see what happens. Overall, the tool has significantally improved one portion of my development process, and is a worthwhile purchase for anyone who still likes to write things by hand, or wants tablet pc functionality for writing, at a fraction of the cost and without a bulky laptop.