Yeah, but you never see the handwriting part. Like he’s writing on it and it’s doing handwriting to text, but the handwriting is not on the screen, which just seems like a bad interface.
What if a piece of consumer tech from the mid 90s helped explain? The Apple Newton brought offline handwriting recognition into the public perception and it was thought of as the Next Big Thing like AI or crypto. Inputs were all the rage in the 90s and handwriting recognition fell out of favor when speech to text software was released in the later half of the 90s.
Trek writers were trying to be forward thinking, and maybe there will be a handwriting resurgence that sees a maturation of the OCR tech, but for now it was a nice quiet piece of trivia that will be lost to time.
I mean, Samsung tablets come with handwriting detection. I immediately turned it off of on mine because it expects since kind of cursive that I don’t use but it’s there.
I consider Palm’s Graffiti input system superior – sure, you had to learn the alphabet but every palmtop came with a cheat sheet and one you had it down it was pretty damn quick to write with.
Production reason: without a stylus it looks like he’s reading, not writing. Without one, dialogue like “I’m writing a book” would come across as lying, which can completely change a scene for the worse.
In-universe lore reason: Jake is a romantic and probably feels that the more tactile approach is better for his creative process.
I mean, we’ve still got authors typing up manuscripts on mechanical typewriters and GRRM writing ASOIAF on a DOS computer. Jake wanting to use a pen is possibly one of the least weird things about Trek tech.
But who wants to deal with searching through the UI for pertinent info when you can have several PADDs each attuned to a specific set of data?
I’m more amused by Jake writing his stories on a PADD with a stylus, but you see it and it’s all printed text.
I get it. I hate typing on mobile devices.
Yeah, but you never see the handwriting part. Like he’s writing on it and it’s doing handwriting to text, but the handwriting is not on the screen, which just seems like a bad interface.
What if a piece of consumer tech from the mid 90s helped explain? The Apple Newton brought offline handwriting recognition into the public perception and it was thought of as the Next Big Thing like AI or crypto. Inputs were all the rage in the 90s and handwriting recognition fell out of favor when speech to text software was released in the later half of the 90s.
Trek writers were trying to be forward thinking, and maybe there will be a handwriting resurgence that sees a maturation of the OCR tech, but for now it was a nice quiet piece of trivia that will be lost to time.
I mean, Samsung tablets come with handwriting detection. I immediately turned it off of on mine because it expects since kind of cursive that I don’t use but it’s there.
I consider Palm’s Graffiti input system superior – sure, you had to learn the alphabet but every palmtop came with a cheat sheet and one you had it down it was pretty damn quick to write with.
I had a Newton. You could see what you were writing.
In the future, kids learn how to hand-write text that looks printed.
Production reason: without a stylus it looks like he’s reading, not writing. Without one, dialogue like “I’m writing a book” would come across as lying, which can completely change a scene for the worse.
In-universe lore reason: Jake is a romantic and probably feels that the more tactile approach is better for his creative process.
I mean, we’ve still got authors typing up manuscripts on mechanical typewriters and GRRM writing ASOIAF on a DOS computer. Jake wanting to use a pen is possibly one of the least weird things about Trek tech.