Introduction
Find yourself wishing your
e-mail program had more inking integration? Well riteMail from Pen & Internet
is designed to address this problem. A full featured e-mail program designed
around inking your e-mail, riteMail is just about halfway between Microsoft
Outlook and Windows Journal as far as features are concerned. I recently obtained
a copy of riteMail and have been experimenting around with it for the last few
weeks. So how does it measure up? Read on into this review to find out.
Setup
Installation is just about
like any other Windows program, but there is some setup involved for the e-mail
functions. Pen & Internet provides a riteMail service which allows people
to reply to your e-mail in ink even if they don’t use the riteMail software.
You can have your e-mail sent via their SMTP server, or use your own. It can
also use the mail settings from whatever your default mail client happens to
be. The setup is pretty straightforward, and is accomplished via the options
menu (figure 1) once the software is installed. I was pretty impressed with
the wide range of options for sending the mail, given that the riteMail service
is fairly proprietary in format.
Figure 1 -
Besides how to send your
e-mail, there are several other things that can be setup via the options panel.
By default the writing area includes a grid and has a yellow background, this
default can all be changed from this screen (Figure 2). There is another settings
screen, located in the file menu that allows you to change your template design
for the current note/e-mail only (not shown).
Figure 2 -
The other two tabs, “User”
and “Print page setup” allow you to change the e-mail address and name that
appears in the “from” field of your message, and allow you to specify margins
and resolution for printing.
The Program
The riteMail interface will
seem pretty familiar to Microsoft Office users, as it follows the same general
layout ideas. There are several options for pen types, as well as a nifty little
shape tool that takes any shape you draw and converts it to a smooth well defined
shape. This shape tool is powered by Pen & Internet’s riteShape technology,
which I must say is very impressive. I’ve illustrated the different drawing
tools below in figure 3. One thing I found interesting is that the eraser tool
also erases the grid on your page, as if the grid was ink (shown in the left
part of figure 3).
Figure 3 -
E-mail/notes that you “rite” up in riteMail can either be
sent as e-mail right away, or be stored on your hard drive much like Windows
Journal. You can then come back to these saved notes to send them at a later
time, or do anything you could with them when you created them. (Figure 4)
Figure
4 -
Once you have your e-mail
written up you just enter your subject and recipient, just like any e-mail program,
and send it on its way. When sent via the riteMail service it shows up in non
riteMail clients (Microsoft Outlook), as an image. This way anyone can read
your message, even if they don’t use riteMail. Below is an example of what that
look likes (figure 5) –
Figure 5 -
In my opinion one of the
best features of this, is that not only can the person receiving your e-mail
view it, they can also reply… in ink! Of course, if you send an inked
message to a desktop user, the ability to ink back won’t come in very handy.
However, when sent to another Tablet PC user who doesn’t use riteMail (or even
Microsoft Outlook), it can be very useful. To do this, the recipient clicks
the “Write Back” button in the e-mail, which will then open his browser with
a Java Applet to write up his ink message (figure 6 below). One thing I did
find annoying about e-mail sent from riteMail is that it includes some links
and text below your inked area. This text and links is pretty much just an ad
for riteMail, and really doesn’t serve any purpose.
Figure 6 (replying to an e-mail sent
from riteMail) -
Outlook integration
Besides the ability to use
the mail server settings from Outlook or other mail client, riteMail also has
the ability to navigate your e-mail folders and open riteMail e-mail located
in them. I found this to be a nice feature as it allows you to keep Outlook
as your text e-mail client and for sending/receiving, yet it adds the extra
inking capability of riteMail. Below is an image of what this looks like (figure
7) –
Figure 7 –
Other Features
Because I’m concentrating
on using riteMail with a Tablet PC, I have not covered the new integration abilities
riteMail 2.0 has with PDA versions of riteMail. More information about this
can be found on Pen & Internet’s
web-site.
Conclusion
Overall riteMail is very
nice for sending ink e-mail, much better than using Outlook XP with the Tablet
PC extension pack. It also measures up nicely to the newer inking features of
Outlook 2003 Beta, even though Outlook 2003 handles inking much better than
Outlook XP. I was impressed by riteMail's ability to integrate with Outlook
and its settings, as well as the shape tool used for writing messages. The shape
tool is unlike any other I have seen, and works very well. There are some drawbacks
to it as well, text at the bottom of e-mail when read in Outlook, and the lack
of templates for customizing your writing area (like Windows Journal), but overall
a nice program.
Pros: Great writing tools, Nice integration
with Outlook, Ability for non-riteMail users to reply in ink
Cons: Too much text at bottom of e-mail
when read in external client (seems almost like an ad)
Buzz Meter - 3.5 out of 5
riteMail is available for download
from Pen & Internet for $24.95,
which includes a one year subscription to the riteMail service.
