April 15, 1996
Issue: 679
Section: Emerging Technologies
By Portia Isaacson
This month I was inspired by pen products from the first two hardware companies supporting Windows 95's pen features: Fujitsu and Communication Intelligence Corp.
Fujitsu introduced the Stylistic 1000 color handheld pen computer, while Communication Intelligence (CIC) debuted the Handwriter opaque tablet add-on for a desktop or notebook PC.
Stylistic 1000 is the first handheld computer with the "Designed for Microsoft Windows 95" logo. In its small 3.4-pound package, Stylistic 1000 packs a 486 DX4/100MHz processor; choice of display, including DSTN color; a Kurta digital pen; 8 Mbytes to 24 Mbytes of expandable RAM; a 260-Mbyte to 340-Mbyte Integral hard drive; a PCMCIA Type III slot; infrared connectivity through IrDA support; external VGA support; the usual serial and parallel ports; and a lithium ion battery with all-day capability.
The price is right, starting at $2,895 with transmissive monochrome display, $2,995 with transflective monochrome or $3,495 with DSTN color.
Stylistic 1000 also features CIC's handwriting recognizer, which is broadly accepted as the best character recognition software available.
Options for Stylistic 1000 abound: a port replicator, a keyboard, barcode wand, harsh environment case, combination case for tablet keyboard and, of course, any Type II or Type III PC Card.
Most importantly, Stylistic 1000 has a high-quality feel. I used it in my office, in restaurants, in bed and in a car. Fujitsu's hard work and experience shows in every fine detail.
Little wonder it is the market leader, with 1995 pen sales of $60 million, according to Fujitsu. Geoff Walker, vice president of marketing at Fujitsu, whose primary markets include sales automation, insurance, health care and utilities, said the company is confident of achieving 1996 pen system sales of $100 million.
The other Windows 95 pen product being introduced this month is CIC's Handwriter for Windows 95.
Carrying a $260 street price, Handwriter is a peripheral attachment to Windows 95 desktop or notebook computers. Of course, it comes with CIC's Handwriting Recognition System.
The device includes Microsoft's Pen Extensions; CIC Dynamic Signature Verification for locking your computer; Lyriq crosswords, which are really fun with a pen; Ypad electronic notetaker; and Ink-It for Lotus cc:Mail markup.
According to Madeline Duva, director of business development, CIC's Handwriter product line is poised for growth in a number of segments. Particularly exciting are high-volume vertical-market applications that use CIC signature verification and digital ink compression software.
Using the Windows 95 Handwriter is an extraordinary experience. Its light weight (19 ounces) and 10-inch flexible cord make it usable from many different positions in many different situations. I have so enjoyed the feel of the pen on the tablet surface that I have spent many hours doodling with it.
More Than Meets The Eye
What Fujitsu and CIC have accomplished with the introduction of their Windows 95 pen products is more than meets the eye. Both companies have done far more than is typical when developing a Windows 95 product, because Microsoft apparently scaled back its pen support last summer in its haste to get Windows 95 released.
Microsoft is contradictory about its present position on pen. Chairman Bill Gates featured pen as a part of our information technology future, for example, in his Comdex keynote last fall and in subsequent OEM conferences.
However, Microsoft will not grant interviews on the subject of its pen extensions or pen features of its Office applications, both of which are in a somewhat unfinished state in current releases.
Microsoft's idea, which will enhance its revenue if not its customers' convenience, is that Windows 95 Pen Extensions will be separately licensed by the company supplying the pen (e.g., the pen computer manufacturer or the tablet manufacturer) which will, in turn, supply them to the end user.
Microsoft will not sell the Pen Extensions to an end user. If Microsoft consistently followed this logic, it should separately license its keyboard support to keyboard manufacturers.
I noticed that Microsoft's plan to license its Windows 95 Pen Extensions separately occurred about the same time as the demise of PenPoint, its primary competitor in pen operating systems. Which, once again, illustrates the adage that there is nothing like a competitor to make a company do what is best for the customer.
