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![]() The scanner can create searchable PDFs as it scans, or scan to a (slightly typo-prone) MS Word document. You can pair the scanner with a phone or tablet via wifi and scan directly to them (the exact inverse of the process you would use with a smartphone-friendly wireless printer). Drivers for Windows and OSX are expected, but there are also support apps available for iOS and Android. What makes it different is a bunch of little things. In other words, it's as boring a piece of kit as one might hope for-an office appliance. What it is: it's a colour duplex scanner with a 50-page automatic document feeder, USB 3, and wifi. I'm not about to write my next novel longhand, but being able to include handdrawn freeform graphics with searchable text and audio notes in my workflow is a definite plus point.Īctually, the ScanSnap ix500 isn't new I've been using one of its predecessors, the portable ScanSnap 300, for several years-however, the ix500 is now available at a reasonable price (around £260 if you look around) rather than the £500+ it cost when it was introduced. The Livescribe+ gives me a simple paper notebook that dumps diagrams into Evernote (or exports into Dropbox) and can even do reasonable handwriting recognition on my crappy scrawl. Sometimes there's must no substitute for a notebook and a pen, but I hate not being able to keep all my resources for a current writing project bundled up in a Scrivener project. However, my experience of them is generally that they're either inflexible or have a steep learning curve, or both. ![]() Outlining software like Omnioutliner is great up to a point, for linear/hierarchical texts, but for complex stuff (cyclic graphs with labels and nodes, whether directed or otherwise) you really need a mind mapping tool. And a perennial problem I have is how to do mind-mapping-to draw diagrams and doodles that join up complex ideas on screen in a form I can refer back to. If I was attending lectures on a regular basis, or giving them in front of a class, this would be a killer tool for lecture notes but as it is, I have another use for it. These pens also include microphones, and you can configure it to record your mumbling as you scrawl, so that you can replay them as a "pencast"-showing an evolving page of text and graphics with a commentary track. It's designed to do just one thing, and that thing is to digitize your scribbles.Īctually, I lied: it has a second capability. ![]() It has one control (an on/off/pair switch in a ring), one LED, charges over micro-USB, and it's fairly simple to use. The earlier Livescribe pen I tried back around 2011 was really rather annoying (it had a display, a set of headphones, an app store, and a proprietary charge cable-lots of kipple to carry around or lose), but the Livescribe+ gets it about right. But you can also print your own Livescribe paper from free PDFs.) Paired via bluetooth to a suitable host computer (really, an iOS or Android device) it uploads your scribbles to an app which can do handwriting recognition and either save them as PDFs or PNG images or stream them to other apps (I have mine hooked up to forward everything to my Evernote account). (Yes, they want to sell you pads and notebooks. However, if you use it with Livescribe's own special paper, which carries a special dot pattern, the tiny camera under the ballpoint tip tracks where the pen is writing or drawing. If you haven't met Livescribe pens before, they're basically a pen. I hate writing by hand (I'm a lefty and do the crooked hold-pen-from-above-and-drag thing) and my previous experience of smartpens wasn't, shall we say, promising, but much to my surprise this one works for me so much that I've actually got a use for it. But in this one, I'm sticking to hardware, because it's a little easier to figure out what makes the cut.) (Note that I could write an even longer clickbait list of software and cloud services.
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