As products everywhere become increasingly high-tech, the decidedly low-tech white board remains a popular solution for educators and businesses alike. It's really not surprising, mind you, given that their electronic counterparts range in cost from thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars. With Virtual Ink's ingenious mimio, however, many of the benefits of electronic white boards can be obtained at a significantly more budget-pleasing price point.

Digitize any white board

Mimio consists of two core components: the capture bar, which attaches to the white board and is connected to the Mac, and the stylus set/eraser. Standard dry erase markers fit into the styluses, four of which are included, for four different colors. Each stylus features a transmitter that communicates with the capture bar, in turn transmitting what you write to your Mac. Mimio's eraser functions similarly; use it to erase a part of the white board, and the equivalent area within the application is erased as well.

Despite the relatively sophisticated technology at work here, setting up and getting started with mimio is a breeze—we had the product out of the box and up in running in just five minutes. Similarly, working with the mimio application is relatively painless, albeit partially because of its simplicity.

Once you've marked up your white board to your liking, a number of options within mimio await. If you wish to discard your work and start over, simply erase the board with the mimio eraser. If you choose to save what you've done and start with a fresh board, press the "New Board" button (either within the application or on the capture bar itself) and mimio will save your previous board and start a new one in the same session. You also have the option of "Tagging" a board, which mimio also refers to as a bookmark—a new board is created, but the contents of the previous one are maintained.

Mimio records every stroke that you make, so you're not limited to simply a static copy of your final board. Mimio sessions can be saved, shared with others (the application is a free download), and played back. If you prefer to go the less proprietary route, mimio can export your board at any point as a static image. Additionally, it can also build a static Web page, complete with dates, comments, and any other information you entered to accompany a session.

With mimio 1.5, Virtual Ink added the ability to export entire sessions as QuickTime movies or DV streams, allowing for further editing within iMovie if desired.

The quality of capture with mimio is first rate, while the ability to specify the width of the strokes allows the application to capture details that may not even be visible on the white board. Strokes are captured as bitmaps, however, meaning that pixelation is apparent. A version of mimio currently in the works will add vector support, allowing files to be exported in EPS format, as well as OS X support (while the mimio application will run under Classic mode on OS X, the capture bar does not function).

Paired up with a projector, mimioMouse, which is included with mimio, allows users to control their Macs directly from the white board, just as with full-fledged electronic white boards.

The one consistent gripe we had with mimio was the performance of application. Even on the fastest G4, it still feels like a clunky port of its Windows counterpart. The interface is not particularly Mac-like, while performance as a whole, especially screen redraws, is somewhat sluggish.

Also, on our not-quite-stable white board, mimio had a tendency to lose the connection to the capture bar, although the USB cable appeared to be secure. While a pleasant voice notification would alert us when this happened, unplugging and re-plugging the cable did not always re-establish the connection, sometimes resulting in at least a few tries before we were back up and running.

Mac users may also be disappointed to learn that most mimio plug-ins, including hand-writing recognition, boardCast (streaming audio with a presentation), and netShare (allows for sharing a presentation over the Web) are not yet Mac-compatible.

The final word

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