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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."
I never was really fond of graffiti, it was a pain to try to type in.
I finally learned, and got rather proficient at it. The breaking point was when I started to write on paper using graffiti. It was then I realized how dependant I was on it.
I love Graffiti, but I have noticed that most people do not use it or similar applications. They want little thumb keyboards.
Now hold on a sec - those of us SlashDot faithful are not representative of the average Palm user. But if you look at your sister or boss or the guy on the train, very few of them like or bothered to learn Graffiti.
Oh well.
Because they lost a patent infringement case,
they either have to pay lots of money or remove the feature entirely.
This is not by choice, they are being forced to do this.
I realize this is different because it is a legal switch rather than a "taste" switch. But that may give the public all the more reason to protest the change. Will people really give a darn? I wonder.
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OK, someone had to say it, so I will:
Graffiti never held a candle to the Newton's handwriting recognition. I know; I used both.
The Newton recognized my handwriting, something that my wife rarely does. I use Graffiti on my Handspring Visor now, but I really miss my Newton. Well, actually, it was the taxpayers' Newton, since testing it was part of my campus job.
Just the same, I have to wonder if the legal eagles haven't killed another good product with their new emphasis on IP issues. Graffiti wasn't the best, but it was good enough for what I have to do.
JA
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Having used both grafiti and jot extensively, i find jot much less reliable. White it may be more me then the software, grafiti tends to make less mistakes, whereas i have to correct far more in jot. Oh well.
That, and all my profs have learned to read grafiti, er, my handwriting.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I think this is definitely a good thing. I've been using various incarnation of Palms for about 4 years now, and I vastly prefer Jot to Graffiti. Jot was one of the only commercial software products I ever purchased for my Palm. It's much more intuitive than Graffiti, though I don't think it's any faster.
The only difficulty I've had with Jot is getting it to do the underscore properly. But othe
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I can remember when playing with a iPaq store demo and playing around with the handwriting recognition settings (I can't remember what I selected), I was able to write in grafitti with great accuracy. How can Microsoft/Compaq get away with that?
Whenever humans have to train themselves to adapt to a computer UI, this is an example of poor design.
When *consumers* have to learn a new language just to be able to use a consumer device, that's just downright brain-damaged.
And don't tell me computers can't recognize handwriting. The ortiginal PDA, Apple's overpriced Newton, could not only read plain handwriting, it could interpret it. You would scribble: "Meet with Bob Friday" and it would find all the Bobs in your addressbook, ask which one you want, and confirm that you meen the next forthcoming Friday.
Years later the Palm can't even read plain ol text?
Oh, and Mac OS X 10.2 can read plain handwriting too. What is it about non-Apple products that make them so incapable of working for humans, instead preferring making humans work for them?
One would think that by now somebody would have figured out a way to do it for a consumer-priced device.
I'm way, way, way faster entering text with one of the various freeware Qwerty screen-based keyboards (VirtualKB is great) and am toying with moving directly to one of those silkscreen thingies you can put on the graffiti area to type Qwerty there.
Graffiti is definitely not all it's cracked up to be (at least for me) while I can write the graffitis fast enough, I find it extremely disconcerting to write characters on top of each other: it goes against many years of learned behaviour (handwriting) and for this reason I don't think it'll ever feel natural. I also read somewhere an article that was talking about exactly this phenomenon.
In my opinion there is no reason for graffiti/graffiti-like stuff to exist: for pdas use a Qwertyish keyboard (on screen or hardware) for tablet PCs just use standard handwriting recognition software.
Man, comparing that to Graffiti, I'll take Jot. The characters seems a bit more natural. I constantly screw up X and K. Stupid Graffiti, I shouldn't have to change my behavior to fit my handheld; this has been my biggest pet peeve with the Palm.
Of course, I got spoiled with the Newton. Don't listen to the detractors, they probably never used a late-model Newton for any length of time. Once it learned (!) your handwriting, it was all gravy. That thing kicked some serious butt. I used a MP2100 for years, then had to join the rest of the world with a Palm-OS piece of junk. There's nothing as elegant as the Newton interface today. Freaking work of art.
Graffiti was a really nice system for the palmpilot. it was easy, simple and fast. I'm afraid of what the newer Graffiti would be like simply because I've used the pocketpc equivilant and even though it's similar to graffiti in many ways, the places where it is different make it a real pain. not to mention is seemed to be a lot slower than graffiti simply because it required more stroke in some of the characters.