Case in point: For some reason, which is not at all obvious to me, Wacom has not licensed Microsoft Windows 95 Pen Extensions.
Both Fujitsu and CIC have finished what Microsoft started. They have provided complete, functional pen systems based on Windows 95.
So where's the Windows 95 pen application software? There is no shortage of vertical-market software, but support for pen in horizontal market packages is wanting. According to Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile systems at the Gartner Group consultancy, voice/data conferencing over broadband networks may be the application that makes a pen essential for many desktop and notebook computers, and this technology is now ready for prime time.
I agree.
Intel's ProShare has long been the best horizontal market pen application.
As will be the case in most pen applications for horizontal markets, as with Intel's ProShare, a pen is actually not required, but have you ever tried writing on a white board with a mouse?
Particularly disappointing is that Microsoft did not finish the pen features that it had defined for Office 95. The pen features are not even consistent with the capabilities documented in the Help files. Word's Help files clearly document a very nice annotation feature that enables marking up a document with pen-produced digital ink. Any Office 95 system would be able to view, edit and print the annotations, even if it were not actually hooked to a pen.
This feature simply doesn't work. If all else fails, we can build our own pen applications. Microsoft has provided great documentation for getting started.
I particularly recommend the following two books from Microsoft Press: Programmer's Guide to Pen Services (C geeks will love it and so do I) and Programmer's Guide to Microsoft Windows 95 (that includes a chapter entitled "Displaying and Using Pen Data")
Visual C++ comes with Visual C++ Tutorials, which uses a pen example named "Scribble" over several chapters. And Win32 SDK Online References contain easy-to-follow documentation for constructing the Pen VBX.
So what are you waiting for?
Lab Log: Digital Pen Presentation Dreams
It was 1973 in the pre-PC dark ages. I was the junior member of an intense group of computer scientists gathered around a conference table to design a supercomputer operating system.
The group was newly formed, and much of its energy was still being spent on establishing the pecking order of technical prowess.
Alan, a particularly competitive, enormously self-confident fellow, claimed the blackboard to put forth his gems.
When the sketch of his conceived-on-the-spot operating system architecture was complete, he stepped to his briefcase, removed a camera as big as his ego, and proceeded to photograph the blackboard from every conceivable angle. At that moment a new set of ambitions was born in me.
In the 23 years since that meeting, those ambitions have been both satisfied and, fortunately, mitigated.
But for some reason my most creative ideas about the future of information technology (my usual subject) do come when I am giving a presentation.
Many times in presentation situations, I want to depart from my prepared color slides and either sketch a modification to a slide on the spot or sketch a new idea on a blank chart.
Because these on-stage inspirations tend to be my best stuff, I want to capture these sketches for later refinement. It amazes me that in this age of the ubiquitous notebook computer, not to mention the LCD projection panel, that for on-stage sketches we must still resort to the white board, which is unfortunately usually under the screen on which the slides are being projected.
Another solution is the ever-present paperflip chart, which has the advantage of permanence.
Another choice with the advantage of permanence, as well as being copier-compatible in size, is the transparency, which requires another projector and screen because moving an LCD projection panel is every presenter's nightmare.
None of these solutions work well with a group of more than a few people. I want to be able to give a presentation using my wonderful color slides before any size group while sketching on the slides as well as on blank charts.
And I want to save the sketches on my slides as well as on the blank charts in such a way that I can later edit them.
Of course, I want to do this presentation from my notebook computer, which is equipped with a pen.
Further, I want this capability to work with Microsoft PowerPoint presentations because Microsoft has seen to it that I (and many of the world's PC-based presenters) have very good reasons for staying with PowerPoint as part of the Office suite.
Every person to whom I have demonstrated this capability wants it. Finally, the hardware and operating system to make this dream reality are now available, even though applications are still lagging.
Fujitsu's Stylistic 1000 is a great little computer for presentations: at about 3.5 pounds, it has a DSTN passive-matrix display option, a reliable pen, Windows 95, and video out capabilities.
