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Alternative to Graffiti Input?
An anonymous coward writes "A team at NYU has developed a new text entry system for the palmpilot.
It is much different than graffiti, and takes a little getting used to, but it is much much faster than graffiti.
You can download it and play with a java demo here
It seems pretty cool. "
"dive it a try"
;-)
Keep practicing - You almost got all the letters right
I prototyped something like this on a joypad (see a post last september in comp.sys.wearables titled 'joypad-based keyboard' .. it's still in dejanews) but found that the pad I tried had poor definition : it was hard to avoid wobbling between adjacent sectors of the pad. Might work on a better quality pad, or one of those heavy-duty joysticks that arcade games use.
-adrian
It's a lot of fun, but my poor Pilot 1000 with
its OS3 card gets a Fatal Exception after every
50 characters or so. I hope the "product" version
is more reliable.
Hey! I gave it a shot and I like it! I'm going to have to try it on my Palm Pilot when I get home. I frequently have problems getting graffiti to recognize my characters and once you get off track with graffiti you can mangle 3 or 4 characters easily before you get back in the groove. I also hate picking the pen up (Yes, I'm just THAT lazy.)
It's a neat idea. I hope to see it as at least an option on future PDAs.
I sussed this in about two minutes without reading the instructions properly!
If the 'layout' was displayed over the writing area then it would be even easier.
Now I've got to convince my mate with a Palm to download it...
Does it display what you wrote on an LCD?
The layout has been optimized for speed. You need to invest a little time in the beginning in order to reap the benefits of this particular design.
If you think about it the conventional alphabet is pretty arbitrary as well.
Graffiti almost works - but not quite - because the letters and digits look much more similar to each other than you'd expect from a similarly sized number of random simplified letter-like symbols.
If somebody were to change the alphabet (or maybe just 4-5 letters to get rid of problem areas) it would be a lot more efficient.
I, for one, am totally willing to use Graffiti's "^" symbol for the letter "A".
Yea, what I was thinking is that you could just have a higher friction surface in the middle, it could be pretty subtle, just enough so you know when you're there. This would only work for Plam model, not CE, of course. But for mnemonics it woul be better to have big letters appear around the main screen anyway. Who says you need to be looking where the pen is?
Miles Parker (can't rememebr my user name!)
miles@clark.net
It would be nice to have an X tool to feed cahracters into the input stream with a pad like this on screen that you could swirl the mouse about on - say a windowmaker dock ?
Save me using the keyboard. Have the 3rd mouse button (or a combination of mouse buttons) bring up the pad at the pointer position, and just swirl the mouse about to send text to the current window - total single handed interaction !
It's definitely faster than clicking on an on-screen virtual keyboard !!
It looks like it has a much steeper learning curve than graffiti, but it also looks super fast. I'd be interested in trying it on an actual palmpilot (can you just download it on or something?)
*grin* I wonder if I could get one of those mouse touchpads and write a driver for it so I didn't need a keyboard anymore =)
They effectively came up with a single-stroke alphabet. If you take the "arrows" produced by the pen movement as characters you basically get a new unambiguous character set that could even be used on paper or as a screen font. It takes a bit of practice but considering how well this could scale across different devices it may end up as the text input method of the future.
It wouldn't work too well on paper. With paper-centric writing (in english) you start at the bottom left, swoosh your way through the letter, and wind up at the bottom right, ready for the next letter.
With this system, however, you start each letter at the center move to the outside and come back to the center (possibly by way of another outside). Your pen always ends up where you started. On paper, you'd wind up writing all your
letters on top of each other.
You can already use it on Palm, so off you go to the nearest store.
Their server claims this file is text/plain, and most browsers believe them (as is required). IE's brain-damaged HTTP support masks the real problem - for once two bugs counteract.
"the conventional alphabet is pretty arbitrary as well"
What a great comment; only true geeks think this way!
This happened to me, too, with my palm III.
Luckily, the hotsync was successful first, so I don't think I've lost any data.
The quikwrite.prc file on the page appears to be corrupted, but the version contained in the quikwrit.zip file is fine. Loads and runs correctly on my PPro, P-III and POSE.
This is kind of like a 8 button chorded keyboard.
... it seems there are still some slight room
for tweaking, eg. I'd exchange `0' and `.'.
This is a nice alternative to (Proprietary)
Grafitti for the LinuxPDA projects (Linux 7k and
LinuxCE so far).
/Tommy
I can't believe how simple and effective this system is! Not only is it easy to use, but not too difficult to code. Basically, the template is in the shape of an octagon. You cross from the inside through one edge and depending what edge you return to the inside produces a letter. Ingenious!
...a little window with a replica of the keyboard in it. Click/tap on a key to emulate that keypress. Caps lock and num lock toggle. Shift, control and alt keys toggle, but reset after hitting a regular key.
I did this once, a long time ago, for Windows 2.1, for use by paraplegics who had to "type" with a pointy straw thingy in their mouths that plugged into the mouse port. I found it was kind of fun to use this with the real mouse to type.
I've been getting sore wrists lately. I suspect this is the downside of having escaped Microsoft's fantasy land. So much typing. Is RSI in my near future?
I wonder if I can do something like this for X? Is this a good newbie project?
