Serenity Caldwell at iMore, talking about the possibilities of handwriting recognition on something the iPad Pro:

Much as I hated longform writing and as terrible as my penmanship was, there was still something pretty magical and otherworldly about writing block or cursive letters and having them transform into digital text. By the year 2000, I had convinced most of my teachers that I could turn in typed work, but I probably saved future Serenity’s penmanship from becoming truly atrocious because I had that Newton MessagePad. I was constantly writing and doodling with it.

I’ve got a couple of Newtons laying around 1 and I recently was playing with the handwriting engine on one of them. It’s nowhere near perfect, but Serenity is right. There is something nice about writing — as opposed to typing — for some types of work.

It’s easy to thing that if Apple were to roll this out, it’d be far better than the Newton ever was. However, while the iPad Pro is hilariously more powerful than the Newtons, the underlying technology probably hasn’t been getting a lot of love from Apple. If the company were to revisit this, Apple’s tech would have to work far better than it did in the 90s. Here’s Ren again:

If nothing else, Apple has some pretty good handwriting recognition software lying around: The company’s aging Inkwell technology is based off the original Newton Rosetta framework, and lets people with a connected tablet transcribe letters and draw pictures. It hasn’t been officially updated in an age, but it’s still supported as of OS X El Capitan, and the recognition engine is halfway decent.

Still, I’d like to see this be an option for Pencil-powered input. I still use physical notebooks, and while this wouldn’t change that, I think a lot of people would like something in between handwriting and typing on a sheet of glass.

  1. Shocking, right? ↩︎