Here is part three of our three part interview with Larry Yeager. In part two we discussed current implimentations of hand writing technology and uses for the Inkwell technology.

Mostly, they don't work well enough, though there are other constraints: You don't really want to talk to your computer in a public place, and if you're halfway competent at typing, typing is faster than handwriting. But there are also situations and places in which voice and handwriting are clear winners. A friend of mine suffered so severely from carpal tunnel syndrome that he had to use voice input for programming. It was horribly tedious and error prone at first, but he was highly motivated, and he finally made it work suprisingly well--well enough that he was able to continue programming for a living, which would not otherwise have been the case. And in classrooms and meetings of pretty much any kind, handwriting is a much better option than keyboard, for the most part--you can sketch little drawings, as needed, show connections between things with a quick arc, and be less obtrusive and quieter than someone clacking away on a keyboard.

I can understand why Apple hasn't pursued a pen-based Mac to date... An integrated tablet adds weight, thickness, and cost to a portable computer--exactly the opposite of what you're trying to optimize in the design of such machines. But technology continues to improve and costs continue to reduce, so I live in hope. Personally, I really want a pen-based Mac that, like some of the Tablet PCs, lets you easily keep your keyboard around too, if you want to. There are situations where I want the keyboard and situations where I want the pen, so I really would like to have both. Maybe someday.

Hard to say. And if I actually knew anything definite, of course I *couldn't* say. Even though I've transitioned to Indiana University's School of Informatics¹, in order to pursue my research interests in artificial life, I have stayed on at Apple one day/week, in order to help sustain and nurture the technology. There's a lot of excitement about the gestural interface support in Motion, so perhaps we'll see more of that. And, of course, I'd like to see a pen-based Mac someday, though I'm not holding my breath.

Well, predicting the future is a sucker's game. Normally I just avoid it. But I think both hand and voice input will be a part of future systems. Better accuracy, both from core recognition technology and from more and more "contextual understanding", that functions under a wider range of conditions (especially on the part of voice), will make the technologies ubiquitous someday, I suspect. But it's going to be a while.

I have two or three main machines. I suppose I live most on my PowerBook (G4/1.5GHz 15"). (Had a first generation 17", but found it a bit too bulky and heavy, so I went back to the 15", even though I loved the extra screen real estate of the 17".) I do most of my development on the PowerBook, besides email, web, etc.

Then there's my beautiful liquid-cooled dual 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5 at the office, with the 30" Apple display. Yum! Very fast, and that screen is an absolute joy to work on. That's where I expect to be running most of my artificial life simulations.

And at home I've got a (formerly state of the art) dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 with the 23" Apple Cinema Grand display (and a CRT on either side). One of the CRTs and the keyboard go through a KVM switch so I can control three other PowerMacs, of various vintages. And then there's the OS X Server PowerMac G4 I'm preparing to be my main web/smtp server, in order to replace the aging Beige PowerMac G3 that has been my trusty OS 9 web/smtp server for lo these many years.