Author Archives: alankent
LiveScribe penlet timers
This is a quick post on timers in a LiveScribe pen penlet (pen application). I had asked in the forums about how to track the pen position as it moved across the page. The following is my take on the response I got. Sample Code In this case, I am going to start with code […]
LiveScribe Penlet accepting input using states
A common question that comes up on the forum is how to wait for user input. The answer is Penlets don’t wait for more input – they react to events. (The following post is a massaged version of this thread on the forums.) Consider a simple penlet where you want to ask the user to […]
27″ Apple iMac – flickering fix?
I have been very tempted to buy an iMac. I have an iPhone and love it. I have been doing some reviews of apps for young children (dropped off a bit due to work commitments, trying to get back into it). I would love to have a crack at writing an app myself (even if […]
MIDI on the LiveScribe pen
I originally thought the LiveScribe pen could only play one note at a time. However, what I did not realize at the time was the pen supports JSR-135, which is a MIDI interface. MIDI is how computers can talk to devices like digital pianos, keyboards, drum kits etc. Using MIDI, chords can be played on […]
Recognizing Musical Chords using Ludef files on the LiveScribe pen
The LiveScribe pulse pen has built in handwriting recognition software. Unfortunately its not very good unless your pen application (penlet) gives it a lexicon. With a lexicon, it works pretty well – however when my lexicon reached 50,000+ lines I found out about a currently undocumented feature, Ludef files. Ludef files are a grammar file […]
Good LiveScribe Penlet Design
The LiveScribe pen allows penlets (pen applications) to be written in J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) and deployed onto the pen. There are not a lot of penlets around yet, so I thought I would share a few personal opinions on how to structure penlets well, based on early penlet writing experience (and years of […]
LiveScribe Developer Day Highlights (14 Jan 2010)
LiveScribe just had a developer day where LiveScribe talked to a number of topics. Slides of the presentation are available here. Highlights are: Partial results from a survey of LiveScribe users More details on on competition Roadmap of future features They even had a special guest – James Gosling of Java fame. Applications on the […]
LiveScribe application store (beta) on home page!
Well, it looks like the LiveScribe online store (where you can buy apps for your digital LiveScribe pen) is a step closer. If you go to livescribe.com, there is a “beta” application store now there. It said I needed to upgrade to the 2.0 desktop to use it (note: my 1.7 desktop did not report […]
LiveScribe, 6 months on
Well I got a new laptop recently and finally got around to installing the LiveScribe pulse pen software on it. I had not been to the LiveScribe developer forums for 6 months or so, so I thought I would check out to see if anything much had changed. “Platform SDK 1.0 is out” – that […]
Early experiences with serious Scala code
A few quick notes on my first experiences writing serious Scala code. I had heard the IDE plug-ins had some bugs. For me, understatement of the year! The Eclipse plugin would not even let me paste in text, frequently would not let me insert text into source code with syntax errors in it – had […]