Livescribe’s digital pen, the Pulse, is just the sort of gadget that should appeal to a Mac user.
It is innovative, comes with cool software that can search your handwriting and is aimed at an audience – college students – which is buying Macbooks hand over fist.
So it is surprising that the Bay Area company has taken more than six months to come up with a Mac version, released today, of the software only available on Windows when the pen first launched.
At a preview event last week, Jim Marggraff, founder and chief executive, told me:”I think we would have had 60 to 100 per cent more sales if we had had the Mac software at launch. Roughly 50 per cent of college freshmen buy Macs and there are professional Mac users such as graphic designers interested as well.”
Nevertheless, he added: “We’re doing well, we’ll make our numbers this year, I can’t announce sales now but, in a dismal retail climate, we’re a bright spot.”
The Pulse features an infra-red camera that records handwriting as the user writes on special dot-printed notebooks, with microphones in the pen picking up associated audio. Tapping on the writing, replays the audio at that particular point in the note-taking.
The software allows images of handwritten pages with audio to be uploaded, stored and searched on a PC or Mac.
Livescribe appears to have suffered the usual start-up problems of delays and difficulties getting everything ready at once for a brand new product, but is catching up now. The Mac version of the software now allows pages to be saved as PDFs and audio exported to the AAC format.
I bought a pen at launch and use it daily as a journalist, finding it an indispensable tool for capturing audio with my hard-to-read shorthand. I would like to see a sleeker version 2 at some stage with a better backup system, but a software update due next week may help address the problem of slow transfer speeds from the pen to the desktop.
Also enabled will be the ability to print your own dot paper on certain laser printers and software that converts handwriting to text – as long as you don’t have my illegible scrawl.
