Active Ink Supports Adesso CyberPad

Active Ink Software has added support for a hybrid tablet called the Adesso CyberPad within their electronic forms application.  The Adesso CyberPad captures pen input via a clipboard device and transfers the ink stored to a  PC via a USB connection.  Active Ink then interprets the ink captured and redisplays it on an electronic form created using the Active Ink Form Designer.

The process of using a CyberPad are as follows:

1. Design the form using Active Ink (Pro Designer ).
2. Print the form.
3. Attach the form to the Adesso CyberPad.
4. Fill out the paper form.
5. Transfer the ink from the CyberPad to the PC or Tabet PC.
6. Launch Active Ink and open the form.
7. Convert the handwriting to text. *
8. Save the data.

* Requires a Tablet PC.

While there are certain advantages of the Adesso CyberPad to a Tablet PC (it's cheaper and lighter), it's not a PC and thus does not have the CPU horse power for doing heavy processing.  However, if all you want to do is capture ink and transfer the image to a PC, then this device may be all you need. 

Comments

[Wade Bruce]

I have an Adesso CyberPad and would like to capture the written data from a printed form placed on the CyberPade to converted text for SQL DB storage. Is this possible with this software/hardware or do I still need a TabletPC

[Steve Hoffman]

Wade

The handwriting conversion requires a Tablet PC or a PC running Windows Vista (when it ships in January 2007).

[Pierre]

Huummm. Are you sure about the Tablet PC/Vista requirement for conversion?

Isn't the include software with the CyberPad sufficient?

[Steve Hoffman]

Pierre

The CyberPad does come with a 3rd party handwriting recognition program called riteMail, but it's not compatible with Active Ink, which was designed to work with Microsoft's handwriting recognition program. When developing Active Ink, we had to make a choice which handwriting recognition program to support and we chose Microsoft's. Not everyone is going to be happy with that decision, but over time, we think it was the right decision.