Palm Kills Off Graffiti

Ed writes "PalmSource, the company that makes the Palm OS, has decided to stop using Graffiti for text input in all future versions of its operating system. Instead, it will switch to using a version of CIC's Jot recognition system, which will be called Graffiti 2. PalmSource was forced to make this move after losing a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Xerox. Jot is already used by the Pocket PC operating system. You can read more about it on Brighthand."

Comments

Don't toss out those spray paint cans yet...

[Robotech_Master]

I expect that someone will come up with a hack or add-on application that mimics graffiti for future PalmOS machines, just the same way you can install alternate handwriting recognition systems for today's. So folks who're so well-trained in graffiti that it shows up in household notes they write probably won't have to worry too much about the Palm of the future.

Hopefully it will be easier for non-geeks...

[rickthewizkid]

It seems to me that PocketPC attracts many people by the fact that it uses normal handwriting recognition instead of a "weird" Graffiti format. Most non-geek people are attracted by the fact that they do not need to learn a new way to write on this device.

I just hope that the "new" graffiti is easier on non-geeks...

RickTheWizKid
Stupid Muggle technology...

I LOVED Graffiti!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Palm's use of Graffiti was one of the most interesting marketing decisions ever made!

Apple thought it was so important to have real handwrighting recognition in the Newton, for example, that it was willing to adopt the technology before it was ready. Conventional wisdom said that ordinary users wouldn't want to learn a funny way of writing.

Boy was Conventional Wisdom wrong! It was FUN to learn grafitti. When I first got my Palm, I couldn't wait to learn it, so I can be "in the club" like everyone else. I ran their practice app, and got good at it within an hour.

Jot's probably not too different; maybe they can put in a "Graffity Compatibility mode" now that Palm's paying the royalties.

Well, that's it for Palm.

[rodgerd]

There's nothing dumber for them to do. If you're going to make people think about a completely new user interface, they're going to think about migrating to PocketPC devices, as well.

Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet?

[Viewsonic]

I mean, it doesn't matter HOW you write the text, im sure some people write in uni-strokes as it is with a pen and paper without even knowing what it is.. How could Xerox patent a writing STYLE? Can I patent the way I make a capital P? Absurd!

Re:Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet?

[mcg1969]

im sure some people write in uni-strokes as it is with a pen and paper without even knowing what it is.

No, they don't. Quite a few printed letters we write every day require multiple strokes to write them cleanly and properly.

But it's not just a matter of correctness; it's also a matter of efficiency: it takes far more movement of your pen/stylus to write standard letters. So even if you expended the effort to keep your pen on the paper to draw the entire letter, it would take you a lot longer to do that than to write the Graffiti equivalent.

That's why the Graffiti system was considered innovative: it provided simple characters that were quicker to write, and easier to write consistently---but which still resembled the original letters enough to be somewhat easy to learn.

Look, people thought that the Graffiti system was inventive at the time it was introduced. Nobody back then said "oh, some people just write like this anyway, what's so cool about that?" Now that this patent dispute has come about, we can't just go back and decide otherwise.

Xerox patent on UNISTROKES?

[steveha]

If I understood the article, Xerox has a patent on the very idea of a recognition system that uses just one stroke per character.

This sounds to me like another bogus patent. If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable. I thought patents were supposed to be non-obvious.

Hmmm. We want to recognize letters. Our big problem is that it's hard to tell which stroke belongs to which character. Hey... many characters are only one stroke; why not make a simplified alphabet so they ALL are only one stroke?

I mean, it's a little bit more complicated than using XOR to draw a cursor, but not that much.

P.S. Xerox may score a few bucks from this, but that is all they can manage. Palm doesn't really need Graffiti anymore.

When the PalmPilot first came out, it really did need Graffiti; handwriting recognition on an 8 MHz CPU with a tiny amount of RAM needs all the help it can get. Now, with much more computing power in the latest Palm devices, a trainable system that adapts to the user's writing is probably the right thing.

Re:Xerox patent on UNISTROKES?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not believe unistrokes is at all nonobvious; instead I think it is the completely obvious and standard solution, if pursued by someone trained in the art of pattern recognition.

The two problems are:
1) How do you recognize the end of a character?
2) How do you maximize the SNR given sloppy human input?

