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Apple's New Trackpad?
jamesoutlaw writes, "I came across this article on Go2Mac.com today. It has some interesting information on a trackpad that might make its appearance in the next PowerBook. Among its features are 'hot spots' and the use of a stylus for handwriting input.
When the Newton was discontinued, Apple stated that they were not licensing the NewtonOS or opening the source for the OS, and that they were going to integrate some of the Newton technology into a future product. It looks like this trackpad may be a part of that." Of course, this would make a cool external device for desktop machines (Macs, PCs or newfangled Web pads) as well, if the handwriting recognition software were available. Apple?
The US Post Office has some extremely advanced handwriting recognition software. I'm surprised it hasn't been exploited commercially.
Yes, but the standard text-entry application (simpletext) needs to:
1) be able to open reasonably sized files (no 16k limit, or whatever the limit is - I keep getting it confused with Notepad.exe - nyuck nyuck nyuck)
2) allow text and graphics to be seamlessly interwoven, similar to how *gasp* Adobe Illustrator works. (okay, 'cmon, it doesn't have to be all that feature-rich!)
Make something like that the default text editor of the system, make the file-format PDF (er Quartz?), and you've got a handy-dandy application that is suddenly able to do about half of what folks are always trying to get SimpleText to do (with various plugins, hacks and whatnot).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As an owner and current user of two Newton devices (first the MP100, with the really shitty HWR, and now the 120), I must take exception to the overall sentiment in this forum that the Newton's HWR sucks. The HWR in version 2.x of the Newton OS is FAR superior to that in 1.x. Of course, Apple being Apple, they never really countered the bad publicity that the first version got, and then they let Newton die altogether. I get about a 90% accuracy rate with the version 2 OS, and about 80% of the errors that I do get are limited to a single letter. Making corrections is easy, and I'd sure rather have real HWR than use Graffiti on the Palm!
:wq
The problem with Apple laptops is that, as in so many other areas, Apple just doesn't give you a choice. Apple has the "one size fits all" attitude even worse than Microsoft. I'll seriously consider an Apple laptop again when they have some pointing device other than a trackpoint.
eries wrote: "... unless they've had a really dramatic breakthrough, this technology is not really good for data entry, period. However, I think that it's _real_ utility could be in applications like digital signature recognition. Imagine that instead of having to remember you secret PGP key you just sign on your trackpad.... That would be cool.
Anyone know what kinds of apps they've got planned?"
You're right that for text entry, a handwriting-recognition pad is not very helpful compared to a keyboard. Definitely!
But "data" in the sense of "communicable information" isn't all text. It's a lot easier to draw a little map or a schematic with a stylus than with a trackball or a mouse (IMO); and like you say, handwriting would be neat for signature recognition.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Why would I go back to handwriting? I haven't done it in years!
If I can't read it, how's a computer gonna manage?
insignificant sig
there were pencils. Pencils introduced you to the concepts of hand-eye co-ordination when the PlayStation was being used by someone else. Pencils also introduced you to the concept of the 'delete' key.
Next you moved onto pens. Pens were an important lesson in your development. Pens showed you what would happen if you made a mistake and then submitted before previewing. They also made it possible to buy computer stuff from old-fashioned shops that still required a permanent signature.
To prepare yourselves for the next stage in your upbringing, you would have been introduced to Mr Mouse. Mr Mouse taught you that the GUI is your friend, and that words are not the only form of communication.
Now you are ready for the keyboard. Most people reach this stage of development around 5 years old (uber-geeks missed out the first two steps of development). You learn that the keyboard can do things faster than the pencil, pen and mouse. Vital lessons about Internet use are learned with the keyboard - it's quicker to type slashdot.org with your keyboard than it is to click in your history folder with the mouse.
The keyboard also encourages more important sociological ideals - the importance of home. Your home keys represent a starting point for your typing the way 'home' represents a reference and 'safe place' in your life.
