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I finally got around to installing the Wacom driver software on the iBook this week, and hooked up the Graphire 2 tablet. After a restart, the Wacom driver application worked fine, and the Ink handwriting recognition pane icon showed up in the System Preferences.

Inkwell is handwriting recognition technology that was added to OS X with the 10.2 version release. It is based on engineering developed for Apple's discontinued Newton PDA and can only be activated and used if you have a Wacom graphics tablet.

"Handwriting recognition" is a bit of a misnomer, since Inkwell doesn't recognize cursive script, only discreetly printed block characters. However, it does allow you to enter text with a pen-stylus rather than using a keyboard -- albeit slowly and somewhat laboriously.

I had not been able to get Inkwell to work on my Pismo PowerBook. The Preference icon ans panes show up OK, but nothing happens when I turn handwriting on. A continuing mystery. However, Inkwell seems to function properly on the iBook.

To activate Inkwell, you open the preference pane and turn handwriting recognition on. There are too optional modes that allow you to right either "anywhere," for only in the InkPad floating window that descends from the InkBar palette that appears when you activate the handwriting function. The InkBar also contains a toolbar for toggling pen recognition, as well as keyboard modifier key functions. IMHO, the InkBar palette is unnecessarily large, and it unfortunately can't be minimized to the Dock or windowshaded. The only way to get it out of the way is to turn off handwriting recognition in the preferences pane, which is pretty cumbersome. You can summon the InkPad by clicking the notepad icon on the InkBar palette.

When the write anywhere option is selected, you can enter text directly into application documents. When you apply the Wacom pen stylus to the tablet, a translucent yellow lined overlay appears for you to write on. I found the Cheshire cat behavior of this overlay annoying and distracting, and wish there were a way to make it either positively appear or disappear at one's bidding. After a bit of experimentation, I decided that the InkPad-only entry option would be my preferred mode.

InkPad also presents a lined interface, but you really don't have to worry about staying within the lines. After you write a character or a word and lift the Wacom pen from the tablet, the entered text is transferred to the InkPad. My first attempt rendered a bit wonky until I began making sure that uppercase and lowercase were distinguished clearly by size. Spaces between words, etc., are executed using shorthand-like "Gestures," for which there is a crib sheet and mini-tutorial in one of the Ink preferences panes. I found some of these worked well, while others were problematical or I couldn't get them to work at all.

InkWell works, but entry is much slower than with a keyboard, and while practice would no doubt speed things up somewhat, I doubt that without cursive text recognition it would ever, at this stage of development, be really useful for more than adding quick, short, notes. Fun to play with though.

*** OSX
Disk woes...
Old Age
Do you need more memory?
Memory needed

***

OSX

From Jenny Morgan

I just got this new Mac, see. It's one of those 1ghz DP tower guyz. Refurbished, last one Small Dog Electronics had. Came w/ OSX loaded and can dual boot to 9.

I'M IN LOVE WITH THE MAC ALL OVER AGAIN!

Using this Mac, with X is giving me the same thrill I felt the first time I used a Mac back in 1984. Everything is sooooo attractive, fast, elegant, solid, intuitive, yadda yadda yadda.

I have these 4 Legacy Macs... 2 AIO G3, a Desktop G3 and a Pismo. I'll hang on to them for a while, but once I get all my software up to X status, They're outa here. I'm strongly considering dumping 9 off of the new Mac altogether. X is that good.

I had tried X on my Pismo for awhile, but the sluggishness just sucked. I feared the future on a Mac as a result. Clearly OSX is made for more powerful Macs. Now that I'm lucky enough to have one (and my visacard is absolutely toast as a result), I understand. Sticking with 9 is OK for economic reasons, but for computing reasons, there is no logical reason not to make the jump.

I love my Macs... Long Live Cupertino!

-Jenny Morgan

Hi Jenny;

Glad you're nejoying your new Mac. I know all to well what you mean about X being sluggish in the Pismo. However, it runs nicely on my new 700 MHx iBook.

Charles

Disk woes...

From Eric Nentrup

Mr. Moore...