The soution to the first problem is fully obvious -- use a single stroke to indicate a character. That is, implement the characters as a set of "gestures", where a gesture is a single engage, draw, disengage sequence. I believe people have been using gestures since the early sixties, for instance in "Sketchpad", an ealy mouse based graphics program. On a film I saw of Sketchpad in action, the operator would draw something like a circle, and the program would replace it with a perfect circle. There were gestures for circles, rectangles, and lines. The obvious and standard way to solve the problem of character distinction is to treat the charactes as gestures, i.e. single or "uni" strokes. I do not see how this can be fairly patented.

To maximize the SNR the standard pattern recognition trick, one I learned in a pattern recognition class in 1984, is to try to arrange your feature space so that the classes (letters in this case) are as well separated as possible. Any gesture based system will be concerned with the class separation of the gestures in feature space -- this is standard practice in the art of pattern recognition. My reading of the patent is that Xerox was trying to patent the set of getures that best separate in their specific feature space. This seems as valid as any other software patent to me: the calculation and selection of features can be subtle.

But what actually happened is that Xerox obtained, apparently, a patent on the use of any set of gestures used as an alphabet in the context of an electronic device. What this means practically is that Xerox somehow now owns the lower case alphabet, except for f, k, t, and x. Palm did not at all follow Xeorx -- they chose the gestures first for similarity to natural characters, then for separation in whatever feature space they are using. It is probably not the same feature space that Xerox was using since the approach is so different.

Note that Xerox owns these characters only in the context of some electronic or computer based input device, so it is still ok to use the alphabet to write on paper. Also it is ok to use these characters to write full words, i.e. where letter placement matters. You just cannot use these characters in some sort of input box, in a sequential fashion.

I think the patent as written is not so bad for a software patent, but I think the use of it against Palm is a disaster. It really does make it seem like there is no point in trying to do anything if they will allow patents to be applied so generally.

I've got an even better idea

[The Evil Couch]

USB port and ship it with a roll-up keyboard. having to learn a new way of writing just for a product to work is asinine.

contrary to some people's belief, knowing graffiti doesn't elevate you into an exclusive club. it simply means that you're willing to put up with corporate work-around solutions instead of demanding something that actually fits your needs.

Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad

[drivers]

Did you learn to type to use the computer?

Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad

[aengblom]

Whenever humans have to train themselves to adapt to a computer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H UI, this is an example of poor design

Ah yes, the failure of the pen and keyboard. Some of of the silliest inventions.

One would think that by now someone could make a device that read minds--but apparently that is hard.

(And probably not desirable anyway. "Computer: I wanted a spreadsheet not a girl spreading on the sheets. I don't care what I was thinking this is my office! )

Re:What about PocketPC's?

[watchful.babbler]

Assuming I understand your question, the reason is because Graffiti and Jot share many common "swooshes" when writing letters, though not symbols. But that is self-evident.

By reading the Federal Circuit opinion that reversed the district court's summary judgment, it seems that the key issue that prevents Jot from infringing is that it "does not allow for 'definitive recognition' of symbols immediately upon pen lift by the user." Certain letters and symbols in Jot -- 'T,' 'X,' the question mark, and so on -- require multiple strokes to create the character. The actual shapes of the characters are not part of the patent, so there's no problem with Jot and Xerox's Unistroke sharing swooshes.

This leads one to wonder why the Graffiti 'X' doesn't allow Graffiti to escape infringement -- the appellate court opinion quotes the district court as citing accented characters in this sense, but not Graffiti's two-stroke 'X.' If I had to make a wild guess, I'd assume this was proffered by Palm in district court and refuted by Xerox on the grounds that the first slash in the 'X' is actually the stroke to enter extended mode, and thus the 'X' is still technically a unistroke character. If Palm had simply reversed the direction of the strokes so that the first stroke wasn't extended mode, then they might have been immunized. Of such tiny errors are great patent cases decided.

Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad

[SirWhoopass]

Your argument assumes that writing by hand is some sort of natural act. It isn't. You had to learn it. Just because you learned how to do that before you learned how to type or write graffiti doesn't mean that hand-writing is superior.

Is printing superior to scripting? No, scripting is much faster, but you had to learn that too. Typing is much faster than writing by hand. If repetitive-stress disorders are a problem now, think of what they'd be if everyone was trying to write out things on tablets for data entry.

The problem most usability "experts" have is that they think it's never a good idea to learn a new interface. That is not universally true. While it is a bad idea to break interface concepts that are common (like red=stop, green=go), it doesn't mean every new interface is bad. When farm tractors were first introduced, several models had the operator driving the same way they drove a team of horses. The steering mechanism was designed to mimic the old horse-drawn equipment. While this method was familiar, it wasn't superior to the car-style interface that it now used.