It’s really too bad we’ve been conditioned to expect everything to happen right away. The original Apple Newton got dinged pretty hard for its handwriting recognition doing funky things, for example. The thing is, if you worked with its “training” program for a couple weeks, it eventually figured out your handwriting and accuracy would go from 30% to 90% all at once. One time, I scrawled something on my Newton that I couldn’t even read, but it figured it out.

Then again, maybe it’s best that we don’t have easy handwriting OCR. During my vacation last month, I spent a lot of time with a pen and notebook, just because I didn’t feel like opening the laptop, and ended up writing about 10,000 words (mostly in the mornings). When I got home and started typing it all in, I wound up fixing a lot of stuff as I typed. If I’d just let the computer slurp it in, I might not have looked at it so carefully.

I’ll have to look into those smartpens, though.