smt@ (Stephen Taylor) (06/18/91)
A press release in the Melbourne Age, 14 May 1991 referred to a device called a Gridpad which acts as both an lcd screen and a graphics tablet.This is good news to me, as I can't stand trying to draw with my drawing hand spatially seperated from the picture I'm making - I think it's the single biggest drawback about computers as drawing tools. Has anyone used one, or similar devices? Any comments? From what I could work out about this device, it's monochrome. Is there a high res colour version of the same out there somewhere? Steve
zweig@parc.xerox.com (Jonathan M. Zweig) (06/19/91)
Here at Xerox PARC we have these neat-o things that you can draw on the screen with a stylus (there are in fact a number of different such devices with screen sizes from notebook- to chalkboard-sized around). While it's nice for drawing, writing is a different matter. The diagrams I have made freehand all look like they were made by a half-drunk eight year old. From a human factors standpoint, this makes handwriting less attractive than typing because it makes you look like an idiot/schoolchild. There are a number of people working on handwriting recognition and gestrue recognition and stuff like that, so someday maybe the machine will look at my scrawl and put nice correctly-sized Times Roman on the zippy zillion-pixel full color lightweight display (just before the part where it dispenses free beer and does my income tax for me.....). -Johnny Scrawl