Re: Using Zoomer as Note-taker

starnet!apple!trantor.harris-atd.com!chuck (Chuck Musciano)
Message-id: <9311171411.AA01470@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1993 09:11:48 +0500
From: starnet!apple!trantor.harris-atd.com!chuck (Chuck Musciano)
To: zoomer-list-1993@grot.starconn.com
Subject: Re: Using Zoomer as Note-taker
X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII
Content-Length: 2001
Status: OR


     My experience with notetaking was limited to short bursts of ink and
quick drawings.  You could never do HWR on the fly while someone dictated
to you.

     As others have pointed out, the lack of defered HWR on NoteBook pages
is the single biggest limiting factor on the Zoomer.  I think Palm's 
promoting of defered HWR is misleading.

     Another problem is not being able to position text on the screen.  
Everything is left-justified, and you have to use tabs to get text to
"float".  Again, the advertising is incredibly misleading; the oft-shown
"Relative Size of the Planets" note page has text floating all over,
giving the impression that you can position text arbitrarily.  Including
these screen shots in the manual is even worse; I hunted all over trying
to find out how to position text before I realized they were faking it!

Dave Fetrow writes:
>  The handwriting recognition is bad enough you'd have to upload the
> images rather than the text. If this is OK, it's probably doable (but
> you'll probably need a cable that's only now shipping, some software
> that isn't quite in place and...maybe...Geoworks 2.0 on the PC...but
> that comes with the $99 SDK [which also requires 1 fairly hefty and
> one fairly dinky PC and TurboPascal]).

     That's Borland C++ 3.1, not TurboPascal.  Also, I don't think you
have to have Geoworks, but it makes life nicer.

Brian Smithson writes:
> (4) Ink is expensive, disk-space-wise.  I'm just about out of space now
>     and will need to transcribe the notes onto a laptop so that I can
>     purge.  Alas, PalmConnect doesn't run on my 640x200 CGA UltraLite,
>     otherwise I'd just upload and delete!

     You have PalmConnect?  When did it arrive?  More details, please!
     
     Someone else mentioned the limited amount of ink you can put on a 
Note Page.  After about 1/3 of the page, you get a "no more ink allowed"
message.  Really annoying, especially when you consider that address book
entries can be 32K bytes *each*.