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

so long, farewell

[greechneb]

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.

People don't want Graffiti, Jot and so on

[loggia]

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.

Re:People don't want Graffiti, Jot and so on

[drivers]

That's funny, my mom, my sister, and my boss (and I) all seem to use grafitti on our Palm computers just fine. My 4 year old niece uses the popup keyboard though. I'm not making this up.

Re:Why remove code?

[pavera]

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 suspect that a public outcry is in the works...

[$$$$$exyGal]

I can only imagine people hording old palms, and riots ensuing. Remember when Coke II came out? Some dude stored a 1000 or so cases of coke in his garage, it was a media frenzy, and then finally, "Coca Cola Classic" was born.

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.

--naked

Mandatory Reference

[johnalex]

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.

Re:Mandatory Reference

[c]

I used a Newton (2000/2100) for a few years and I have a Palm now.

To be completely honest, I prefer Grafitti. I'd prefer it even more if
I could write anywhere on the screen (as Jot allows), but then again
I think the Grafitti pad is nice in that it cuts down the wear on the
screen.

The problem with the Newton engine is that it took ages to tune
it so that it was comfortable. Even then, I found I had to adjust my
own writing... bigger, more deliberate scribbles, for example. And
trying to actually take notes when it mattered or convert them later
was just too much twiddling around. The handwriting recognition worked
well when it worked, but it was just an incredible bother to get it
that far.

The Palm concept is simple, cheap, functional and (in my opinion)
disposable. Grafitti fits well with that model. I imagine that Jot
fits even better.

c.

What is Xerox going to do with it?

[core plexus]

Are they just going to sit on the patent, or do something with it? Anyone know?

Pentagon Seeks Robots-Prize is $1 Million

ga! grafiti is so so so much better

[MikeLRoy]

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.

It's a good thing

[hawkestein]

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

Re:It's a good thing

[Nomad7674]

I am definitely in the same boat. My first PDA was a Philips Nino which I bought because after using both in a store, I found the Nino SO MUCH easier to write on. JOT works with the way I write and think, and has always been a lot easier to use than Grafiti. When I upgraded from my Nino to a Palm IIIc, I decided to try out Grafiti but after a month of use decided Grafiti was simply not worth the effort. I bought CIC's version for the Palm, and found myself suddenly productive again.

Many say that JOT is slower than Grafiti and they have a point. A well-practiced Grafiti user will outpace a well-practiced JOT user every time... but the number of well-practiced Grafiti users I know can be counted on one finger. All the rest use the on-screen keyboard instead. But every person I know who installed JOT uses it daily.

What about PocketPC's?

[detritus.]

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?

Well this sucks.

[Deathlizard]

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.

with the exception of

[night_flyer]

x t i & j what other characters are out there that cannot be written in a single stroke? (think cursive here)

Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad

[MissMyNewton]

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

Yeah, and remember when your teachers MADE you write in a certain way? Bet you hated it then and don't do it now...

Boy do I miss my newton!!!

Re:How do I "Jot"?

[chefmonkey]

I'm a bit confused. If Xerox's patent covers the whole one-stroke-per-character interface, I don't see offhand how Jot doesn't infringe.

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?

Keyboards are obvious, Graffiti is not

[cmoney]

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.

Re:slashdotted server already

[Asprin]

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. :(

Re:I LOVED Graffiti!

[harlows_monkeys]

You're kidding, right? Please tell me this is sarcasm

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.

Why don't they fight it?

[LenE]

Unistrokes, or "Unistrokes for Computerized Interpretation of Handwriting", as it is referred to in Xerox's 1997 patent, is a system of text-entry using single-stroke symbols for computerized recognition of handwritten text.

Palm using Graffiti goes way back to the early nineties. One would think that they would have no problem proving prior art.

-- Len

thanks for the link.

[twitter]

I prefer the US government site to view stuff like this.

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.

Graffiti UI issues

[Ilan Volow]

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.

Re:I own an pocket pc...

[plumby]

regocnition

I see your keyboard has recognition problems too :-)

Seriously, though, I use Transcriber all the time and I rarely get a problem with it. It's far quicker than the letter recogniser, and on the odd occasion where it refuses to read the letter that I put in, I tend to use the onscreen keyboard. Have you been through and 'trained' Transcriber (selected the relevant character styles)? That makes a big difference.

My wife is a primary school teacher, so is very precise with her character forming, and has so far got near enough 100% accuracy whenever she's played with mine (ooh err).