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In 2009 a 9-year-old Malaysian boy, Lim Ding Wen, wrote a finger-painting application called Doodle Kids for the Apple iPhone. The program allowed iPhone owners to draw images on the handset's touch screen using just their fingers. Although done to please his two sisters aged 3 and 5, the program was downloaded by millions of users on Apple's iTunes and Lim has gone on to bigger things.
With the growth of smartphones, tablets and touch-screens,digital pens and stylus are becoming more and more common, better and cheaper. But for those who have grown up with pen and paper, digital writing and drawing feels a bit funny. Some say that digital pens will never make it with the older generation and some don't know what to do with them.
For many reasons, all this is now changing. Innovative and inexpensive new products that feel and work like real pens and have hand-writing recognition programs attached are beginning to flood the markets. This digitised conversion of your written text can be automatically turned into editable text, avoiding the need to type it up and thus reduce your workload. It also deals with problems in others reading your odd hand writing. Besides, people these days are losing the ability to easily read hand writing and are more comfortable with printed text.
But what about drawing, painting and sketching - or even just doodling? Today there is a great need to be able to share drawn or painted work online or send it in an email to others. But to do this with a paper media you must first scan the image into a computer. And, as many digital illustrators today can tell you, there are things you can do much better and faster when drawing online - and some things that would be impossible on paper or canvas.
Digital pens and touch-screen devices (there are even products that can easily turn a normal laptop screen into a touch-screen) are gaining ground and will soon replace the mouse. Digital pens also have another great advantage - they do not cause Mouse Syndrome. Using a mouse involves many repetitive movements with the hands and the arms. The hand and forearm are also slightly twisted to lay over the mouse and the movements are usually very small and precise. The result has been that many mouse users suffer from a condition called Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), more commonly called the Mouse Arm Syndrome or Mouse Syndrome for short.
Mouse Syndrome can be a very painful, sometimes enough to end a career involving computers. Symptoms are numbness of the fingers, soreness, stiffness or burning sensation in the hand, wrist and forearm, and even severe pain in the neck and shoulders which can lead to tendon inflammation. There is no known cure for Mouse Syndrome and it has become a recognized workman's compensation injury in many countries.
Touch-screens, pads, and smart phones together with digital pens allow a more natural hand-arm movement just like holding a pen or pencil. The buttons on them can be adjusted to allow right and left "click". Instead of constantly clicking with the mouse, one can tap with a pen to accomplish the same mouse tasks. And with a pen it is possible to actually draw and use your own hand writing on a document or even over a page on the Internet.
The mouse, originally designed by Douglas Englebart over 40 years ago at the Stanford Research Institute was meant to be a pointing and clicking tool to move a cursor around a monitor. It is poorly designed for drawing and writing and was first sold as standard equipment for a computer in the early 1980's. So much has changed since then and so many new functions have been loaded onto the mouse, that it no longer can keep pace.
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