As for the rest of Taposé's capabilities, there's a lot of promise, but calling the edges rough is like saying . The app's interface is glitchy and occasionally unpredictable. For example, there's a cool feature that lets you draw your finger around a region of the screen to turn it into a clipping, and then drag that clipping from the holding bar onto a page of your notebook. But it turns out that anything you've drawn with the freehand tool doesn't actually appear in the clipping.

In its description on the App Store, the developers write, "If it seems like Taposé is trying to tackle and reinvent enough functions to fill a whole tablet, that may be because it is." That's a tall order for a single app and may be misguided: it's hard enough to do one thing well, much less a slew of them.

It's clear that the Taposé developers went through the Courier video piece by piece and tried to remain faithful to the original vision--perhaps too much so. After all, Courier was a concept product that never shipped, and it was based on a combination of software hardware. What works well on one piece of hardware doesn't necessarily work as well on another. For example, Courier took handwriting recognition for granted; Taposé is missing that feature entirely.

More to the point, the Courier video was just that--a video. Turning someone else's concept video into an actual working app produces results that are, not surprisingly, hit-or-miss. As Steve Jobs famously said, "[Design] is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Taposé's developers don't seem to have spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how the app should work.

What I found perhaps most eyebrow-raising is that Taposé supposedly has the backing of J Allard, who headed up the Courier team at Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division. Allard's title in that group was "chief experience officer," but that "experience" is exactly where Taposé seems to have the most trouble.