Using riteMail
Once it's set up, riteMail is easy to use and flexible too. You can send and receive riteMail messages when you perform a HotSync operation between your handheld and your PC. You can also beam riteMail messages or send and receive messages using a wired or wireless modem and one or more email accounts.

To create a new riteMail message, you select the New button, which causes a blank riteMail message similar to the one in Figure A to appear.

FIGURE A

riteMail offers a clean and simple interface for creating messages.

Enter the email address or addresses you want to send the message to on the first line, or tap to:, cc:, or bcc: to look up addresses. Now edit the subject line, and you're ready to write a message.

Tap the writing tools icon (the fifth from the left back in Figure A) on the bottom of the message window to choose your writing tool. Work your way to the left from this icon to set the line width and color of the ink you'll use.

Note: On grayscale devices like my Treo 180, the color icon selects shades of gray instead of colors.

Once you've got all that selected, you're ready to write. Just scribble anything you want in the center of the screen, and you've created a handwritten email message. Now, before sending off your message, imagine that you don't like what you just wrote. Tap the Remove Strokes icon (it looks like a pair of scissors) and tap the offending strokes to make them disappear.

If you want to draw something in your message, riteShape will come in handy. To get riteMail's help in drawing precise geometric shapes, tap the riteShape icon, which looks like an overlapping square and circle. With riteShape selected, try drawing a rectangle, a triangle, and a circle on the screen. After you draw each shape, riteShape analyzes what you drew and redraws it using a best guess at the shape you were trying to create. While riteShape isn't perfect and it can take a few seconds to redraw each object you drew, the results are worth it. Figure B shows my best freehand attempt at some geometric shapes, alongside riteShape's reworking of those attempts.

FIGURE B

riteShape does a nice job of cleaning up hand-drawn objects.

Just remember to turn off riteShape when you go back to writing or it will happily revise your handwriting for you.

When you receive a riteMail message, you can reply using all the same tools and capabilities. Tap Write Back, and riteMail opens up a message for your reply. This message includes a writing area as you would expect, but it also includes the original handwritten message below that, just as you would find in a regular text email message.

Even better, the copy of the original message is fully interactive, so you can modify it just as if you had created it in the first place. Talk about flexible. If the message has a diagram or drawing of some sort, you can mark it up and send it back for immediate review and comments.

riteMail has other helpful features too, like its infinitely expandable writing area, multiple message folders, and an online showcase of riteMail use in the real world.