printing, spell checking and find & replace tools. Notes — Used for checklists, as well as both drawing and writing in the same program either with a newton keyboard or a stylus pen. Dates — Calendar program where you can schedule appointments and other special events. Names — Program for storing extensive contacts information in a flexible format. Formulas — Program that offers metric conversions, currency conversions, loan and mortgage calculators, etc. Calculator — A basic calculator with square root, percentage, MR, M+ and M- functions additional to the basic functions found on a calculator. Clock — A small floating window type application, known as a desktop accessory on the Macintosh. The Newton clock also includes features for an alarm, minute timer and the date. Book Reader — Support for displaying electronic books is built in. Version history Handwriting recognition The Newton uses the CalliGrapher word-based handwriting recognition engine developed by ParaGraph International Inc, led by former Soviet scientist Stepan Pachikov. The earliest versions had weaknesses that resulted in bad publicity and reviews. However, with the release of Newton PDAs based upon version 2.0 of the OS, the handwriting recognition substantially improved, partially being a product of ParaGraph and an Apple-created recognizer pair: Apple's Rosetta and Mondello. Newton's handwriting recognition, particularly the print recognizer, has been considered by many reviewers, testers, and users to be the best in the industry, even 10 years after it was introduced. It was developed by Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and was described in 2012 as "the world's first genuinely usable handwriting recognition system". The Newton can recognize hand-printed text, cursive, or a mix of the two, and can also accept free-hand "Sketches", "Shapes", and "ink text". Text can also be entered by tapping with the stylus on a small on-screen pop-up QWERTY keyboard. With "Shapes", Newton can recognize that the user was attempting to draw a circle, a line, a polygon, etc., and it cleans them up into "perfect" vector representations (with modifiable control points and defined vertices) of what the user is attempting to draw. "Shapes" and "Sketches" can be scaled or deformed once drawn. "Ink text" captures the user's free-hand writing but allows it to be treated somewhat like recognized text when manipulating for later editing purposes ("ink text" supported word wrap, could be formatted to be bold, italic, etc.). At any time a user can also direct the Newton to recognize