I had the pleasure today of meeting the founders of MetaMoji Corporation and continued learning about the Note Anytime Application. During a Skype interview with Mr. and Mrs. Ukigawa I learned not only about the app itself but the purpose behind the product and some of the history that helps create a story that isn’t just about technology and what the future holds but also the passion and the dream of creating a personal and creative communication experience that breaks linguistic boundaries to give the user the ability to be truly free in an otherwise captive electronic world.
Note Anytime is no ordinary app and neither are its creators. At JustSystems, Kazunori Ukigawa helped create a way to bridge the “electronic translation gap” in the early 1980’s by making QWERTY keyboards compatible with Kanji characters. With the help of experts Dr. Evans and Pamela Millar I was able to understand their story behind Note Anytime and realize the full potential of this software. As I previously had written in my last article: Note Anytime is an app that allows for writing recognition. In other words, what one writes by hand is recognized and then transferred into on-screen text. I also mentioned how annotations can be made to various web pages and pdf. files as well.
This time around I heard about the utility of the program itself. In the age of gestures and strokes meshing with electronic devices such as smart-phones and tablets, we could possibly be seeing the elimination of pen and paper! But let’s not get to far ahead. It is more about getting the most out of language. They have made the recognition software for thirteen languages so far and do not plan on stopping there. It is not called the “World Wide Web” for no reason. Everybody should be free to express themselves no matter what language they speak. Perhaps mobile computing is bringing cultures closer together. Mrs. Ukigawa is also part of the Unicode Consortium which has the aim of replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode (a process for multilingual encoding schemes). For more information read here: Unicode Transformation Format.
The idea of writing your text has already been actualized and the Note Anytime app is available for free download. More add-ons will be available (mazec handwriting recognition is $7.99) in the future as well. Look for more on this story about Note Anytime on my examiner page, as more insight and details emerge.
G.U.P