Done very well, but for a few complaints: why the three character codes, such as :)
369 => 'j',
You don't need them - make it
39 => 'j',
and save yourself some keystrokes
Jezzball (who forgets his password and is on his new home's computer (erm, home, best friends house, whatever, getting kicked out sucks)).
I don't own a palm pilot, but I was in the store yesterday trying them out. So my experience levels with Graffiti and with Quickwrite are the same.
;-(
I would say that Quickwrite is easier to learn, and easier to use.
Many Graffiti strokes are against the grain. (I was taught to make an "A" by starting at the top, going down and left, going back to the top, down and right, then finishing the letter with a left to right horizontal stroke. Where did this upside down "V" come from?)
Many of the Graffiti strokes are like this. Some strokes are modeled on the uppercase letter, some on the lowercase letter. It's all a mish-mash.
Quickwrite is fairly easy to pick up. Frequently used letters are just a simple back and forth stroke. Plus you never need to lift the stylus from the pad. This is a big plus. I can write cursively (script) much faster than I can write block letters. (especially lowercase ones... I just don't seem to have a lowercase font built into my mind. I have to "draw" each letter, rather than just blatting it out on the page.
The only drawback I saw, was the lack of cursor keystrokes. I'd hate to have to untype several words, just because I forot a letter. (get it..:-)
Anyways, just a POV from one who's new to both and used to neither.
Is anyone else reminded of pie menus? Don Hopkins of UMD :-) code... the idea was that you clicked up a menu and it "bloomed" around the cursor, then you gestured in a direction to select,
did most of the work, I think; there was a twm that used them, as well as a bunch of
display postscript, err, I mean NeWS
and if that would "drop down" another menu, instead you got a new bloom for the submenu. A key trick was that you could learn these sequences of gestures very easily...
so repetitive operations became fast. There was a twm implementation using them, as well as a Tk menu object replacement; the last place I saw the code
was in dux.com's SimCity for Linux, which used a Tk-based UI wrapper. (Yep, a commercial game for linux,
several *years* before Civ:CTP...)
Hey, it worked for me, too, and I have the cheapest 3-button Logitech mouse I could find.
Actually, it wouldn't be hard to add a "heads up" mode to this system.
All you'd do is switch from tracking absolute position to relative position, and require the user to lift the stylus between letters. You'd also need some kind of way of indicating long strokes instead of short ones. For example, you could say that any stroke is a short stroke (the most common) unless you follow it with its reverse. Thus f would look like a "7" written from the bottom up, and the next letter over that would normally take a long stroke (forgot what it was) would be like a "7" written from the bottom where you trace back over the top line.
Then in "heads up" mode, it'd feel more like block printing (only faster) and in "heads down"mode it would be slightly faster.
Of course, the real fatal flaw with this system is its "curb appeal". It _looks_ complicated, although it's quite simple in practice.
Pratice is the key. Playing with a mouse I've gotten close to my writting speed. That is with only twenty minutes of pratice. I sort of get into this scribbling type mode, and the characters quickly fly out. I now know enough about it to implement it. The neet thing is it's such a simple system to decode the motions.
I saw a while back on the MIT wearable home page that they were working on a finger tracking system so that your finger could act as a mouse for things like pull down menus.
It'd be interesting if you could incorporate this, perhaps switching between a plain mouse mode and text input mode or perhaps displaying an input square on your goggles which behaves as an input device while your finger is in the square...
The NYU project is no good if you need to produce more than a very few dozen characters at most. Recognizing stroke order works the best. Unfortunately, the roman alphabet has no standard taught stroke order for its characters. Everyone just goes their own way.
Warm reset works....no data loss:
hold up-button and press reset button on
back to execute.
We could write each other notes that no one else could read.
You could also have each word begin a new loop, and each charactcter in the same quadrant appear a little further out than the one before it. Kelbasa? It would look like a series of little daisies palnted one after another, with larger words bigger, not longer!
I don't have a palm, but it was great with the track point on my thinkpad.
A PDA with a trackpoint type thing would be great and would allow one finger input!
Yeah, the hardest thing with the applet was keeping the mouse in the center, and not accidentally moving into
:-)
one of the zones...
That'll be your crummy PC mouse with the tracking set far too fast to be well controllable (in Linux or WinDos).
I've never been able to fathom how PC users manage to select things accurately in, say, Photoshop when their mice are so hyperactive and jittery. Not to mention when you pick up PC mice to move them to a different place on the mouse pad the cursor jumps wildly across the screen - sometimes more than 30 pixels!
Give me a nice accurate, ergonomic Mac mouse anyday
I found that the applet worked beautifully and gave very precise and quick control over the typing...
The rule is so simple to learning in 30 second. I am sure it will replace the old one as the default input method in the future.
Hmm. Yes there should be some feedback when you enter the inner area. Would audio feedback work?
Alternativley an input pad could be designed that provides the feedback in hardware (eg. a concave surface or dimples or whatever).
Wait till they make a mind-reading interface.
