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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."
Now, after making my handwriting unreadable to anyone/anything but a Graffiti capable palm, the next generation devices won't be able to read what I write either. keyboards from here out, I guess.
I post links to stuff here
By the Brighthand News Team
January 13th, 2003
When you think Palm, you think Graffiti. But Palm's long-standing association with its home-grown character recognition software is about to take a dramatic turn. PalmSource, the operating system subsidiary of Palm, Inc., announced today that future versions of Palm OS will not contain Graffiti. Rather, they will incorporate a modified version of Communication Intelligence Corporation's Jot handwriting recognition software, something it's calling Graffiti 2 powered by Jot.
The impetus for the switch appears to be legal rather than technical. In April 1997, Xerox sued Palm, claiming that Graffiti was essentially derived from its patented Unistrokes technology. 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. However, it appeared Palm dodged a legal bullet when, in June 2000, a federal judge dismissed the case. But in late 2001, Xerox won a reversal in the U.S. Court of Appeals and the lawsuit was back on, and it's been hanging over Palm's head ever since.
CIC's Jot recognition software has long been found on competing handhelds running on the Pocket PC platform. As with Graffiti, its alphabet is based on block characters. However, unlike Graffiti, some characters require two rather than one stroke. Therefore, Jot characters more closely resemble common block letters than Graffiti characters. According to Marlene Somsak, Palm's VP of Communications, this will reduce the learning curve. "For new Palm users, Graffiti 2 powered by Jot is more intuitive and natural than Graffiti," Ms. Somsak told Brighthand.
Hints to Graffiti's demise began to surface last year, when Palm OS licensee Handspring said it was dropping Graffiti in favor of integrated thumb-type keyboards for its Treo organizers. And Palm itself announced in November that, for the first time, it was bundling Communication Intelligence Corporation's Jot handwriting recognition software with its upcoming Tungsten W handheld.
According to Lee Williams, VP of Engineering for PalmSource, the move to Graffiti 2 will allow Palm Platform licensees the choice of foregoing the silk-screened "hard" Graffiti area, since Jot can accept input from anywhere on a device's touchscreen.
According to Mr. Williams, Graffiti 2 powered by Jot will be a modified version of the current version of Jot found on CIC's website. It will be included in future releases of the Palm operating system, including the upcoming Palm OS 4.1.2 and Palm OS 5.2, and will be included in the Palm Developer's Kit (PDK) as part of a unified API.
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
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...
Ok, here we have people complaining about how grafitti is a bad thing, but in this thread there will be lots of people who really like grafitti. Am I the only one that's utterly confused?
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
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.
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
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.
wr:tng in graff1ti was so guick, 4ccurete and oonveniemt!
:P
whot th3 fsck am i goin;;;;: to do nuw?
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
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.
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
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
http://www.johnalex.org/
Pentagon Seeks Robots-Prize is $1 Million
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!
Thank you Xerox, from the depths of my bank account.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Check out CIC's web site for information on JOT, as well as a listing of the symbols.
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
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
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?
Q: How many Newtons does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Faux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup!
Why not go with a Rune based system for the LOTR fan base?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Palm should have used something like Jot from the start, or they should have copied Xerox's Unistrokes better.
Here is some Unistrokes performance data showing it to be the fastest of the bunch. There are papers comparing Graffiti and Unistrokes directly, and, again, Unistrokes comes out way ahead.
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.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I bet that transition wasn't half as bad as when coke switched out the cocaine.
"Coca Cola Oldschool"
x t i & j what other characters are out there that cannot be written in a single stroke? (think cursive here)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.
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Did you learn to type to use the computer?
I know that Graffiti had very reasonable usability: "After one minute studying the Graffiti reference chart, about 86% accuracy is attainable. Following five minutes of practice, accuracy improves to about 97%. Without further practice, users demonstrate total retention after a one-week lapse, with accuracy holding at around 97%."
How does the usability of Jot compare? Any ideas? Personally, if I am entering text, I like to use a thumb keyboard (e.g., Blackberry). One more thing, I guess that Jot 2.0 is available as shareware. It gets good ratings, but I haven't seen any "real" usability research.
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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! )
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
"The only 'intuitive interface' is the nipple. EVERYTHING else is learned."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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!!!
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
You're forgetting history. Until recently, computers didn't have the processing power to understand arbitrary input (and a computers attempts to still aren't perfect.) Dispite this, people who wanted the computer now instead of later adapted.
