November 21, 2008
I’ve taken a keen interest in the digital pen space this year, writing columns and posts about the LiveScribe Pulse, IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe and Dane-Elec ZPen. LiveScribe recently announced that it will be bringing the Pulse to the Mac, which should be a good fit for a product category that has natural appeal to students. Indeed, while LiveScribe CEO Jim Maggraff has told me that they exceeded their sales targets for this year, he estimates that the company could have doubled its volumes if had been on a Mac from the start.
Consistent with other Mac applications, LiveScribe Desktop will be able to generate PDFs from within the application, but the application will work only with the Intel version of Leopard; it won’t be a universal binary. I’m sure this is simply an early example of what will soon become a growing library of applications that leave the PowerPC behind. LiveScribe is also following through on its promise to let consumers print their own dot paper at home, but you’ll need your own color laser printer.
I’ve used the LiveScribe Pulse a few times this year at lengthy meetings and have found it particularly useful in situations where I haven’t had a nearby outlet to support a full day of notebook note-taking. It’s also more convenient for entering diagrams than PCs, at least non-Tablet PCs. It would be more convenient, though, if there were a way to combine typed text with input from the LiveScribe within the Desktop application. LiveScribe says to stay tuned.
Tags: digital pens, livescribe, Macs
December 19, 2007
For most of the time I’ve been aware of his platform proclivities, my cousin Alan, a cardiologist, was not much of a Mac fan. However, he recently purchased a MacBook Pro and is loving it. I think he is an interesting case study for how Apple is attracting more Windows users.
He first bought an iBook for his wife, a computer novice. Then he had interest in a way to run two computationally intensive Windows-only medical programs on a Mac. After debating Parallels and VMWare, he chose the latter. The result, he says, is just "amazing"; the programs are running well in VMWare’s "unity" mode which allows the running of Windows applications in the context of the Mac operating environment. He also praised the program’s automatic configuration for Windows XP.
He’s not blind to the Mac’s faults and still prefers the way Roxio dealt with rewriteable DVDs and CDs so he’s using that Wndows program under VMWare as well.
Tags: Macs, PCs, switchers, VMWare, Windows
