Why don't you have this yet?

About a month ago I realized that I was writing way too many notes for me to keep track of them. My ideas would be scattered all over the place and it was hard to find "fresh information" - notes only a few days old.

I did a little searching and came across this toy. Well, the Logitech io2 pen is hardly a toy. It is an amazing piece of machinery. It has a built in optical sensor, similar to an optical mouse. The pen requires special "digital" paper though, merely a normal notepad with special dots printed all over it so the pen can generate it's coordinates on the page.

The pen is supposed to be able to convert your handwriting to text, but you'd have better luck flying by just flapping your arms. However, the totally awesome redeeming quality is that it can "search" through your handwritten notes with what ever phrase you throw at it. This is because it's easier to search for the typed word "T-R-A-I-N" through your handwritten notes of: "train", "rain", "trip", "plain" then to handwrite the word "train" and have your computer figure out which one of 100 words it could be.

So if you were to search though your notes for some random word, let's say "STAPLER" it would find "stapler" and anything similar to that word. It lists these searches with a "% Accuracy" metric. If you are a person that take's a lot of notes, it's unbelievable how powerful of a tool this will be to you. I wish professors would adopt something like this when they write on transparencies (assuming you can get it to work on a transparency.) Just think of the possibilities!

For me the best benefits have been:
- Searching through old notes.
- Putting up an informal meeting minutes into a network share for all attendees to review. (The Logitech Software can save a copy of your notes as an image embedded into a Word doc.)
- Keeping a duplicate "soft-copy" of everything you've ever written.
- It vibrates if you write off the edge of the page ;)

I highly recommend this toy, (I mean tool,) tool to anybody interested in making their day a little more productive.