.KEYWORD ritemail
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Create handwritten email with riteMail
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Feel constrained by the limitations of text-based email messages? There’s a solution. Bill Mamm review riteMail from Pen&Internet, which brings the flexibility of pen and paper to your Palm handheld. With riteMail, you can draw, doodle, and scribble right on your handheld to create handwritten email messages.
.AUTHOR Bill Mann
The best thing about writing on paper is that you’re not constrained in what you can write or draw. You can print stuff neatly in rows. You can write in script. You can draw and doodle and scribble. Pen and paper have their own limitations, but if you can conceive of something, you can get it down on paper.
riteMail, from Pen&Internet, LLC (at http://www.ritemail.net), brings the flexibility of pen and paper to many types of computer, including your Palm handheld. With riteMail, you can draw and doodle and scribble right on your handheld to create handwritten email messages.
.H1 What is riteMail for Palm Handhelds?
riteMail for Palm Handhelds provides interactive, handwritten email for Palm OS devices. With riteMail you can send and receive handwritten email messages through wired or wireless connections. If the person you’re corresponding with is a riteMail user or is using a Java-enabled computer (see "The many flavors of riteMail" later in this article) they can view your handwritten message, modify it, and reply to you in their own handwriting.
riteMail lets you write with various widths and colors of ink, using a pen, pencil, eraser and other tools. For those times when you need to draw a real circle, square, triangle, or other simple shape, riteMail includes riteShape, a tool that can convert your freehand scrawl into a perfectly formed geometric object. riteMail is thrifty with bandwidth too, storing and transferring messages in compact digital ink format instead of as large graphics.
.H1 Installing and registering riteMail
Installing riteMail from your PC is similar to installing any Palm OS application, with one exception. During installation, riteMail will connect to the default email program on your PC and ask you which email profile it should use. You’ll need to select the name of the email profile you want the program to use and enter the appropriate password to give riteMail access to that profile.
Once you have riteMail installed on your handheld, you’ll need to register with the riteMail service, as well as fill out the User Identity screen on your handheld. Use the same email address as you used when you registered riteMail.
Note: If you are installing a retail version of riteMail instead of a trial version, the registration process should already be taken care of.
The last step here is to configure riteMail to connect to your mail server so it can receive messages. For this, you’ll need to get information about your incoming email server from your Internet Service Provider or network administrator.
.H1 Using riteMail
Once it’s set up, riteMail is easy to use and flexible too. You can send and receive riteMail messages when you perform a HotSync operation between your handheld and your PC. You can also beam riteMail messages or send and receive messages using a wired or wireless modem and one or more email accounts.
To create a new riteMail message, you select the New button, which causes a blank riteMail message similar to the one in Figure A to appear.
.FIG A riteMail offers a clean and simple interface for creating messages.
Enter the email address or addresses you want to send the message to on the first line, or tap to:, cc:, or bcc: to look up addresses. Now edit the subject line, and you’re ready to write a message.
Tap the writing tools icon (the fifth from the left back in Figure A) on the bottom of the message window to choose your writing tool. Work your way to the left from this icon to set the line width and color of the ink you’ll use.
Note: On grayscale devices like my Treo 180, the color icon selects shades of gray instead of colors.
Once you’ve got all that selected, you’re ready to write. Just scribble anything you want in the center of the screen, and you’ve created a handwritten email message. Now, before sending off your message, imagine that you don’t like what you just wrote. Tap the Remove Strokes icon (it looks like a pair of scissors) and tap the offending strokes to make them disappear.
If you want to draw something in your message, riteShape will come in handy. To get riteMail’s help in drawing precise geometric shapes, tap the riteShape icon, which looks like an overlapping square and circle. With riteShape selected, try drawing a rectangle, a triangle, and a circle on the screen. After you draw each shape, riteShape analyzes what you drew and redraws it using a best guess at the shape you were trying to create. While riteShape isn’t perfect and it can take a few seconds to redraw each object you drew, the results are worth it. Figure B shows my best freehand attempt at some geometric shapes, alongside riteShape’s reworking of those attempts.
.FIG B riteShape does a nice job of cleaning up hand-drawn objects.
