inkBook a solid note-taking app – if it’s practical for you
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 29, 2004 at 11:10pm
inkBook is a US$20 application from Wage Software that frees your hands from the keyboard. You don’t type, but write your notes in an inkBook document with a tablet and pen. The software utilizes the power of Apple’s InkWell handwriting recognition system in Mac OS X to recognize the words you write. Plus, you can copy and paste your notes as typed text. For some, it will prove useful. For others, it will simply be impractical
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The folks at Mage say that inkBook is designed for those who need to jot down notes during a phone conversation, take notes in class or during a business meeting. The application pretty much does what it says it will and has several useful features. inkBook lets you work in three modes: Ink, Sketch and Edit. It has an effective Find feature for searching through your notes. You can export an entire notebook to a text file or RTF file (complete with graphics). You can scribble sketches and images, as well as words. You can join multiple ink objects together (which is nice for sketches). You can choose from a variety of brushes, including Pencil, Paintbrush, Highlighter, Calligraphy Pen and Eraser.
inkBook is also intelligent enough to “remember” the last used setting for each brush You can set the default window size, implement customizable tabs for each page and show all recognized text for a page at once. Plus, the software supports page flip animation.
To use inkBook, all you have to do is plug in an Inkwell-compatible tablet. Handwriting recognition must be turned on in the Ink system preferences before you can write in inkBook. You can still open and modify inkBook documents, but not ink in them. Thankfully, the handwriting recognition under Apple’s Ink is much improved over the infamous technology of the original Newton. inkBook recognizes the text you’re writing, but it doesn’t change the text into a regular font; it stays the way you wrote it. However, if you press the space bar you can see how the text was parsed.
Another nice feature is that if you drag a PDF into InkBook, it will import the document with each page of the PDF imported onto a separate notebook page. Unfortunately, the imported PDFs are just graphics, so you can’t search the text in them.
But my biggest concern with inkBook is that for me, it just isn’t very practical. I’m not interesting in carrying around an Ink-aware input device so I can take notes. Wacom tablets are a mite big to carry for such a purpose, while smaller tablets such as the Macalley IcePad mini-tablet are, well, too small. I’ll just pop open my PowerBook and type ‘em instead. However, if you don’t mind carrying such a device, would prefer to hand write your notes or if you need to make sketches along with your notes, inkBook may be just the thing you need.
Minimum system requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and an Ink-aware input device. (the folks at Wage recommend Wacom tablets).
Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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