This past week, I picked up a Livescribe pen. I think it’s the most impressive gadget I’ve seen in a long while, though every now and then I have to stop to consider the fact that I carry around a 1 gigahertz computer complete with keyboard and touch interface in my pocket. I remember long ago seeing an ad for a machine for a 400 hz machine and thinking it was a typo – nothing could possibly be that fast.
Anyway, so, pen. The nickel tour is that it records whatever you write* and can also record voice. I had a microcassette recorder in college. I used it to tape a handful of lectures, and never listened to the tapes ever again. So the voice recording capabilities weren’t really a huge selling point.
What’s cool about the Livescribe is that it indexes the audio to your writing. So I can tap on a bulleted list, and hear the full conversation from thath point. Which is much more useful than having to search an entire conversation for the 10 second clip I care about.
It syncs with Evertnote, though not particularly elegantly. With a paid evernote account, you can search your notes (using OCR), and since I didn’t feel like paying for the Livescribe OCR add-on, that’s a win. Evernote’s OCR does an OK job of translating my half-cursive-half-print writing.
But, let’s get to the most important thing about this pen: it plays Zork.
Zork is a free application for the pen. It’s a direct port of the Zork we all know and love, and it uses the pen’s LCD window to scroll text (e.g. “You are west of a house”). You write your actions on the page, it reads them in, and then spits out the appropriate snarky Zork response.
The handwriting recognition is generally very good, but I had some odd trouble getting it to read the phrase “open mailbox.” If you look at the command list, you can see where I forgot to save and had to start over after turning off the pen. Modern autosave has spoiled me.
Saving/restoring is pretty cool, you draw a little picture (the circled 1 and 2) and tap it twice. Then you tap the one you want to restore when you go to load a game. Neat trick.
Overall the pen is a neat bit of technology. Maybe not a critical one, but definitely neat.
*provided you write it on special paper. You can print your own special paper if you have a nice enough printer, and even design your own special paper if you really want to hack around with their SDK.
Love the GRUE on my Echo, albeit an increasingly unsupported technology.