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. "

Comments

Impressive, But How Generally Useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!?!).

Other alternative

[mattdm]

I'm a big fan of TealPoint Software's TealScript, which lets you design your own graffiti -- you can make whatever letters be whatever you want, including alternate strokes and distortions. Really nice.

--

Graffiti = Heads-up writing

[jbarr]

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.

Works real nice on my Pilot

[Bruce Perens]

Oooh, I want to try this on a joystick. Who needs a "writing surface"! You should be able to just jiggle a finger around using a device like the keyboard mouse on my Toshiba laptop.

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

Practice people, sheesh.

[juuri]

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.

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/OSF /...

Built in cheat sheet helps

[DLPierson]

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.

Smartness McLots

[Si]

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 :)

I *like* this!

[roadtrip]

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...

Works great on my Palm V

[bobert]

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

Type Alt-key to display stroke

[foop]

If you hold down the Alt key and press the key you want to type the applet will display arrows showing the trace that your mouse should follow.

(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.

WARNING! This locked my IIIx, have to hard reset

[agarcia]

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

Re:Crashed my Palm III -- danger

[firewood]

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.

You don't have to hard reset

[bgdarnel]

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.

Key pad vertion

[moore]

Here is a rilly quick hack to use you key pad to
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 /quit/;
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, $t);
while () {
last if /print/;
chomp;
chomp ($t = ) and $c{$_} = $t;
}

print map "$_ => '$c{$_}',\n", keys %c;

It's a download problem -- check the file size

[foolishj]

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.

You don't have to hard reset!

[Masker]

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.

Crashed my Palm III -- danger

[foolishj]

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...