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By Dan Moren for Macworld
Pencil it in: Apple should bring back handwriting recognition on the iPad
In the almost seven months since Apple announced the Apple Pencil, I haven’t once been tempted by the stylus. Yes, it’s an impressive piece of technology, and yes, I’ve seen some truly wonderful things accomplished with its help. But as someone whose artistic skills never progressed much beyond the doodling phase—and really, those doodles are nothing worth putting up on the fridge, much less venturing anywhere beyond the margins of a notebook—it just didn’t seem like the Apple Pencil was for me.
But something funny happened the other night, when I’d been thinking about some ideas for a book I was working on. Lately I’ve realized that I prefer the free-form nature of jotting things on paper, which allows me to easily make diagrams as well as write notes. It’s also a little more comfortable for, say, lounging on the couch and writing in a way that typing on a laptop or using the onscreen keyboard of the iPad isn’t.
Wouldn’t it be great, I mused, if I could just do the same jotting and doodling, but with my iPad?
Aw, crap. I think I just talked myself into an Apple Pencil.