Sure, true handwriting recognition was adequete and available when the Palm first came out. But it was also processor intensive. Certainly more demanding than the puny 16 Mhz processor in the Palm. To support handwriting recognition would have required a faster processor and thus, a shorter battery life. In fact, about the time of my first Palm, Microsoft's PocketPCs had handwriting recognition. Of course, they were surprisingly warm to the touch when running and measured their battery lifespan in hours. The Palms of the era generated no noticable heat and measured their lifespan in weeks! As someone who easily forgets to buy new batteries (or recharge my newer PalmOS device), I appreciate this.
Yes, ideally my computer would perfectly understand my handwriting without any training period. However there will need to be a balance between price, battery life, heat, and ease of input for the forseeable future. For many people (including the millions of Palm users), Palm achieved the best balance available at the time.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Forget the control key. Where's the any key?!? I can't continue like this!
Umm how exactly is a Palm going to do realtime handwriting recognition? It's not, a P4 can't do a very good job of it so a couple Mhz Dragonball doesn't stand a chance. There is a reason that the Palm uses graffiti and that is that the driving force of the Palm was simplicity and long battery life. I don't think I'll ever get a Palm past my IIIxe because I don't need a color screen, mp3 player or any other "cute" feature, I need an electronic organizer with meeting reminders and I don't want to recharge it twice a day, I want to change out the batteries once a month at the most, which is exactly what my Palm does for me.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
It should remain a very simply process of installing a 3rd party piece of software to add Grafiti support, similar to what users of the Handspring Treo do now.
Jimbo writes the note, then reads it back.
Jimbo: "Eat up Martha? Bah!"
Jimbo throws the Newton, hitting Martin in the head.
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.
Quite a few printed letters we write every day require multiple strokes to write them cleanly and properly.
That may be true for printed letters, but among Latin lowercase cursive letters, the only ones that need more than one stroke are i (need the dot to distinguish ii from u) and t (crossed).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I had a PocketPC (Nino) before switching to Palm. The relatively restrictive "graffiti" and the piss-poor application integration were my only complaints against the otherwise superior Palm (Vx). Oh, wait, it was those things, and the fact that the Palm has a permanent writing area, instead of the much more clever virtual one.
Point being, hacking up Jot to do Graffiti would be a step backwards in my opinion.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Palm using Graffiti goes way back to the early nineties. One would think that they would have no problem proving prior art.
-- Len
Did you learn to type to use the computer?
Just like we all learned to type, on a QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to slow typists down so they didn't jam the early mechanical typewriters. Yet another example of designing for the machine and not the human. I'd say you've proven his point quite nicely.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Newly developed? Inkwell has existed for a long, long time. It was Rosetta, the printed recognizer on the Newton before the Newton was killed in 1997.
Strangely, I don't see why Palm doesn't have prior art claims (those apply in patent cases, right?) Graffiti was released as an enhancement to supplement the initially bad HWR on the early Newtons. I think it was available in '93 or '94 (though I don't know for sure.) Strange.
I've owned several Palms, over the last 5 years. I love graffitti, it's quick and easy for me now.
For Xmas, my bud got me a Dell Axim for a present. One of the first things I figured out, was how to put it in "Block Recognizer" mode, so that it understands Grafitti.
Now Palm's moving away from Grafitti, basically leaving all of their existing customer base wtih their best upgrade option for the future, being to move to the competitions products, since it better suits their ingrained habits.
Seems like a disastrous decision to me.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I'm seeing a lot of reactions along the lines of " Graffiti kicked ass! This sucks!" and responses saying "Graffiti sucks! Newton's better 'cause it can read real handwriting!" and so on. To me, this is all irrelevant because the best input option is neither: it's the keyboard. A lot of people seem to think that handwriting is better because it's more "natural", but they're overlooking a century of experience that tells us that people can be much faster with input using a keyboard. Trying to get a machine to understand handwriting is a cool idea, but why would you bother with that when you can just enter charachters manually, with much better accuracy and speed?
I recently got a Handspring Treo for christmas, and I'm already used to the controls - I didn't have to waste time teaching myself a new writing system, or trying to teach the thing my handwriting style. When I need to enter 'Q', I just press the button that says 'Q'. How much simpler can you get?
I've noticed that a lot of new handhelds (Treo, Blackberry, Hiptop) have integrated keyboards instead of handwriting-recognition. I think this is because the "gimmick" factor of writing on a computer have faded, and people are more concerned about usability now. It's just too bad Palm decided to go to another flaky "writing system" instead of putting a decent keyboard in.
The advantage is that the keyboard is designed to lessen pen (stylus) movement based on common words. It is highly customizable and supports international characters. shifting, special characters, etc.
I like it and it works for me. I won't miss Graffiti at all. Worth a look if you're interested in alternatives.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
Yes, but oldtimers may remember that Graffiti is older than the Pilot. Palm used to make Graffiti for the early Newtons (in the 'Egg Freckles' days), back when Newtons were the *only* PDAs.
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).