Patent ID: 8638319

Claim:
A method of making a smart pen application product using customer authoring tools, the method comprising: receiving, at a computing system, a user selection of a template application, the user-selected template application comprising: program code for being executed by a processor of a smart pen, and a plurality of user-assignable smart pen functions, each user-assignable smart pen function including a user-selected output signal to be reproduced by the smart pen, the user-selected output signal comprising at least one of: an audio signal to be played back by a speaker of the smart pen; a visual signal to be displayed on a display of the smart pen; and a vibration signal to be generated by a vibrational feedback device of the smart pen; receiving, at the computing system, a computer-readable representation of printed content; determining that a color of the computer-readable representation of the printed content will be incompatible with a dot pattern on the writing surface when the computer-readable representation is printed to the writing surface; responsive to determining that the color is incompatible, applying dimming to the incompatible color; receiving a user-selected region of the representation of printed content for associating with one of the user-assignable smart pen functions; receiving a user-selected smart pen function from the plurality of user-assignable smart pen functions in the template application for associating with the user-selected region of the representation of printed content; generating a mapping between the user-selected smart pen function and the user-selected region of the printed content; and transferring the user-selected template application and the generated mapping to a non-transitory storage medium of the smart pen as a user-specific application that combines the user-selected template application and the user-selected functions, the user-specific application comprising instructions for being executed on a processor of a smart pen, wherein execution of the user-specific application causes the smart pen to reproduce the user-selected output signal included in the user-selected smart pen function responsive to the smart pen capturing a gesture of the smart pen interacting with the user-selected region of the printed content specified in the mapping.