Maybe that would explain those columns of "alien script" decorating starwars.com. :)
Ummm... he wasn't asking how to do it. He was asking why his entirely unrelated mouse motion put a y on the screen. I think the applet is just a little sensitive. With a small amount of practice, though, I was able to write full sentences without any real problem. I would imagine with an actual palm pilot (andthe fact that there is some resistance when you move your stylus), it would work much better
Yeah, good call. But I think that would only help beginners, or for those obscure punctuation marks that I can never remember in Grafitti either. A smaller square (without text) would help minimize path lengths and be quicker to use once you memorized the layout.
Perhaps a cheat-sheet can pop up on the Pilot's display area (a la the keyboard), and allow you to drag letters in either the normal writing space or on the display. (I don't have my HotSync cable on me, or I'd have tried their demo by now. Maybe the feature is already there...)
All in all, it's pretty cool. When I first bought my Pilot, I had visions of taking notes with the thing. Unfortunately, I can only write about 1/4 as fast with Grafitti as I can with a pencil; I keep making stupid mistakes and backspacing, or I don't move the pen far enough and end up with a dot-punctuation instead of two characters.
What I like about this system is that once one learns the "alphabet" it would work well on an amazingly large number of different input devices. Obviously any nine button pad such as a phone would work. But so would anything that can distinguish eight directional inputs and a center. Trackballs, gamepads, laptop touch pads, those Thinkpad pointing nipples, plus your more exotics like pupil trackers.
A PDA which put a single thumb rocker for "typing" in the position you would normally put your thumb anyway would be much nicer for general input than the pen as your PDA would become a one handed machine. Alternatively, I'd love to have a glove that would monitor the movement of one finger.
At work recently someone bought a writing tablet (Crosspad I believe was it's name) that does handwriting OCR. It's just a legal paper sized tablet on a platform, and you just take it to meetings or whatever and write away. Then when you get back to your computer, hook it into the serial port and it uploads & OCRs the handwriting.
Anyway, has anyone used these sort of things much? Do they work reasonably well with decent handwriting. This guy's biggest problem was his horrible handwriting. I print mostly, so it shouldn't be that hard for it to recognize, but I want opinions before I spring a few hundred for one. Of course, Linux support would be nice, but I'd imagine not many developers have one to test and write the drivers for it.
Yeah, the hardest thing with the applet was keeping the mouse in the center, and not accidentally moving into one of the zones...
Judging from the Java applet, the system is good once you get the hang of it. As a Finn, I'm slightly concerned about whether they will remember to allow us and other non-Americans to type our funny characters (such as åäö). You would either need another shift or two, or the kind of "accent characters" that the Palm devices use.
But kinda cool once you play with it for a bit...
\\'
Erase all data?
YES - "up" button
NO - any other button
It's easier than waiting for the batteries to drain.
$ telnet www.mrl.nyu.edu 80 /perlin/demos/Quikwrite.prc HTTP/1.0
Trying 128.122.47.64...
Connected to MRL.NYU.EDU.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 22:28:58 GMT
Content-type: text/plain
Last-modified: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 22:44:03 GMT
Content-length: 5446
Accept-ranges: bytes
Connection: close
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
yeah, ./ must have eatten the angle brackets. ./'s current setup. (i think)
the line with while should have lessthan and greaterthan inside of the (). which there is no way to enter in
Look at the other stuff on his website. There is a look of cool stuff there. Lots of Java applets. I like his Zooming User Interface (ZUI). It is a great idea.
...Trapped in Windows. http://www.execpc.com/ikilledkenny/Quikwrite.zip I coudn't figger out how to get windows to d/l it as a binary, wo there you go. I must say it rocks heavily. Grafitti sucks.
* ikilledkenny@execpc.com * * Because I can. *
The layout is well though out. All of the vowels are easiest to produce and the common constants are also in easy to produce spaces. A few minutes is all it takes to learn the letter positions. Once you know even a few positions, such as the vowels, you can "type" reasonalble well with minimal "hunting and dragging"
Now all I have to do is get a Pilot....
-Viper
...and I liked it. At first it was a little confusing looking but I was surprised at how fast I was able to input text after only a few minutes of playing with it. I don't have a Palm Pilot, so I'm not sure how "grafiti" works, otherwise I'd voice a comparison. Oh well.
Kudos to the QuickWiting folks for daring to try something new like this. I like it.
-Derek
well, palm pilots have that - tap the little 'abc' thing and a standard QUERTY keyboard appears. it's very simple, so when people who don't know graffiti try to use my pilot they invariably sit there tap-tap-tapping away at the letters. simple, yes, but it's like typing with one finger on a very small keyboard. a keyboard with no keys, no less.
It crashed my Palm V to and I don't even have any weird programs on it so:-(. So I went searching the newsgroup about it, and it turned out that the way to solve it was to hold down the page up button for 5 seconds while pressing the reset button. This made it possible to get it so I could delete the applet. For some reason it had installed itself as "This applicat" followed by an unprintable character.
The problem probbably occurs because the program is executed and hangs in the boot sequence. At least that was the idea I got from the newsgroups. Anyone have a more enlightened answer?
Torbjörn
I also have 3.0.2. I'm running HackMaster and SwitchHack (no other hacks). Your file may have been corrupted on download. Some web servers and browsers have problems with .prc files (i.e. not in a .zip) and will send them as text instead of binary. The correct file size is 5446. Netscape 4.5 for Linux works as long as you shift-click the link.
