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August 22, 2014
Why OneNote for Android with handwriting is important
A few days ago, the Office 365 and OneNote blogs at Microsoft announced OneNote for Android or the addition of handwriting and inking support for OneNote for Android, it wasn't quite clear (see here). While Microsoft OneNote isn't nearly as popular as Word and Excel, it's available as part of Microsoft Office, and supposedly over a billion people use Office. So there may be tens or even hundreds of million who use OneNote.
What is OneNote? It's sort of a free form doodle pad that can accommodate all sorts of data, from screen clippings to text, to audio, annotations, revisions, doodles, and so on. It can then all be sorted and shared with others. If that sounds a lot like the older Microsoft Journal, there are plenty of similarities.
Journal goes way, way back to the mid-1990s when a company name aha! introduced it as the aha! InkWriter. The idea behind InkWriter was that that you could arrange and edit handwritten text just like you can manipulate and edit text in a word processor, hence the name InkWriter ink processor. Handwriting and handwriting recognition were big back then, the central concept around which the initial pen computers of the early 1990s were built. As a result, InkWriter could also convert handwriting into text for later editing and polishing. To see how InkWriter worked, see the full manual here and Pen Computing Magazine's 1995 review here.
Anyway, Microsoft thought enough of it to buy InkWriter and make it available in Windows CE and Pocket PCs for many years. Renamed Journal it's still available in most PCs. In many ways, OneNote looks like a enterprise and business version of Journal, one that's more practical and more powerful. To this day, some users prefer Journal while others prefer OneNote.
The question may come up why Journal didn't become a major hit once tablets really caught on. Aha! designed InkWriter specifically for pen computers, i.e. tablets. There was, however, one major difference between the tablets of the 1990s and the modern media tablet: all 90's era pen computers had an active digitizer pen well suited for handwriting and drawing. Though no longer centered around handwriting recognition, Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative of 2001/2002 continued reliance on an active pen, enabling super-smooth inking and beautiful calligraphy.
That still isn't enough to make the Tablet PC a success and it took several more years until the iPad showed that effortless tapping and panning and pinching on a capacitive multi-touch screen was the way to go. The tablet floodgates opened, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, with all the success of modern-era touch screen tablets, one simply cannot annotate a document with fingers, one can't write with fingers, and there's a good reason why fingerprinting is for Kindergarteners and not for serious artists.
Samsung realized this when it equipped its rather successful Galaxy Note phablets with miniature Wacom-style pens. But since the Wacom active digitizer adds size and cost, it isn't common in modern tablets, and even Windows-based tablets usually refer to those broad-tipped and rather imprecise capacitive pens that are, for the most part, nearly useless.
But all that may be about to change. The latest advances in capacitive touch enable passive pens with tips as narrow as that of a pencil (see Advances in capacitive touch and passive capacitive pens). That will be a boon to Windows tablets that still have all those tiny check boxes, scrollers, and other interface elements designed decades ago for use with a mouse. And it will be a boon to apps like OneNote (and Journal!).
And with Android now dominating the tablet market as well, the availability of OneNote for Android with full handwriting/inking capabilities may mean that OneNote will find a much larger user base than it's ever had. That's because all of a sudden, the combination of OneNote and advanced passive capacitive pens will add a whole new dimensions to tablets, making them infinitely more suitable for content creation rather than just consumption.
Posted by conradb212 at August 22, 2014 10:13 PM