I have also found CIC's Handwriter for Windows 95 is a good choice as an attachment to my favorite NEC Versa Pentium notebook. The Handwriter is so lightweight that I carry it in my briefcase with my Versa. At $260 street price, Handwriter is definitely the least expensive way to add a pen to a notebook.
There are other ways for manufacturers to combine a pen with a Windows 95 computer for presentations, all of which I expect to see in the market this year.
For example, they can build the pen into the notebook as the pointing device. I have actually used an IBM ThinkPad 755C with Scriptel's WriteTouch in it. Both the cordless pen and finger touch worked extraordinarily well with Windows 95 on the SVGA active-matrix TFT display.
This idea can be extended to the IBM ThinkPad 755CV, which has a movable display that can be used as a separate projection panel that can be written on with a pen or software navigated by finger touch.
There is also the obvious approach of providing a pen and touch built into a projection panel. The best way of doing this would be with the pen controlled by the notebook's Windows 95 application.
While we are waiting for even more choices, Fujitsu and CIC have given us a nice range of options. We just need a little application software.
Ideally, Microsoft would enhance PowerPoint so that it would save the digital ink that can be drawn on slides being presented in a PowerPoint slide show.
I was very disappointed that the first release of Office 95's PowerPoint did not support pen-obvious features. PowerPoint's new LAN-based conferencing capability begs for some way to keep and edit the digital ink that is drawn during a presentation. PowerPoint should take a few lessons from Intel's ProShare, which has excellent electronic white board capabilities.
Although Microsoft could have done a better job with PowerPoint's pen capability, it did provide most of the essential software tools to build the presentation system of my dreams: Visual Basic 4.0, OLE Automation, PowerPoint's exposed objects function, Microsoft Solutions Developer Kit (MSDK) and PEN2CTL.VBX.
The MSDK is a cookbook for building a Visual Basic application using the functionality of Office 95 apps, including terrific PowerPoint examples.
PEN2CTL.VBX is a Visual Basic control that makes programming the pen in either digital-ink mode or handwriting mode a breeze.
I also found the book OLE Automation Programmer's Reference from Microsoft Press very helpful. My application would have been just a little neater if PowerPoint had VisualBasic for Applications built in. I would also like to have a 16/32-bit PEN2CTL.OCX so that I would not be limited to 16-bit code.
Nonetheless, I built my dream application Meet n' Sketch in only a few days. In a 16-bit Visual Basic program, Meet n' Sketch employs PowerPoint's exposed objects to open a presentation and export selected slides as WMFs. It then converts the WMFs to BMPs that can be used as backgrounds for the Ink Edit control that is part of PEN2CTL.VBX.
Meet n' Sketch presents the user with an interface that enables the display of the slides in any order as well as writing, editing and erasing digital ink in assorted colors and widths on the slides, as well as blank slides for impromptu notes and drawings. It enables the user to switch easily back and forth between slides and notes.
The digital ink associated with a slide is stored so that it can later be viewed and edited on any Windows 95 system-even one without a pen. Both the slides with digital ink and the notes can be printed.
Meet n' Sketch will save the sketches made on slides and notes at one presentation (e.g., customer A) and be ready to start with a clean sheet of slides and notes for the next presentation at the click of the pen.
Meet n' Sketch is only a prototype. Will someone please build it into a production application?
Yes, I know someday Microsoft will build all this functionality into PowerPoint, but in the meantime, maybe you can make a few bucks.
PORTIA ISAACSON is president of Dream IT, Inc., a Boulder, Colo.-based consultancy that consults on emerging technologies and markets. Dream IT assists its clients in opportunity analysis, competitive analysis, product planning and product marketing. Isaacson can be reached by telephone at 303-417-9313 or electronically via the Internet at portia@dreamit.com. Dream IT's World Wide Web site URL is http://www.dreamit.com/.
Copyright * 1996 CMP Publications, Inc.
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