Pen-based tablet rumour and the Apple touch

Another day, another tablet rumour grabs its calling card and heads out looking for a dance partner, and today’s claims the tablet (if it exists) may, or may not, use a stylus, and is based on an actual patent filing by Apple Inc.

On November 12, 2009, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a new patent application from Apple that reveals various concepts behind the company’s notions of a pen-based tablet - though to be honest this patent (filed July 17, 2009) doesn’t really mention a tablet (using the phrase, “pen-based input tablet”) and is instead focused on “acquiring and organising ink information”.

Here’s a taster from the actual patent filing: “An ink manager running at a computer system receives ink information entered at a pen-based input/display device and accumulates the ink information into ink strokes. The ink manager communicates with a handwriting recognition engine and includes an ink phrase termination engine that is configured to detect the occurrence of one or more ink phrase termination events by examining the ink information. Upon the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event, the ink manager notifies the handwriting recognition engine and organizes the preceding ink strokes into an ink phrase data structure.

“With pen-based input systems, the user relies on his or her own handwriting or drawing to control or operate the computer. These input systems typically include a hardware device called a "tablet" that is connected to the serial port of the computer. The tablet may include an integrated display screen so that the tablet can serve as both an input and an output device.”

The ink manager collects separate ink strokes, determines when a whole phrase have been entered and passes that phrase to handwriting recognition engine.

The patent even mentions the much-loved Newton within its text, when it says: “Even systems that attempt to improve this situation by using each stroke to determine the input field anew, such as the Apple Newton from Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., can suffer from failure modes that make the situation difficult for both end users and for application developers.

"For example, a word that accidentally spans two input fields even a tiny amount (due, for instance, to a stray ascender, descender, crossbar, or dot) may be broken up into multiple sessions, causing misrecognition and invalid data entries that must be manually corrected."