I don't like the name, though. While playing it, I was reminded of an old parlor game I used to play when I was a kid. Why not call it "Ouija Write?"
As cr0sh predicted, it looks quite alien, especially when the inter-character segments are vertical or even diagonal!
This is cool. What's really neat about it is that you could even use it to enter characters on a normal 8-direction gamepad - much better than one of those horrible onscreen keyboards. I have an 8- direction pad-button-scroller-thingy on my mouse, but have no clue how to make it work in Linux (maybe I should write a driver for it) - this would be a good use for it .
This really makes me wish I could afford a PalmPilot.
damn this is a very simple to use product. it rates imop as good as 'jot' (which allows for natural handwriting).
:) Texturing and Modeling, A Procedural Approach by David Ebert, et al,
but then again what do u expect from the man who bought us the 'perlin noise' function used in rendering tools such as povray, 3dmax, renderman etc
cant forget the day i rode 20 miles on my bike on a stinking hot summers day to pick up a copy of this book
AP Professional, Cambridge, 1994. my chapter is entitled: Noise, Hypertexture, Antialiasing and Gesture
http://mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/doc/oscar.html
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
The problem with a phonics-based keyboard is that English spelling is not a phonetic system --- it's what is called `morphophonemic', where individual morphemes (smallest units of meaning) are spelled consistently though their pronunciation often depends on context. For example, the `-s' at the end of `cats' and `dogs' is two different sounds. We spell it the same way because it means the same thing: plural.
The rest of the oft-cited difficulties of English spelling are leftovers from several centuries of changes in the way we pronounce words (e.g. we used to say `light' more or less the same as the German `licht', and vowels have changed a lot), as well as quite a bit of borrowing from other languages. However, the system is still quite consistent and rule-based.
See Wier, Ruth and Venesky, ``English orthography: more reason than rhyme'', in The psycholoinguistic nature of the reading process, K. Goodman, ed. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1968. pp. 189-199.
Opps slash dot eight my
"left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket"
in three plases.
while ("left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket") {
$t = "left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket"
Maybe it's just the peculiarities of the java applet, but it seems as though the difficulties I have with it go deeper than the learning curve. How could dragging the mouse into the upper left major zone produce a Y?
If it works for someone, somewhere, more power to it. One feature of Graffiti that I really appreciate, though, is its position-independence.
Netscape and presumably other browsers respect the Content-Type header sent by the server, which is this case is text/plain. So Netscape downloads it as text, as instructed.
.html, it treats the file as html. If it doesn't understand an extension like .prc, it treats it as application/octet-stream.
IE ignores the header and looks at the URL as if it were a filename with a n extension. If the extension is
Basically IE's non-compliant behaviour is masking a problem with the webserver's configuration. It's not really Netscape's fault. Point out the problem to the webmaster, and complain to Microsoft and the WSP.
In most futeristic movies, interfaces don't have keyboards like we're used to. Maybe the Enterprise uses something like this, 'cause I've never seen anybody using a qwerty keyboard (except Scott, on the Mac).
just a pseudo though
scottwimer
-- Beer. It's what's for breakfast.
This input system should be called "Ah ha!", 'cause that's exactly what my brain did when I finally 'grokked' how to use it.
Kewl thang!
**>>BELCH
Yes! I agree with everyone, this is wonderful, I might actually buy a PDA now. :( ]
[that is, one without a keyboard, the one I had gotten before was a Sharp Zaurus which was nice, it had a stylus and a mini keyboard, even with my huge fingers I could still type about 20wpm. unfortunately it broke
For righties...
* One mouse for normal point and click stuff on the left hand for speed or right because it's easier.
* A pen pad for the right and a cheap monitor or status window for those who have yet to memorize the interface (to track position).
Inverse for lefties.
I think this seems like a great low impact alternitive to typing(smooth sweeping movements rather than short jerky ones.) But how fast can a skilled user manipulate it 20,30,40 wpm? Anyone have an idea?
Matthew Newhall
Yes! I'm in heaven!
This is nice.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
The basic idea is that characters located in the corners are entered by drawing a straight line into it's region. To get the first character located, lets say, to the right of the upper left-hand corner, you draw a line into the left corner region and over one region to the right. To get the first character located below the corner you draw a line to the left-hand corner and down one region.
It takes a little practice to get used to and seems to be a faster way to input. But I think I'll stick to my conventional alphabet.
Did the same thing to my Palm V. I had to reset the memory by holding down the power button while resetting. Then, with nothing on the machine at all, it STILL killed it.
It looks amazing, though. I can't wait until someone fixes it... because I'll use it 99% of the time.
I can see where it might be faster, but not until I memorize the layout... is there any rhyme or reason to it?
Holy cow, this is cool! The simplicty is frightening!
I HATE graffiti, and my handwriting stinks so bad that I can't even read it, much less a computer. Grafitti is so darn slow, it just can't keep up with my thoughts, and after using it for a couple of years, I still need to check the cheat sheet for obscure punctuation and the like.
But this, man. I spent about five minutes puzzling over it, and had was writing at a reasonable speed not much thereafter.
This would actually make pda's useful for me. Now if only they had a Newton version...
-LF
Interesting ... so you're saying, initially you were closed minded, but then you decided you'd try the graffiti thing. And that worked out, but why risk it by being open minded again?
