Other Sites

In last week's The Road Warrior, I disputed the notion that the advent of powerful smartphones like the iPhone and RIM's newer Blackberry products portend the beginning of the end of the personal computer era.

Apple needs capability like this, but has thus far shunned the tablet computer category. It's not that there appears to be any daunting technical roadblock to development of a tablet Mac. Indeed, the only new "Mac" hardware introduced had Macworld Expo in January, was a third-party tablet device, based on the MacBook, the Axiotron ModBook, designed by a California based team of German and American engineers, to be marketed exclusively by Other World Computing.

Mac OS X has actually supported handwriting recognition since the release of version 10.2 Jaguar. Apple's Inkwell technology, based on software originally developed for the late, lamented, Newton PDA, allows OS X to accept a handwritten (or at least hand block capital - it can't read cursive script efficiently), and convert it to editable computer text, provided you have a graphics tablet

Unfortunately, Apple has pretty much ignored Inkwell after adding it to OS X 10.2.