GO Ships PenPoint

Solid lineup of OEMs and ISVs line up behind OS

From start to end, from early morning coffee and croissants to late afternoon tea and crumpets, GO’s all-day formal announcement that PenPoint 1.0 is shipping was an impressive display of technology and marketing savvy. GO wisely highlighted third party applications, providing the floor space for software developers to show off their wares and, oh yes, a powerful operating system that makes that software possible.

GO is shipping immediately its Software Development Kit, which requires an 80386 system with MS-DOS and a digitizing tablet. The SDK is available from GO or through software resellers, Merisel and Ingram/Micro D. End users will be able to obtain PenPoint by purchasing a pen system from NCR, Grid, IBM (when available), and other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

GO’s marketing director, Mike Homer, told us that a requirement for all third party vendors exhibiting at the show was that their products would be shipping within 90 days, although virtually every product shown at the event was still in beta testing.

Virtual Memory and Better Recognition

Although PenPoint has been greatly revised since we first described it in our January 1991 issue, the system’s basic functionality is essentially the same; refer there for technical details. Over the past year, however, GO has added some important features that bear discussion. For one thing, GO has added virtual memory support that allows the system to utilize a hard disk as an extension to physical RAM. This means that users can open more documents simultaneously or use large documents without having to add memory.

Also new is the GOWrite handwriting recognition engine which, the company claims, provides better accuracy without training or practice, higher tolerance for sloppy shapes, recognizes more symbols than the beta engine, and a greater variation of writing styles using a database of over 700,000 handwriting and gesture samples. (This database is available to ISVs on a license basis.) We had a chance to try the recognizer and were impressed. In our tests, it always recognized our printing correctly but would often confuse upper- and lowercase. Nevertheless, the recognition is noticeably better than it was a year ago.

GO also says it has provided ease-of-use enhancements to the interface and help system. These include a new Settings Notebook, allowing users to easily set up system preferences and access installed software; a new and improved application menu and simplified network and peripheral access by means of a Connections Notebook.

An Impressive Third Party

Among the third-party application software developers exhibiting at the GO announcement were: InkWare (San Mateo, CA) which was showing NoteTaker, a powerful electronic “notepad,” and Photo, program that lets you take, edit, and display digital photographs; Notable Technologies (Oakland, CA) with its PenCross electronic crossword puzzle and PenLiner, an intelligent outlining notebook; PenMagic Software (North Vancouver, British Columbia) showed Numero, perhaps the most impressive software exhibited. Numero is a financial worksheet that has all the flexibility of paper-based ledgers but the power of an electronic spreadsheet. Numero also used the PenPoint visual interface to great advantage, with features such as “folding” the worksheet horizontally or vertically to line up columns; Pensoft’s (San Mateo, CA) Perspective, an intelligent personal information manager; Pen Stuff’s (Rochester, NY) RPN 12C+ financial calculator; Slate (Scottsdale, AZ) with its At-Hand spreadsheet, PenBook document preparation system, DayTimer pen scheduler, PenApps, and its SafetyPen utility package; and Stylos Development (Corte Madera, CA) with its Markup graphic annotation system.

Vendors showing connectivity products included: Compsoft Services’ (Greenwich, CT) PenConnect/Host for interactive and file transfer communication between mobile systems and IBM 370s; IQ Interface’s (Sausalito, CA) DBF Engine, a function library for access to dBase data; Photonics (Campbell, CA) with its infrared transceiver for wireless communication; Sitka (Alameda, CA) with PenTOPS and PenCentral networking software; and Slate/Traveling Software’s (Scottsdale, AZ) LapLink Pro for disk sharing and file transfer.

Development tool and utility software included: ParaGraph’s (Boulder, CO) CalliGrapher, a cursive recognition system; Novotech’s (Bethany, CT) Objective-C, an object-oriented programming language that’s also used with the PC, Mac, Next, Sun, and other platforms; Peripheral Vision’s (Somerset, England) PenOp signature verification software; First Pen System’s (Marlboro, MA) PenSIL, an interactive screen layout tool; OCR System’s (Huntingdon Valley, PA) ReadRight optical character recognition software; and Watcom’s (Waterloo, Ontario) Watcom SQL, an SQL database engine for PenPoint.

Among the vertical application developers were: Epsilon (Burlington, MA) which makes a pharmaceutical sales app; MapFrame’s (Austin, TX) Penovation Mapping system, mapping and geographical information system for mobile computers; Penergy’s (Redwood City, CA) PenTrial, an electronic notebook for the pharmaceutical industry; JDS Solutions’ (Carlsbad, CA) electronic purchase order software; Information Retrieval Method’s (Carrollton, TX) sales automation applications; and Greycat’s (Metairie, LA) Scratchpad clinic-oriented, patient record management system.

OEMs included IBM who introduced its ThinkPad system (described elsewhere in this issue), NCR with its 3125, and Grid Systems, who showed its GridPad-SL.

GO Promotes Development Through ISV Alliance

Like Microsoft, GO is actively courting software developers. As a start, GO has established a Custom Solutions Alliance, allowing ISVs to distribute the SDK as well as additional development tools. Initially, PenMagic Software, PenSoft, and Slate, are authorized SDK distributors and offer additional development tools: Slate offers PenApps and PenBook, for developing PenPoint forms and document retrieval applications, respectively; PenMagic’s Numero includes tools for designing custom financial and database applications that use the Numero worksheet program; PenSoft’s Perspective is a customizable personal information manager.

For more information, contact GO at 415-358-7400.