... :-)]
[All in good humour
--
Ian Peters
First Dvorak, and now this. . .
Well if you have linux/unix or anything that supports perl...can someone port this to win95/dos...?
you can get perl for win32 at activestate
This is the coolest input method since the invention of the keyboard. It took no time to get used to and was nice and fast. Also the input area is tiny. Wow cool, I'll buy a palm when I can use this on it.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Some considerations for making a desktop, pointer-driven version:
If pushing multiple keys for a single character is causing a slight deficiency in your efficiency, then maybe someone can invent a keyboard where every letter can be typed with a single keystroke.
Remember, I thought of the idea first...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
> A smaller square (without text) would help
> minimize path lengths and be quicker to use
> once you memorized the layout.
Yeah, but a smaller square would be more error-prone, and would therefore negate any speed gain from the shorter paths.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
I bet this would rock if you could use a digital joystick (with the buttons for SHIFT & CTRL).
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
It happened to me too...twice. After I concluded it might have been a conflict with the Jot app, I loaded it up into the Palm III Emulator on my NT machine. It looped around an alert box calling out a "bus error". Maggie's assessment: toxic to Palm IIIs. In Perlin's defense, he does say he's had reports of this. I do with I'd read that comment before installing. Mea culpa.
-=Maggie Leber=-
Yeah, I agree here. I downloaded it and tried it out but it really didn't feel as good as graffiti for two basic reasons:
1) It lacks the intuitive feel of graffiti where the input strokes resemble their corresponding characters.
2) There is less tolerance for positional errors. If I'm writing while looking elsewhere, my pen tends to drift around in the input area a bit. Granted, you do need to be somewhat sensitive as to your position with the letter/number distinction, but there's still more tolerance than this new system.
Now, I'll admit, perhaps I didn't give it enough of a chance. But I really don't have enough complaints about graffiti to make the effort to change either.
On the other hand, there's a nice symmetry to the keyboard in their current positions. Down could mean "hitting the space bar," up could mean "stretching your pinky up to hit that backspace key," and down-left looks like the symbol on many enter keys.
I just think it's more viscerally appealing to see the cursor move the same way your pen moves; besides, that's the way Grafitti already does it, so it can't be wrong. :) Perhaps there could be an option (or HackMaster thingy) to swap the N/S fields with E/W...
--
--
#define private public
Can't be a conflict unless it's with the pilot in it's "Post Hard Reset" state.
I have tried several times since having to reset (No data to worry about now =) and have gotten the same results.
Anyone with any suggestions?
Zanthor
I just downloaded this PRC and installed it on my palm III - I succeeded in hotsyncing and at the end of the hotsync recieved a "FATAL ERROR" and a button labeled "RESET".
A reset gets you the PALM splash screen and nothing else, you cannot turn your palm off, it's zombied. At this point I executed a HARD reset nuking my schedule that hadn't been hotsynced yet (DOH!) and tried again with just the ROM portion of PALM OS installed, no upgrade performed... Same results.
Just wanted to STOP you guys before you ended up in Hard reset ville with me...
Zanthor
I'm thinking more along the lines of uCLinux.. You know, the one for the Pilot. One of the primary problems with it, if I remember properly, is that there are patent problems with Graffiti, such that it couldn't be reproduced as an input method. Thus, uCLinux can only get input right now through a serial port. I'm guessing that this thing is more lenient, as it is the product of an educational institution. And besides, increased productivity with a steep learning curve is what Linux is all about. I'm salivating over wiping my Pilot and starting anew with some phat free software.
So far, though, I haven't been able to get the hang of it.. I'll give it time.
Prof. Ken Perlin @ NYU apparently wrote. He won
an Academy Award for his special effects technique.
before my palmpilot 1000 i had a casio with a keyboard for input. after playing around with the pilot demo unit in the store for a few minutes i was fairly proficient at 'how now brown cow' and 'now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country'. the strength of graffiti is that it is intuitive and makes it easy for me to remember. trying to remember where all the letters are and what their strokes are is quite difficult. i'm sure if i were to use it for a whole day i might get used to it, but i bet i'd still be looking up those obscure punctuation marks just like in graffiti. at least with graffiti i can try and fudge it, hmm + is .. and draw something like a plus.
:P i use my palm for writing down quick things i dont want to forget, sometimes in the car where i cant look down. phone numbers, things to get at the store.. no novels here. even with the mistakes that i make (that i dont see till i look back at it later) i still undrstd th not i wrt.
i've used tealwrite for sometime and it helps a lot to distinguish between characters. graffiti ha s been fast enough for me. i'm not in class taking notes with it, i dont know if i could ever enter data with one hand, one stylus for that matter as fast as i can touch type. ok now i had to learn that too, but if i forget where a character is that i dont use that often is it doesnt take me that long to find it
- Other languages can be supported simply by doing the equivalent of using different "character sets". You just need a standard one for each language.
;-)
- The "common letters" list for English begins "e a t o n". After that there are a load with roughly the same frequency. They seem to have incorporated that pretty well.
- It would be easy to avoid "drift", and so to be able to enter text without looking, if the pad you were writing on had a raised border. Sound would also help (as suggested). The raised border could be implemented in software if using a joystick etc. (no movement beyond a certain radius).
