ProjectProposal-Michael Moeng
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Problem Description
One major limitation with the Anoto pen technology is that one cannot send multiple copies of a document to different people easily. There is one space for email and one for fax. While the pen’s software may support putting an email client’s group name into the email space, this is inconvenient. The other method for this type of group send is only possible by sending the first copy to oneself and then manually emailing that file out to all relevant people—this eliminates much of the usability of the Anoto digital pen.
A small business is probably the most likely place for the Anoto pens to take hold. A small business has the resources to equip its employees with digital pens, but not enough to hire a separate note-taker or supply tablet PCs to everybody. Businesspeople in small businesses often need to send correspondences out to multiple people: the boss, the secretary, his/her-self, and the client would be likely people on an email list. Somebody in a project team may also want to send out a copy of his/her notes or a design to everybody on the project.
While a feature that allowed group sending would be beneficial for everyone using the Anoto pens, small businesses in particular would benefit the most since: they often work in small projects where there are not massive resources available for inter-communication (such as a larger company may have); there is less of a hierarchy in a smaller business compared to a larger one (in which case only the manager needs a copy); and there is more of a reliance on the less-formal pen and paper approach compared to in larger companies (where typed documents are more likely to eliminate legibility issues).
Solution Description
One method of allowing group sending is to have a blank space near the “done” checkbox on the bottom of the digital paper sheet.
The user could save an image corresponding to a key saved on his/her computer. When he/she plugged in the pen to digitize the saved pages, in addition to sending out the usual email through the user’s designated mail application, the program would also access a saved database to match an image in the custom box to the keys in the database. This image would be associated with several “actions” specified by the user. For now, they would be limited to sending an email to a person, or sending a fax if the user had specified a designated fax program in the Anoto software.
There would need to be an interface for the user to interact with this database on his/her PC, either as a program within the Anoto application or as a side program. This program would be able to add images to the database, as well as compare two images for similarity. Each image in the database would have a list of actions (that could be changed) associated with it which would be executed once the user digitized the pen’s data.
An example of this in action would be at a presentation before a committee (or an interview). Beforehand each committee member could have the email of all the other members of the committee saved in the Anoto application, with a key being "C A" or "team" or even an X in the custom box. During the presentation each member could write their own comments about the presentation and then have it emailed out automatically to the entire committee after the meeting.
