The use of a pointer to enter information is the only point that seems inconsistent with Apple’s philosophy. Steve Jobs highlighted the iPhone that it did not need the use of a pointer and that it could be operated with several fingers using multi-touch gestures. However, when carrying out certain tasks, such as drawing in detail or taking handwritten notes and using a larger device, the use of a pointer would allow this device to offer more functions than the iPhone. In any case, it is expected that any device of this type that could come from Apple would retain the ability to operate with the fingers and multi-touch support.
The patent was submitted by Apple on July 17, 2009.
Its description, although of a somewhat complicated translation, says the following:
An “ink manager” running on a computer receives ink information input from an input device / display and accumulates ink information in strokes. The ink manager communicates with the handwriting recognition engine and includes an ink phrase completion engine that is configured to detect the concurrence of one or more phrase completion events by examining the ink information.In the event of a phrase completion event, the ink notifies the handwriting recognition system and organizes the preceding strokes into an ink phrase structure.
The ink manager can also transmit the phrase to a computer application that is associated with the ink information, and the program, in response, can return a reference pointer and recognition context to the ink manager. The reference pointer and the ink manager recognition context are then associated with the structure of the ink phrase. Using the recognition context identified by the application, the handwriting recognition engine generates one or more hypotheses for the ink phrase and provides them to the in manager. The in manager forwards the hypotheses together with the pointer of the reference to the application and can also add them to the data structure of the ink phrase. “
