Xerox Patent Ruled Invalid, palmOne Exonerated

An anonymous reader writes "palmOne has issued a press release, that a court has found that the patent that Xerox was using to sue Palm for its character entry method, and was developed in house, didn't infringe because the patent was invalid." The case was first brought against 3Com Corporation back in 1997 before they spun off the Palm brand name.

Comments

Reuters story

[ozric99]

Internetnews has this take on the story.

Re:Graffiti2 to Graffiti1 fix?

[Trongy]

Is there a fix for devices like the Clie to return it to using the original Graffiti pen strokes?

Yes there is a way. You have to get the Graffiti1 files from a Palm OS 5 device such as the Palm Tungsten T.

This article explains how.

The letter i in Graffiti2 is really anoying, also k and t are a pain. Making x a two stroke character is acceptable only because it occurs so infrequently in English.

Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return?

[jomas1]

You can probably put Graffiti 1 on your Graffiti 2 Palm device. See this link for one method:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_stor y.asp?ID=5830

Howto: Replace Graffiti 2 with Original Graffiti

[jomas1]

Don't know how to make my link work.

Here is the meat of the graffiti switch article from Palminfocenter if you want to use graffiti 1 instead of graffiti 2:

Step 1
Use a handheld that has the original Graffiti system installed , Use a handheld file manager, such as FileZ, to locate the following files (You will need to check the ROM box, as the files are stored in the device ROM):

Graffiti Library.prc, size: 30k, creator: grft
Graffiti Library_enUS.prc, size 22k, creator: grft

Step 2
Beam or copy the above 2 files to the target handheld you want to install original Graffiti on.

Step 3
Preform a soft reset (simply press the devices reset pin), and you're set to start enjoying original Graffiti again.

PIC tested this procedure with a Tungsten T and were able to successfully install Graffiti over Graffiti 2 on a Tungsten T2, Zire 71, Tungsten C and a Sony Clie NX80V. Other models that run Palm OS 5 should also be compatible. Even after the replacement the write anywhere on screen feature of Palm OS 5.2 still function as normal, even on the Tungsten C. The on-screen Graffiti reference also reverts back to the original guide.

Re:Invalid Invalid Invalid

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, Marconi, the guy who didn't invent the radio. His patent has failed to win against Nickola Teslas prior art 3 times in the courts. (It hasn't won against Tesla once that I know of.)

Seems that Teslas paper on wireless telography was published in Italy (and in Italian) 3 years prior to Marconi's device. (It was published in several European countries in native languages.)

Tesla even demonstrated the application of wireless telography at a worlds fair by using it to make a light go on/off. Though he didn't try morse code with it, or if he did, none of the fairgoers watching it noted it as such. (They probably couldn't read morse code if you hit them upside the head with a morse signal manual.)

Patents have been a screwy thing since a week after they started, maybe before. The only real difference is the level of stupidity of the new patent laws and examiners.... (I still think it's total BS that companies can patent something everyone knows they didn't create, and we have prior art going back thousands of years at least. Aka, Human DNA.) (Oh well, it's not as bad as US Copyright laws have gotten in a number of ways. yet...)

For those who don't know...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...here is how bad Graffiti 2 is. Why you write 't' the first stroke is an 'i'. When you make the horizontal stroke it sends a 'backspace' followed by a 't' to correct the incorrect 'i'. You can imagine how many applications are messed up by this. But it's worse: 'i' followed by a space (a horizontal stroke) is a 't'. So you have to wait between the 'i' and 'space' to make sure it doesn't come out as 't'. Please, please, pretty please, Palm bring back Graffiti 1. Graffiti 2 is like phoning people by rolling dice and pressing a button every time a digit you want comes up.

Re:For those who don't know...

[Just Some Guy]

As a stronger example, consider that Palm applications typically allow a lot of penstroke shortcuts to menu commands. You start the shortcut by writing a "/", then the associated letter. For example, the "delete" command often has a shortcut of "/d".

Now, consider what the poster said about how the letter "t" is generated (except that the first stroke is really a "l" and not an "i"; you write an "i" by drawing an "l" and then dotting it). If your application uses "/t" as a shortcut, that shortcut cannot be written, since the menu-shortcut function accepts the first penstroke of the "t" as an "l" and processes it before you can cross the "t". No matter how fast you try to write "/t", it always gets interpreted as "/l <space>". Sucks to be you if "t" is the shortcut for "take a backup", and "l" is the shortcut for "lose this immediately".

Did I mention yet in this post that I hate Grafitti 2? I didn't? Oh, then: I hate Grafitti 2.

Re:Use in Open Source projects

[julesh]

Unless Palm have their own patents on it, I guess so.

The Xerox patent was on "unistrokes", a system that was _very_ similar to Graffiti, but is a little simpler to implement, faster to use, and harder to learn.

Unistroke uses only three types of stroke, a straight line, a curve through 90 degrees and a curve that crosses back over itself, which makes the recognition much easier than graffiti. The system was designed to be quick to use: common sequences of letters alternate in direction, so that you have to reposition your pen less frequently. The drawback is that these two factors mean that a lot of the strokes are non-obvious, bearing little or no relationship to the letter they encode.