WritePad

by Eric March on October 16, 2008 at 11:39 am

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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App Name: WritePad
Developer: Stan Miasnikov
Category: Productivity

Here’s one from the Windows Mobile scene, come to grace the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Back in my WinMo days there existed a suite of textual applications from PhatWare, which included PhatPad and PhatNotes, two of what I would consider the essential apps for any WinMo users.

PhatWare’s main product was actually the thing that drove these apps: Calligrapher, their advanced handwriting recognition engine which allowed you to write on the screen in natural block letters or cursive script, whichever you felt more comfortable with.  So scrawled, PhatWare’s engine would convert the handwriting to plain text and insert it into whatever you were writing in at the time.

It was surprisingly effective and regognized everything I threw at it with few errors. I was quite impressed with it, hence it being filed under “essentials” when it came to what any good upstanding Windows Mobile device should have installed on it.

Now it appears that this engine is being brought to the iPhone and iPod Touch, currently in the form of WritePad, and having tested it out, I can safely say it’s the same solid recognition system I remember.

This particular freebie is just a simple notepad — simpler even than the built-in notepad in some ways for only letting you write one note — ever.  It’s essentially like one infinitely long sheet of paper.  It’s really only there to demonstrate the Calligrapher engine however, so you can’t really expect full word processing here.

The on-screen inking is just as good as it always has been, and the recognition is very robust, able to decipher block text, handwritten text, or mixtures of both, even within the same word.  You can write words as you normally would on a sheet of paper, write letters one on top of another in case you run out of room on the screen to write the whole word, write multiple words at once (separated by space either beside or above/below, as long as there’s some indication to Calligrapher that it’s a new word), whatever you like.  When you’re done, and after a configurable writing delay, it will parse your chicken scratch and turn it into eiditable text.

Speaking of editing, it also features word or block selection, copy & paste, spell checking, and more. Calligrapher is also a gesture-based system that lets you insert special characters or perform special actions by “drawing” special patterns — not unlike mouse gestures in some web browsers.  Special characters such as punctuation have their own gestures, as do actions such as deleting characters, enteirng carriage returns, or other such features.

It also learns your handwriting style as you go, so if your penmanship is terrible, it will learn how it’s terrible and compensate.  There are a plethora of configurable options in the settings menu which make this even cooler.

Frankly, there are way too many features to go over here — you really have to download this one and try it yourself.  It is most excellent, and while I’ve become proficient enough with the soft keyboard not to really need slower handwriting recognition software, anyone who hates the soft keyboard might find some comfort in WritePad.

I give this one five stars and Gary Coleman’s autograph.

EDIT: I really need to find a way to either stop clicking the wrong star or edit the ratings…

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Posted in Productivity