So you see, when we have moved onto keyboards, we have reached the very top of the evolutional ladder of development and control - the very pinnacle of inteligent maturity. To try and develop new methods of control would only leads us back down a path that we have all walked in our lives.
insignificant sig
The Sony VAIO 505 series has this capability, too, at least the older ones. You could use either your finger or the stylus hidden alongside the LCD in a pop-out tray on the left.
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Klactovedestene!
Paragraph's handwriting engine is indeed very good. For those that don't follow the link above, it goes to a Java applet that recognizes cursive writing with a mouse with no training whatsoever.
In fact, it's the cursive engine on the Newton (Apple's own is used for print recognition). Anybody with a touch-capable LCD should definitely see if Paragraph runs on your system.
As mentioned, it runs on Wince. CmdrTaco forgive me for my sins but I have dallied with the Beast - when my beloved Newton died, I got a Phillips Nino. Why not a Palm? I had tried Graffitti on the Newton - didn't much care for it. I gave it another go on Palms belonging to friends. Couldn't cope - my writing habits were too ingrained and I couldn't get my mind around the concept of "write each letter one on top of the other." Since Paragraph's Calligrapher ran on WinCE, I got a WinCE device. No joke. That was the only reason.
Of course, it was Microsoft software. It needed to be reset pretty much every day, even if I did nothing with it but turn it off and on occasionally. If I used it with any real frequency, it would crash. And the sync services fought with everything else for the serial port. Yuck. So I went to eBay and found a "new" Newton.
I'm much happier. My Newton gets words right when I know I got them wrong. It garbles foreign names, until you tap the word in question and select "Try Letters" (i.e., don't use a dictionary for matching). Bingo. Perfect.
Yes. Three years later, and it still kicks the pants off a Palm as an actual computing device. Sure, Palms sync great, but do you use one to take notes in meetings? I'll bet not - as Newton users observe, the Palm is the right size when you're not using it, and the Newton is the right size when you are. And on eBay, you might actually find one at a price comparable to a high-end palm.
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Klactovedestene!
Of the almost 1000 people in the Newton division when Apple killed the project in late January 1998, less than twenty were actually laid off. The other nine hundred-plus were roughly evenly split between the dev/test/QA/etc. groups for Mac OS 8.6 (which shipped that October) and the Mac OS X project. Apple probably couldn't build a Newton 2100 today without starting from scratch.
The main issue to remember about the handwriting recognition is that it learned you, as opposed to you having to learn Graffiti. (Graffiti was available for the Newton, too, if you liked it). A number of the more ridiculous failures of the Newton's handwriting recognition came from people trying to write on a Newton that had already been trained to recognize it's owner's handwriting.
Not sure if this is just the writer speculating, but I've already got this feature on my Dell laptop. Not only does it have hot spots, but you can use the sides of the trackpad to scroll windows. Hope Apple has more grandiose plans than that...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
I can understand the uses for signatures, etc, but how many people, after some practice typing, would go back to handwriting?
Most people I know can, after a little practice, type much faster than they can write.
Maybe someone can point out why you would really want this
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider
Check this impressive demo out..
Paragraph's Demo
Even better, it works on Windows CE HPC and PPC devices natively. (Ofcourse CE fully supports Java 1.1 too).
Silly you.
The sweeeeet technology from Newton that Apple is re-using is the translucent plastic from the E-mate.
Steve can understand translucent plastic.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Its a classic.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Man, my trusty PowerBook 170 has one of the best trackballs I've ever seen on a laptop... I dug it out the other day and was amazed at how usable it was after using crummy "pencil eraser," trackpad and various other mouse-wannabe-replacements. While it needs to be cleaned every so often to maintain peak performance, it's better than having to replace the little eraser-head caps every month or so... (and I hate trackpads :). Modern laptops need trackballs like this, heck, if it weren't a 7 year old powerbook, I could play Quake with this thing quite easily...