- Given that the hassle of having more than one "version" of this would far outweigh the convenience of swapping a few letters, it's VITAL that the layout doesn't fragment within one language if this is to catch on. Remember the annoyance of different keyboard layouts.
- Imagine the size you could get hardware down to! I could do this on the face of my watch. Forget voice recognition; this is the future
- It's very, very cool, and anyone can learn and use it given a few hours. If it was standardised on, it could become a skill everyone knows, like typing.
Gerv
Well, I don't have a palm anything, so I had to use the java demo.
It seems extremely cumbersome with a mouse. But then again, it's not designed to be used with one.
Anyone got a light pen and X drivers? Using a light pen would be a more fair assessment, considering what the program is designed for, than using the clunky mouse.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I don't think that I ever had a problem with inputing with the graffiti system. Well I actually did for some time. About the first 3 minutes that I first had gotten my palm pilot. I decided that it would be easier to just use the build in keyboard. One day I decided to mess around with the graffiti. And low and behold I picked it up in like a minute. there are only like 3 letters that aren't almost exactly how the real letter looks. they are "e" "q" and "f" wow those were hard to learn. I can write graffiti into my pilot without looking at it at aloomst the same speeds that I can write with a pen and a piece of paper. LONG LIVE GRAFFITI!!!
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
Dvorak is the best! Everyone should do it!
Most sigs are dumb. This is one of them.
Give me a nice accurate, ergonomic Mac mouse anyday :-)
yeah, I like my drawing tablet for this applet. it works great with a real pen... but you have this feeling you should push the pen down like on the PP to make it work. oh well, force of habit, i guess.
Lowmag.net
Well if you have linux/unix or anything that supports perl you can writing this app. The code is above. Though some guy says it doesn't work right.... I personally wouldn't know. Anyways can someone port this to win95/dos or whatever for us loosers?
No problems here; Palm III (3.02), Hackmaster (Fitaly, ClearHack, LightHack, SwatchHack, GoType). Seems like a pretty good thing to me; I'd spend $ for it.
The Java Demo looks good but it lacks the possibility of accent some letters like á or õ that is common used in other languages than english.
whoops didn't realize this was a seperate writing app, and not a substitue for the graffiti pad on my V.
Answered my own question
Well as funky as it looks, I will have to dive it a try. Anything to speed up input ;-)
Actually it does make alot of sense. Once it finally clicks with you, it becomes very simple.
So, if you were to use this, would you need some sort of sticker over the writing area? Or would you just have to remember the symbols postion?
That solved it for me. Thanks ;-)
I cannot get it to work! it runs ..
./cord.pl > test.txt
:(
...
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$
369
7
369
2
quit
quit
^C
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$ cat test.txt
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$
:(
any idea what the problem might be? I cutnpasted from slashdot
James
Just a quick comment -- the layout isn't quite optimized. The space and backspace are great, but I seem to recall 's' being one of the most used characters in english, but its position here is "secondary" (not just an in-out stroke).
Also, the position of the zero is secondary. I'd assume that's the most used number.
Any other thoughts about the optimality of the placements?
I own and use a pilot every day, and I've been playing with the downloaded app for twenty minutes now, and I can't see how it can be as fast as graffiti. I can hammer out graffiti strokes almost as fast as I can write, but I can't even generate random characters with 'QuickWrite' as quickly as I can generate meaningful graffiti.
Besides, graffiti is actually easy to learn.
This may be useful for some people, but I reckon it will never appear in a marketed device. The learning curve is too steep. Many people don't even seem to be willing to take the 15 minutes or so it takes to learn grafiti, so very few will take the (IMO) 3 hours it would take to become somewhat adequate with 'QuickWrite' - as it stands right now, after 20 minutes, I couldn't imagine trying to use it without the cheatsheet right there. Graffiti, on the other hand, is easy without the cheatsheet after 20 minutes.
- Seated, at a desk, I can take notes.
Reasons I don't like it:A new graffiti system would be nice because I could use it while standing on the train.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Hey guys, Ken Perlin was also on the team that did the CG for Tron back in '82, and he won an Oscar for developing Perlin Noise, which makes CG stuff look more real (you know how rendered stuff can look *too* perfect?).
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
I'm using PalmOS 3.0.2. What version are you using that didn't lock up your PalmIII? Mine locks hard every time and I have to reset it like described above.
If you don't have a Pilot and want to compare the original Graffiti with this input system, you can try out a Java-based demo of Graffiti at:
http://www.palm.com/products/input/index.html
My take: while this secondary system is FAST, it will take lots of memorization before you can use it without a crib sheet, and you'll never be able to use it without looking at the pad. Graffiti isn't perfect, but neither is this, the quest for the perfect pen input system continues...
At the end of the paper there is a reference to T-Cube. It sounds pretty similiar, but I wasn't able to find an online copy of the T-Cube paper. There's an implementation for Newtons (with a short description) here
For example, use 39 instead of 369 for 'j', and 93 instead of 963 for 'x'
Perhaps someone could create a parser for long strings with the 5 key as the character seperator: 71569535415795 = "quick"
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
I ran into this applet about six months ago, but dismissed it. While I imagine it's very fast, it has a major flaw: you must continually re-locate the stylus to the near-centre of the screen. This means you must look at the pen as you write. There's no way to avoid drifting if you're not looking.