Just remember to turn off riteShape when you go back to writing or it will happily revise your handwriting for you.
When you receive a riteMail message, you can reply using all the same tools and capabilities. Tap Write Back, and riteMail opens up a message for your reply. This message includes a writing area as you would expect, but it also includes the original handwritten message below that, just as you would find in a regular text email message.
Even better, the copy of the original message is fully interactive, so you can modify it just as if you had created it in the first place. Talk about flexible. If the message has a diagram or drawing of some sort, you can mark it up and send it back for immediate review and comments.
riteMail has other helpful features too, like its infinitely expandable writing area, multiple message folders, and an online showcase of riteMail use in the real world.
.H1 The many flavors of riteMail
One of the things that makes email the killer application for so many users is the fact that you can view it on virtually any kind of computer. When you’re corresponding with someone by email, you seldom know or care what kind of computer they’re using. For an alternative type of email (like riteMail) to succeed, it too needs to work on as many different types of computer as possible.
riteMail is designed to be platform independent. You can get versions of the riteMail software for Palm OS devices, Pocket PC, Windows, and any type of computer that supports Java technology-including Macs and computers running Unix, Linux, or who knows what else. That means if you send riteMail to someone, they’ll almost surely be able to read it (although they may need to install riteMail client software first).
In addition to the Palm OS version described in this article, I tried the Windows version of riteMail and found it to be quite good. The more powerful processor in a desktop PC lets riteMail generate geometric shapes quicker than the Palm OS version can, and the larger screen makes it easier to see details in drawings. The PC version also has some features the Palm OS version doesn’t, like a system for easily storing and retrieving riteMail messages from folders, as well as integration with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and other email programs. Integration here means that you can receive a riteMail message in your standard email Inbox, and when you open the message, it opens as a dynamic riteMail message, not just a static image of the message.
The only real drawback of the PC version of riteMail is the fact that it’s hard to write with a mouse. riteMail works with several types of graphics tablets. Pen&Internet is also getting help from Microsoft and its partners this month, in the form of the Tablet PC, which they hope will be the next step in the evolution of the notebook PC. The key distinguishing feature of Tablet PCs is that they’re pen-based, which will make them an ideal platform for a Tablet PC version of riteMail.
.H1 riteMail and other email programs
The only problem I’ve had with riteMail is because of the way the Palm OS works and is illustrated nicely by the way riteMail works on the PC. On the PC, riteMail messages go into the email Inbox like any other message. When you open a riteMail message in your regular email program, Windows displays the message with riteMail.
On a Palm OS device, things don’t work that way. I use JP Mobile’s One-Touch Mail (at http://www.jpmobile.com/one_touch_mail.asp) as the primary email program on my handheld. When I open a riteMail message in the One-Touch Mail Inbox, the handheld can’t start riteMail to display the message. All it can do is display the HTML and Java code that makes up the riteMail message. Since the Palm OS isn’t a multitasking operating system, it can’t run One-Touch Mail and riteMail simultaneously.
As a result, if you use riteMail with another email program on your Palm OS device, you need to check for messages twice-once for riteMail and once for the other email program. It’s the only way to be sure your riteMail messages get into riteMail and regular messages get into your regular mail program. If your main email program is set to delete messages after it retrieves them from the server, you must also check for riteMail messages first.
Having to do things this way is extra work and uses up valuable connect time if you’re working wirelessly, but it’s inherent in the way Palm OS handhelds work. It’s not really a mark against riteMail.
.H1 Conclusion
Your Palm OS handheld is considered a pen computer. riteMail lets you really use your stylus like a pen. It brings the flexibility and expressiveness of handwritten text to your handheld.
A 30-day trial version of riteMail is available at the Pen&Internet Web site. You can buy the retail version online for $29.95, which includes a one-year subscription to the riteMail service.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on riteMail, visit http://www.ritemail.net.
For a trial vesion download of riteMail, visit http://www.ritemail.net/rm/downloads/index.asp.
For more information on One-Touch Mail, visit http://www.jpmobile.com/one_touch_mail.asp.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
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.BIO Bill Mann writes about mobile technology at http://www.techforyou.com. Email him at bill@techforyou.com.
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