Alan Kay wrote:

> BTW, Nathanial Shaerli spent the summer with us and did an
> absolutely fantastic character recognizer that he also beautifully
> integrated within morphic, and which includes a terrific UI for
> understanding what the recognizer understands and for making changes,
> new integrations, etc.
> We plan to put this out when the current spate of big internal
> changes to Squeak settles down in a month or so, but he might be
> induced to send out his changeset earlier for those who are curious.

How hard would it be to write a plugin that would let you use the touchpad
of a PowerBook  (etc.) as a writing pad?

(The regular "finger" recognizer doesn't recognize a stylus, it's imprint is
too small I guess.)

It would work like the UPS-guys' boxes where you sign for your delivery on a
small touchpad-like square. This would give much greater accessibility to
pen-based input since you don't need to buy any special hardware or a have a
PDA with a touch screen. (And you wouldn't have to develop the recognizer on
a 240x160 screen :-)

The first hurdle would be to find out about the calls needed to access the
trackpad hardware directly. From this I guess you would read off grid
coordinates just like "regular" pen devices. Aside from the hardware access,
the rest of the code would be portable to other platforms.

The way to find out about this "unofficial" hardware-access call, I was
told, would be as an official, registered Apple developer. Anyone? It's far
beyond my hobbyist budget. Given that access I could certainly not resist
the temptation of making it work.

I envision having "recognizer" objects that you train with your handwriting
style, and that you can move between images or share with others.

Henrik