CrossPad XP

Bill Buxton's Notes

This digital clipboard lets you write on regular paper with pen and ink, and yet everything is captured digitally. The clipboard is a graphics tablet with an embedded microprocessor, power, and memory. The pen is a digitizing stylus that also has a conventional ink cartridge. There were two problems with this device. First, the pen was terrible—surprising since Cross is a pen company. The problem was that it had a lot of tip-travel that made if feel terribly spongy. The other problem was that the digital version had no idea if or when you had flipped pages on the paper copy. Hence, things could get out of sync. There were other issues. But it was close to being good.