freed tablet, JPen and OpenInk
I’ve been coding on two projects lately, OpenInk and JPen, that I think have huge potential. Never before has there been an easy, universal tablet platform for all major platforms. What I think is even more impressive is that this platform runs as unobtrusively as Silverlight — without security warnings or popups — but is not tied to .NET.
With so many huge problems out there, it feels a little strange to be working on something as low-level as a tablet platform. I see the real value in this work as establishing an open source, universal standard, which feels a decade late. OpenInk aims to operate on both Java and iPhone Cocoa with the same API, which could rally a lot of (the limited amount of) pen development around creating something that will stick with us. An example, which is credit of Nicolas Carranza, is the JPen project itself. I fortuitously came across it a month after its release, and since then it seems artistic developers from all over the world are pitching in to solve an important problem.
“grassroots” cross-platform coding is what makes the Java platform unique. I’m really impressed that I can run an OpenGL, tablet application from my browser.