I like to have the option of doing other things (ie watching a movie) while I write. When I am looking at what I'm doing, I prefer to look at the actual letters on the page rather than my stylus. Thus, I don't see getting into this device.
Like the GoType for my Pro, though. Squarish bottom on the Pro reduces the wobble factor, and is great on airplanes and in meetings. Not so good on the lap, but you can put it on a flat surface (clipboard, notebook, etc.)
Worst problem -- my graffiti skills are in decline now...
- m
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
THANKS!!! It hosed my Palm Pro (continuous resetting), and I thought I was going to have to hard-reset, but it's fine now.
I don't even have a PalmPilot and I think this thing is cool! It's just lines and circles - with a mouse it is hard, but not impossible.
With a pen - should be even better. Now, think of this:
* A conductor writing with a tracking baton on a projection screen system!
* Quadraplegics writing by moving their eyes (or tounge!)...
* Waving your hands in front of the monitor...
Think about it! I hope this takes off!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Since the nyu server does not have the mime type set for .prc files, they are treated as text and get CR-LF mangling if your computer is ill-equipped to deal with reality.
..At least in comparison to what MS is offering. Living in Bill's backyard, I recently did some handwiritng entry over at MS on WinCE machines, and found them to be quite thorougly useless for the purpose of doing handwriting, as more time was spent backspacing than actually writing characters on their system. There is somewhat of a learning curve on this system, but I imagine it's probably a lot easier using a pen than it is with a mouse.
-=>W=-
Windows is not a virus. Viruses actually do something.
I installed the Graffiti alternative and it completely hosed my Palm v. Warm and hard reset were useless... finally one of my coworkers held down reset and the power button, which got me to the "erase all data" option.
I downloaded the file usign Netscape, which apparently corrupts it. IE works, though, I hear (as much as I am loathe to say it).
In the wired.com piece on QuikWriting, it says that an August commercial release date is planned. Is there any way to sign on as a beta tester before then? I'm interested in the Palm OS implementation.
Thanks.
I used the QuikWriting demo on my Palm IIIx off and on for several hours about 4-5 days ago. Then I picked it up again tonight. I was amazed to see that I had retained familiarity with the input layout. By contrast, I've been evaluating Fitaly for about three weeks, and I never seem to be able to remember where those keys are. There's something intuitive about the major-minor zone scheme, at least for me. I'm ready to put this thing to work!
Um, what about the GoType keyboard. I know it's kinda small but it functios
I'm impressed with the efficiency & speed of input, but I question how generally useful it could be.
That is, I don't really see a lot of people taking the time to learn it. Mainly because, I think it would intimidate most casual users.
It strikes me as being something akin to shorthand. It will be invaluable to individuals who need to maximize input speed. And another group of users will learn it because they WANT to maximize their input speed. But both groups will probably remain fairly small.
As a long time Palm user, I appreciate the speed potential, but it's not enough for me to give up the intuitiveness of Graffiti (besides, my handwriting is getting confusing enough already with the Graffiti characters that keep slipping in, I can only imagine what it would be like if a bunch of triangles & lines were added to the mix!?!).
--
One of the *really* nice features of Graffiti is that it provides for "heads-up" writing. I can hole my pilot with one hand and write with the other while looking at who I am talking with. This *really* adds to the experience, and isn't distracting.
Sure, I make mistakes, but I tend to edit them later.
Must of the Graffiti replacements have been the "keyboard-type" that require you to be looking at what you are tapping.
YMMV, but for me, Graffiti is the most seamless.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
It works great on my Palm Pro with III upgrade. No crash here, but then I don't think I have any hacks active (I do have a GoType keyboard, but I've reset since it was last used).
It's surprisingly easy to learn. The vowel-vs.-consonant positioning is pretty good, but it's slightly awry from the English-language frequency of character use - "m" is in the wrong place if you go by frequency-of-use alone.
The recognizer should be improved so that it's not necessary to go through the center between every character - it sort of works if you drop the "center stroke" between characters, but not always. It's also a bit too sensitive to jitter, I find myself inserting spurious "e" and "i" characters with my shaky hands. But that can all be improved without changing the basic positions in the alphabet.
What is the patent status? It would be nice if the pilot app were open source.
I must have met Ken Perlin at NYIT CGL, Pixar, and Siggraph, but I don't remember.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This is actually pretty damn quick if you spend a little bit of time with it. Im trying to use a trackball to do it and can get characters out within 15 minutes almost as fast as I write. I can only imagine how much faster this would be with a real pen input for which it was designed.
F /...
More importantly however it shows someone out there trying to do something really different. I still don't see what would be wrong with a phonics based keyboard set.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
This might work pretty well if the cheat sheet diagram around the input area was built into the PDA. You could even change it for shifts if you use a full screen as in CE machines instead of a silkscreen input area as in Palms.
It would take a bit more vertical space and less horizontal space than Graffiti. This might not be a good tradeoff, since vertical space is more of a premium in the existing PDA footprints.
After 1 1/2 years my graffiti is still mediocre. I suspect that I'd be much faster and with this, but it would take longer to learn and it's very easy to make mistakes quickly.
