Overall, the Livescribe Pulse smartpen is a interesting gadget. The only ‘export’ functionality is the ability to copy the content of a page to the clipboard and sending a page to the printer. I know that some scanner come with some level of OCR support and I expected the Pulse to have support out of the box. I was not able to find any help, tutorials, or documentation on how to convert my hand written notes into text. As a technologist, I demand control of my data for my repurposing, such as hosting on the server and service of my choosing and embedding in my site.Īnother omission from the Livescribe Desktop was OCR (Optical Character Recognition) support. I cannot use the Pulse smartpen for meetings at the office because we are not about to upload proprietary information, notes, and conversations to a third party website. This basic feature, freedom, is required if the Livescribe Pulse smartpen is to be functional in the office. Ultimately I would like the ability to export any part of the session, the sound, image, and animation in a variety of open and standard formats such as MP3, PNG, and/or MPEG-4. I consider date time as metadata so a much better naming conventions should be the notebook name with page number. I also found it difficult to navigate through the list of sessions as they are automatically give the date and time as a name and not the page number. You can’t remove a page or a batch of sessions you can only remove one session at a time. For example, once you have your images loaded into your desktop you can remove them, one at a time. The Livescribe Desktop is just not feature complete. The Livescribe Pulse smartpen tries to replace the pen, paper, scanner, voice recorder but it actually just removes your freedom and replaces it with hard to use software. It is not obvious where the files are stored so you can’t just backup that directory or send a single file to a coworker. You can’t even save the files for each session to a different directory for backup or transfer. You can’t export either the sound as an MP3 file, the image of a session as a vector image, or both image and sound as a movie. The worst offense is that you can not do anything interesting with your drawings or writings without first registering and uploading your work to their site. The Livescribe Desktop is blatantly lacking key features and functionality. The Pulse also comes with a USB dock to connect the pen to your desktop and upload all recorded sound and images.Īs is the case with most hardware products I’ve used, the software is what hold the Pulse back. As the name indicates, the dot paper has tiny little dots which the pulse’s infrared camera uses to record your writing. The pulse comes with proprietary dot paper notebook. The smartpen is as easy to operate as a typical pen, once you learn how to turn it on and start a recording session. I found the digital copy of your writings to be faithful and accurate to the notebook. I’ve used the pen continuously for over an hour and had no discomfort of any sort. The pen is considerably thicker than a conventional pen or pencil but comfortable enough to write for a long period of time. The Pulse smartpen is programmable there is a Software Developer Kit for the Java programming language. In the small slim package, the Livescribe Pulse hardware combines a ballpoint pen, infrared camera, speakers, LCD display, audio jacks to review your recorded sessions in private, and either 1GB or 2GB of internal storage space. After seeing this, I immediately wanted to draw a rock band. For example, you can draw a piano and but tapping the keys play the piano you drew. The Pulse smartpen is aware of what you write. The Pulse integrates and plays back the written word with the spoken word. The pen will playback the audio recorded near the time when you wrote the area that you tapped. What makes the Pulse so interesting is that you can play back the recording simply by clicking on the notebook where you had written. The Pulse lets you record the sounds and background noise around you as you jot notes down. Unfortunately, when I saw a live demo at Target I broke down and shelled out for a 2GB Pulse on the spot. When the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen became widely available, I told myself that I would again wait at a minimum six months for all the kinks to be worked out, especially since I had never before heard of Livescribe. My wait paid of, especially since during that time the price of the iPhone dropped significantly. When the iPhone first came out in the summer of 2007, I knew to wait at a minimum six months so as to give Apple enough time to work out all the kinks in the phone’s firmware.
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