I am expecting my iPad to arrive today or Monday and I am still prepping for this event. When I returned from traveling this week, there were a number of packages waiting for me. I eagerly opened and reviewed all the parts I had ordered. One of the most interesting things that I had ordered was the Radtech Styloid, a stylus specifically engineered for capacitive touch screens.
As you might remember, I have been a TabletPC user for years, where I had been able to use a pen with an active digitizer, and the experience is almost EXACTLY like writing on paper. And, in fact, I have quite literally thousands of pages of hand-inked notes. I do not expect to get anywhere the same experience in trying to write with my finger (or a sausage!) or even a soft, fat stylus (at least compared to my digitizer pen) on the iPad. But, I need to at least try.
PenUltimate for iPad
The #1 Bestselling iPad App. (Early Adopter Special Price! $2.99)
Penultimate is the ultimate app for iPad. Good-looking and fully-featured, Penultimate encourages you to take notes, make sketches, or work through your next breakthrough idea– whether you’re in the office, on the go, or home on the couch. Your handwriting looks beautiful in natural-looking black gel ink, on a choice of paper styles. Keep your notes organized in infinitely-expanding notebooks, and when you want to share your thoughts with others, you can send single pages or entire notebooks as PDF files.
During the week, I found reference to the app Penultimate for iPad, and while it is not like using an active digitizer, you can see from the graphic above, it has a nice look and feel, perhaps similar to a medium tip Gel pen. While the writing that you see in the example was made with a finger, I am very interested to see how it looks with the Styloid. This is an app that I have added to my arsenal, but unfortunately I can’t test until I have the platform in my hands. One of the things you may not know is that one of my favorite programs, Evernote, has some ability to take scanned handwriting and turn it into text. Let’s see how well that works. I will let you know how it all goes.
