I’m pretty evenly split, in writing, between writing on my laptop and writing in notebooks. This occasionally bothers me: I kind of prefer the notebooks, but I have a bad habit of misplacing them. I have a Wacom tablet, but have found it to be (for these purposes) the worst of both worlds: non-portable and difficult to use. I don’t even carry it with my laptop anymore. When I think of it, I take photos of my handwritten notes with my phone. That works reasonably well… when I remember to do it. I have also not yet come up with any kind of reasonable indexing scheme for these photos, which makes it harder for me to make use of them.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of picking up a Livescribe pen. It looks like it might do the trick, and they make notebooks for it similar to the ones I already use. As long as I don’t lose the pen itself, then misplacing a notebook is no big deal, and I’m intrigued by some of the possibilities of being able to record audio while I’m writing. (I have zero confidence in any machine being able to read my handwriting, given that I usually can’t read it myself: I rely primarily on spatial memory to remember what I was thinking when I wrote something. You think I’m kidding…)

I could probably justify the expense as well for my day job: I have had a number of design meetings where I sit and draw out windows and interfaces, then afterwards it just looks like a bunch of boxes. For that matter, it might be nice to have for Viable Paradise, though I doubt they allow recording devices.

Has anyone reading this used one of these pens? Or do you have suggestions for an alternative?