How to Convert Your Touch Phone as Digital Writing Pad for PC

For a recent e-learning project work, I had to do a writing task in a multimedia presentation. As only pointing device I had was a mouse, I had to come-up with alternatives. We could write a big letter, word or two such like "Hello" and "Good Morning" with mouse of course, but this is writing of a few code snippets. Some teeny weeny thing. Wacom, Digipro and so forth writing pads are out of the budget. So the only savior was; my precious phone with Android. Remember how it saves the day when I not having a microphone to record a voice over.

I tried few apps in the google store, but not a one was working correctly. Not running the server application in PC or client version in the mobile. And some are not compatible to my capacitive touch phone. But exceptional this app. Thanks go to developer.

WiFi Drawing Tablet

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wifitablet&hl=en

This can be found on the above URL. Here is how it describe himself. "Turn your android device into a wireless drawing tablet."

Too bad it only allows WiFi to connect with the PC for data transmission. But no installation needed in the PC. It is just a simple double click on a jar file to run the server. Therefore you'll need Java to be installed on your machine. As I was already fulfilled with those requirements, I didn't find any difficulty in setuping this tablet system.

Luckily I had a stylus which goes with a capacitive touch screens. It was totally insane move to bought it at the first place few years back, and was never used for the silly purpose I had in mind. But it was ideal with this app to write something very teeny tiny. So now it's my rescuer. Even though the app support the finger touch, it's not suitable to write anything very small. So with this app I can write almost anything in the screencasts.

If you can see this stylus clearly, you will see it doesn't have a pointed end. As it is a capacitive supported stylus which will mimics the finger touch, it has a plastic cap attached to a spring. As we the humans are used to write with pointed tips, using of spring is ideal in this design. We can perceive and feel this spring as a pointer, but not the circular cap. This stylus was a low budget one in capactive area, and surely there'l be more in the market now.

After perfect setup of the system, you can run the jar file and it will runs the server. Here you'll be given the IP and port that you need to configure on your mobile app. After that, the mobile app and the server app would be connected. Then Viola!!!! we can start the work.

The benefit of this app is, we can see what we are writing at the bottom of the stylus. I mean in the touch screen. Because I'm not used to move the stylus by looking just at the PC screen. (Wonder how'd I trained to do with the mouse long time back.) I dunno about this app's usage in drawing or any other high end graphical tasks, but this one is ideal for my purpose; Writing. You can trigger the clicking activity on PC by having two touches simultaneously. And do the dragging in the same way or else by pushing a button to drag activity. And to hover the mouse cursor in the PC just use the touch.

Once again thanks goes for the developer. This is a perfect low budget solution till the collection increases to have a real writing pad for the work.

Here's how the screencast goes.