I read your article on disk maintenance, looking online for a solution. I have my G4 466 running Jaguar, stuck between OS X and OS 9.x. This is the second time I've done this, and have learned one valuable lesson...if you're going to reboot to the other OS, do it THEN...not later. Meaning, twice I've made the mistake of shutting down after switching startup disks (the same literal partition, unfortunately) without letting the computer restart in the other OS first. It leaves me in limbo, with the computer unable to find the startup disk, because that partition won't even mount. Anyhow...I've lent my Jaguar disks to my brother (out of town) and was looking for another way to startup.

any thoughts?
Eric Nentrup

Hi Eric;

This is a new one for me, partly perhaps because except for a couple of weeks with the new iBook, I've always had OS x and OS 9 on separate partitions.

You could try holding down the X key when booting, which is supposed to select OS X as the startup disk, overriding the Startup Disk panel.

Aside from that, the only thing I can think of is to find a bootable CD and fix it from there.

Maybe some of our readers can shed some light.

Charles

Old Age

From: Herr K

Yes Charles, as you get older you proabely do need more memmory . );-))

Too right! ;-)

Charles

Do you need more memory?

From Anonymous by request

Charles,

Short answer. No.

Long answer, OSX utilizes active memory management, unlike OS9. Realistically you can open all the apps you want and RAM is paged in as per usual and assigned to the physical memory space as well. Type the "top" command in Terminal and check out the RPRVT column, that's RAM currently being used by the app. You'll notice how small it is right? I assume that the "do you need more memory" app looks at the RSIZE column, the RAM allocated to the program. Clearly if you actively use the app, more RAM in RPRVT will be used and you'll see concurrent changes in RSIZE and the VM (virtual memory) storage as well, by the way those figures aren't real. If we had VM's that size our hard drives would let us know, they're just idealized limits. Also notice that the PhysMem line allocates memory that is active/used/free. Self-explanatory. Anyway, as you switch and change programs the memory is dynamically assigned, and with 640MB of memory you should see no problems unless you work with 400MB Photoshop files and like to compile software at the same time.

I also noticed you run Classic all the time, do you leave the Classic apps running whilst you do your thing in OSX? If so, try the "top" command again. this time type "top -u -S5 10", this updates the top ten CPU hogs on your system every five seconds. Now look at TruBlueEnvironment and it's CPU hit as you work, check out what happens when you switch to OSX environment as you leave files and windows open in Classic. In particular, look at the value for idle CPU %. I'm running 8 apps with 12 active windows (2 Word files, 1 Illustrator, email windows, browsers with Dreamweaver, Terminal etc.) and I can see my idle CPU% at 62% as I write this email on my 1st Gen TiBook 400. This may be the reason why you're Pismo was choking and you OSX experience has been perceptively "slower".

Best.
Anonymous

Memory needed

From Jonathan Boyd

Hi Charles,

Your memory situation seems a little odd. I've got 384, but still have a big chunk of it available after starting up into 10.2.3 on my iBook/500. Maybe you should check out you login preferences, see if any programs are loading themselves in the background at login. If you've got any haxies installed, it's possible one of them might have a memory leak and be gobbling your RAM. With the httpmail plugin installed for Mail.app so that I could check my Hotmail account, I had one bizarre instance where the iBook kept trying to access the account without success and grabbing more RAM each time it tried. By the time I quit, it was asking for 700MB virtual memory!

You might also want to check the results of your program against what the Terminal says. Open Terminal and type 'top' to get a list of active processes and RAM usage. Sometimes even these numbers aren't strictly true, but you can fix that by typing 'sudo du -sx /' followed by your administrator password, when asked. Occassionally I've gone from 4MB free to around 200 by doing this. You'll hear some disk activity for a couple of minutes, then some RAM should be freed up.

Interestingly, the program seems to reserve almost 17MB of RAM for itself, according to top, which seems a little excessive.

Hope this helps, and God bless.

Jonathan Boyd

Hi A and Jonathan;

Tkanks for the explanation ans elucidation. I really haven't been experiencing any noticable problems with memory -- no episodes of excessive hard drive activity that would indicate dipping into virtual memory, Just reporting what the Do I Need More Memory? program indicated.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

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