Frankly, If Graffiti can be sued, what stops xerox from suing CIC for their Jot character recgonition? especially when unistrokes looked nothing like graffiti and still won.
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x t i & j what other characters are out there that cannot be written in a single stroke? (think cursive here)
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If you look at the character chart, every Jot character except "X" has a one-stroke equivalent (in fact, only "I", "J", and "T" have a two-stroke varient).
Certainly modifying grafitti so that "X" is two strokes would not have been sufficient to fend off the lawsuit, right? So what gives?
Hmmm, I wonder if Palm even considered licensing Inkwell from Apple? (Inkwell is Apple's newly developed handwriting recognition software)
It's a pretty simple distinction. As far as text entry goes, imaging a person walking up to two different text entry devices. One is a keyboard. They see letters, and hitting the letters puts text on the screen. Simple, fast, obvious.
The other is a Graffiti pad and a stylus. They try what seems natural and start writing letters. Oops, some work, some don't. Hmmm, what's going on.
That's why, although people may not know the "proper" way of typing, they can still use a keyboard. You may not be as efficient, but it still works. With a Palm and Graffiti, you must learn to remember the Graffiti keystrokes to even get it to work.
I also remember something from my old Palm V manual about "if you have trouble making certain characters, try writing them backwards (mirror image)" or words to that effect. Sure 'nuff, most characters and numbers can be written that way as well.
My big gripe with Graffiti was that the cut-and-paste commands were easy to botch. I lost data several times because I overwrote the stuff I was trying to copy with a capital 'C'. If you didn't realize right away or the data was too big to undo -- oops! And with PalmOS, it's not like you can quit without saving.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
No, he is not kidding. What Palm did, and Apple didn't do, is find out what people actually wanted, rather than what people thought they wanted.
Apple listened to what people said they wanted, and went for zero training over accuracy. Palm figured out that accuracy was way more important to people, even though people said otherwise.
Palm was and is far superior to Newton and PocketPC in almost every way that is actually important to people. PocketPC has been able to somewhat overcome that by massive marketing. Apple didn't have to resources that Microsoft has to market past the fundamental flaw of not really understanding the customer, so Newton never took off.
Palm using Graffiti goes way back to the early nineties. One would think that they would have no problem proving prior art.
-- Len
The patent you point to does not look like something that graphiti would infringe on because graphiti is not rotationaly independent and graphiti uses a seperate area for numerals. Suppose this and other reasons are why the case was tossed out?
In any case, the patent itself is broad and very late. The referenced material dates back to 1982 and we can be sure that there was plenty of prior art. Yes, this is essentially patenting all styles of handwriting that might be easy for a computer to read. The same things make hadwriting easy for people to read as well. The is why most alphabets are mostly rotationally independent and involve as few strokes as possible. If Palm was ugly enough to keep others from using graphiti type systems, they deserve the same treatment, but it all goes to show how silly patents have become.
I'm going to miss graphiti as the replacements, short of a keyboard, just don't work. As Xerox managed to NOT file until 1997, it will be a decade before others may use this without paying Xerox a fee. I hope Xerox will be reasonable, ten years from now voice recognition will be good enough on portable devices and graphiti will be worthless.
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I agree with the part about people adapting to the computer UI, but in the case of Palm, Graffiti was the proper UI decision to make for that era.
In UI design, just as in engineering, we have trade-offs. You let something give in one area to get something in return. Palm's design had to use grafitti because it was the only way to create a device that was capable of fitting easily in your shirt pocket and running on batteries for entire month(s) (a Palm back then with a 200mhz CPU like the one in my zaurus would have been like carrying around a brick). People seem to forget that how people interact with hardware UI is just as much part of the user experience as how they act with the software UI. This is doubly true for a device that is carried around as opposed to one that sits on your desk all day. In fact, the creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, did something that few PDA creators actually do: he shaped a block of wood (i.e. made a prototype) that would easily fit into the pocket and from there built up the model of user interaction with the hardware by carrying the thing around to meetings and writing on it (that's how he came up with grafitti). Any good UI design person will tell you that you should design the interface before you start designing the technical stuff (as opposed to grafting it on last as 'a testament to modularity'). I really wish that designers of mobile devices took half as much care designing their products as Jeff Hawkins did with the original Palm.