Hey, this thing's pretty cool. I can even see one's hand getting used to certain `word-patterns' which would become semi-automatic over time. It kinda gets close to Kanji in that a certain set of strokes stands for a word or part of a word and can be repeated quickly, with a little practice.
:)
Signing your name with a real pen is almost automatic, I can see it becoming that way with this system. After just a couple of minutes practice I was remembering where most of the letters where and `writing' almost as fast as I can with a pen.
I don't think it'll replace true keyboards, but for PDA's it's golden, at least as far as the Roman alphabet goes. Might be time to fork over the foldin' for a Palm
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
wow. that's all I can say. wow. this is going on my palmIII as soon as i get home.. I'd absolutely love to see a version of this for PCs which used the number pad.. I can see definite uses for being able to use only 8-9 keys as a full input device.
*hypothetical situation*
text-paging a pager from a payphone, using this system. or typing notes. whatever... if you ask me, this is a great new way of doing things...
(insert witty quote here)
Since there are a lot of posts from those that don't have Palms yet, I thought I'd have some useful info. It works fine on my Palm V (I have lots of hacks and a Chinese OS and everything).
The Palm demo consists of a large square on the left with the lines and letters and a small square to the right where you do your writing. The letters on the large square change when you shift, etc. And you can turn them off for practicing. Above the squares is the textarea where the letters come out. I really like the small writing square (shorter paths) and it seems to work really well with the stylus. I will have to practice more and see if I can get up to speed.
I suppose it is just a demo but for now you will have to cut and paste the text from the app into wherever you want it. Very awesome idea. The pdf has a lot more info, too.
bob
(I didn't get it at first because I kept trying to move my mouse directly to the letter of interest and back again. duh!)
This is very cool. I might buy a PDA now.
I just now downloaded and installed Quikwrite.prc.
As soon as the sync finished, the machine hung with a "Reset" dialog box. Soft reset brings up the "Palm Computing Platform" splash page and then hangs. Hopefully BackupBuddy will save me. I was running Hackmaster, that may have contribued to the problem.
-Anthony Garcia
agarcia@neosoft.com
Make sure to download the .prc file in binary
mode. If an ascii dump of the first few bytes
of the file aren't "Quikwrite", your prc file
got corrupted during the download.
The command
pilot-file -l Quikwrite.prc
will also report file corruption.
When you reset a Palm device, all apps are sent a notification code. If an app locks up upon recieving this code, a normal reset will not work. Instead, hold the up arrow while pressing the reset button (and continue holding the arrow for a few seconds afterwards). Then you can delete the offending app, followed by a normal reset.
FWIW, Quikwrite.prc does not lock up on my Palm III.
Here is a rilly quick hack to use you key pad to
/quit/;
/print/;
do the same thing. to type run: "
cord.pl > out.text
To quit type quit and then return. to enter a leter type the apropreat key seaquance (ignoring the start and end for the center thing) and hit enter when the char is done.
-------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl
#cord.pl
my %c =
(
369 => 'j',
963 => 'x',
12 => 'g',
14 => 'w',
32 => 'd',
41 => 'c',
987 => 'p',
789 => 'k',
36 => 'r',
63 => 'y',
47 => 'h',
74 => 'm',
69 => 'u',
96 => 'l',
78 => 's',
1 => 'o',
98 => 'f',
2 => ' ',
3 => 'i',
4 => 'e',
123 => 'z',
321 => 'b',
6 => 't',
7 => 'a',
8 => "\ch",
9 => 'n',
147 => 'v',
741 => 'q'
);
while () {
chomp;
last if
print "$c{$_}";
}
---------------------------------
this program is for traying the thing if you don't
like the way it is set up;
#!/usr/bin/perl
my (%c, $t);
while () {
last if
chomp;
chomp ($t = ) and $c{$_} = $t;
}
print map "$_ => '$c{$_}',\n", keys %c;
Tried the app under the Palm OS emulator and it crashed again. I then downloaded it using IE instead of Netscape and it ran fine on both the emu and my device.
Checking the file size gives:
5491 bytes when downloaded w/Netscape (corrupt)
5446 bytes when downloaded w/IE
Anyone know why Netscape is downloading it this way?
Thanks to the people who helped me save my data, too -- that reset/hold up trick worked great.
It also crashed my Palm III immediately. I had to warm reset (hold up arrow for a couple of seconds while hitting reset and keep holding it for a second after) to clear the problem without losing my data. It also installed itself as "This appli" instead of Quikwrite. I have HackMaster with Eco Hack and a couple of other hacks, as well as PalmOS 3.0.2.
Anyways, no real harm done, except for wasted time! But you DON'T HAVE TO HARD RESET. Just delete the app with Launcher (or Launcher III). Hope this saves some people's data, if necessary. I know I was panicked.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Downloaded the prc, put it on the install list, and hotsynced... then my Palm popped up an error message, and when I hit cancel it reset and now it just sits with the "Welcome to Palm III" screen draining my batteries. The power button doesn't even work. I've hit reset a few times and it does the same thing.
Anyway, don't know if it was Windows or what, I've got nothing fancy on my Palm Pilot (not even HackMaster) so I don't know why it's doing this. Any ideas? I think I've got to take out the batteries and let the memory flash to get the thing back...