Yeah, all that "clear logical thought" went into designing the iMac mouse, which is clicked by mashing your palm onto the circular *scream* mouse.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Just a quick note, I've found a better description of this system at http://www.business-linux.at/case/case.uspostal.ht ml
We've been through this holy war before... (sigh)
M$ Windows isn't entirely consistent about what they use the two buttons for. The average Windows users I know rarely use the second button -- or when they do, it gets them into unexpected trouble. The way X uses the mouse buttons seems even more unintuitive and inconsistant. What good are all of those extra buttons when you have to learn what they do all over again for each application or window manager?
Some research that I read about (and wish I'd kept track of a reference to) demonstrated that more mouse buttons means more RSI. This is partially due to sharing the load among the tendons, but it has more to do with the way one holds a mouse when one can use any finger to press the button, versus the way one holds a mouse when they have to use different fingers to press different buttons.
Apple, with clear logical thought and good reason, originally considered developing around a two or three button mouse, and wisely rejected that idea after watching a statistically significant number of novice users become confused by them. Macintosh "Power" users can buy aftermarket pointing devices with a wide number of button configurations -- and they get to define what those extra buttons do.
Windows 3.1 really didn't make use of the second button. But the MacOS had context-sensitive menus (available by a holding the "Control" key on the keyboard while pressing the mouse button) for some time before Microsoft standardized on what their second button did. Some Mac "power" users, who may be ignorant of the RSI ramifications, set their second button to duplicate that operation.
While not in common use in the US, touchpads of various sizes that work with stylii are being sold with Chinese character recognition.
As an example, Synaptics both has a touchpad-based Chinese character recognition system and a touchpad whose standard driver includes configurable hot spots.
-j
I'm a nature photographer.
The Newton was truly an amazing device. Before anyone bashes it on the stereotypes that people had against it, realize that in the later versions the handwriting recognition was excellent, it had a 200mhz processor on a HANDHELD, was able to record sound, accept TWO PCMCIA cards, get on the internet, fax, print, infared connection between two Newtons, wireless printing, play sound, and many more things right out of the box.
Now also realize that the Newton 2100 (the last version) came out over 3 years ago. The main reason it wasn't successful was because of its large size and high price, but the thing was WAAAY ahead of its time, I can't see how anyone can deny that.
Aside from that, Apple just canned it when Jobs came on board, supposedly because Jobs just didn't like them. I'm not bitter about it, it was probably the right decision. Some people on here asked why Apple doesn't revive it, well the story goes that much of the design information for the newton OS and hardware is lost/scattered throughout the apple campus. Plus, the handwriting recognition is about the only thing that is transferrable to another product.
I don't really see why someone would want to write on the trackpad when they have a keyboard right there; except just to draw on the screen easily, but that is not handwriting recognition. It certainly adds to the coolness factor though.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
Jobs killed it because of his Ego.
Jobs managed to drive away most of the Newton engineers. They left in-mass for Palm Computing.
When Jobs stood up at WWDC and said:
"Apple Makes Computers Right?"
"Computers have keyboards, Right?"
Jobs then help up a Newton and then said:
"So what is this then?"
This caused a few Newton Engineers to leave. When the spinoff was cancelled, thats when most left.
And, as I have heard it in the Newton newsgroups, the code was rather crufty, and convoluted. The only people who have a CHANCE of groking its fullness are now at Palm.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I'm sure they've done a lot of work on the handwriting heuristic, but it was the generally clunky nature of having to wait for the device to process each word that eventually led to the development of Graffiti, which of course is now so popular on PalmOS.
Unless they've had a really dramatic breakthrough, this technology is not really good for data entry, period. However, I think that it's _real_ utility could be in applications like digital signature recognition. Imagine that instead of having to remember you secret PGP key you just sign on your trackpad.... That would be cool.
Anyone know what kinds of apps they've got planned?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
..should "invent" the 2-button mouse first.. :)
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