While the Newton was a great idea, it was somthing that didn't easily fit into the pocket. I had heard rumors that mac journalist Andy Ihnatko actually created a "holster" so that he was able to carry the Newton around with him whereever he went; if that isn't a great example of a human being forced to adapt to clunky technology, I don't know what is.
But your are completely right to criticize grafitti in this day and age. Palm processors have gotten faster and memory has gotten larger, yet none of these resources have been used to make Palms handwriting recognition any more accurate or Grafitti any more humane. For crying out loud, the next generation of mobile devices will have 400mhz StrongARM processors; before we use this all this power to do multi-media this and wireless connectivity that, we should make sure that people have the ability to easily write stuff into their PDA's.
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I've been reading all the "Graffiti is hard to learn" posts... and I'm kind of baffled. I am not the fastest learner in the bunch, my memory is just awful, but I learned it in about 10 minutes. Literally 10 minutes.
If someone told you "write the alphabet using one continuous stroke for each letter" you would pretty much just write the Graffiti characters w/o having ever seen a Palm.
Seeing as Handspring has moved completely to using keyboards in their Treo line (and the Visor line has been killed off), I wonder what Jeff's take is on the (non)use of Graffiti? I mean, don't get me wrong, the usability that Handspring has put into their keyboards is amazing (great keyboard shortcuts, if you've never used one yet), but I actually like using Graffiti. Now that the "real" Graffiti is dead, I wonder what his feelings are on input for handhelds in general.
In fact, I would love to see a Slashdot interview with him on this very topic. I like the thumbboards, but I find that I can't touch type on them yet, which makes it hard to write notes and pay attention to the person that I am listening to (in a meeting, for example). That's why I loved Graffiti.
Don't get me wrong, Jot isn't bad, but I actually like having single strokes for common letters (read: I don't want to two strokes for K, T, etc.).
I always thought the handwriting systems in general were pretty stupid for most things. Some people here on slashdot may remember the "Avigo" handheld that Texas Instruments had out there for a while. I owned an Avigo (still do, actually), and its alternative to handwriting recognition was really great.
The idea is simple: you have an on-screen keyboard with letters grouped together. ABC, DEF, etc. You tap the button that has the letter you need on it, then the next, etc. As you go along, the Avigo references a dictionary and the context to try and figure out which word you're typing from the combination of letters. I found that about 90% of the time, its guess was right-on with what I was trying to type. And when it wasn't, the alternatives were listed right on-screen, so all I had to do was tap.
It's a shame that Palm et al haven't implemented something like this on modern handhelds. The Avigo had very little power, very little memory, and it managed to pull off word-recognition really well. It was a lot faster than Graffiti, and a lot more accurate. C'mon, Palm! You need something to propel you ahead of the PocketPCs, and this is it! Give the people something faster and more accurate than scribbling on a plastic screen for God's sake.
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My Dell Axim can do that! It has Pocket PC 2002 and it includes a program called "Transcriber" which allows you to write in cursive longhand and it recognizes it an inputs it into your document. It has about a 90% recognition factor at what I have it set for. You can set a slider bar to choose faster or more accurate. I can just fly on it. It's way faster than "jot" (which is also included). If you want it will also recognize individual block letters,or printed letters, or cursive letters, or mixed in any combination. You can even put in math and it will recognize it. Here is a page on it.
Grafitti-like
The recognition is not much better than on palm's grafitti, but pocket pc's recognition is software based, inthat, instead of that box at the bottom of all palms where you have to write, pocketpc can hide that box whenever you want, just by hitting a button. I get about 70-80% accuracy with the grafitti like system(lifting your pen off the surface can can make unwanted letters to popup). This is the best system to use for me.
Freehand Recognizer
As part of that freehand input, you can run a notepad like program in pocketpc, that lets you write on the screen, and then "recognize" your handwritten notes. Very cool, but not all that useful, about 50% accuracy (not worth using regularly).
QWERTY Keyboard
Pocketpc also uses that software input box for a keyboard that is quite useful to use. Not as productive as a full sized ofcourse, but decent typing can be done by hunt-and-pecking. I would say about 85% recognition, but it is slow, accurate, but slow.
Transcriber
I have a third option for my pocketpc. Transcriber is a microsoft program that lets you write in free hand on the screen and takes it as any other input(similar to notepad,but usable in any program). It is more of a novelty than an utility as regocnition for it isn't great, but the program idea is quite cool. Around 60-70% worth using, neat to have, but a novelty.
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