As Jeff Hawkins tells the story, he invented and implemented Graffitti in a couple days after noting how poor the state of the art in handwriting recognition was. The Palm's early success was largely due to eschewing the huge problem of reading natural handwriting in favor of briefly retraining users to make the recognition task easier. Recognition on a small set of characters with ordered and directed strokes is an order of magnitude easier than visual-style recognition based on the appearance of a character. Nowadays this is becoming less important as natural handwriting recognition improves. The goal, as in speech recognition, is to not make a user speak to/write for a computer any differently than for another human.
Just to get another vote in there... I use Dvorak and Qwerty both, having started learning Dvorak this spring. Within a month I was full speed on Dvorak as well as on Qwerty. I use a Mac and sometimes run into cases when I have Dvorak in an OS X window and Qwerty in an OS 9 ("Classic") window, and I found that I can go back and forth pretty easily. I prefer Dvorak because my hands feel more relaxed, and because it lends a certain nerd credibility, I feel...
Thanks for your answers, all. I was able to present my advisor with a pretty comprehensive list of alternatives. And I think I am hooked on Ask Slashdot for life...
Slashdot Mirror
As Jeff Hawkins tells the story, he invented and implemented Graffitti in a couple days after noting how poor the state of the art in handwriting recognition was. The Palm's early success was largely due to eschewing the huge problem of reading natural handwriting in favor of briefly retraining users to make the recognition task easier. Recognition on a small set of characters with ordered and directed strokes is an order of magnitude easier than visual-style recognition based on the appearance of a character. Nowadays this is becoming less important as natural handwriting recognition improves. The goal, as in speech recognition, is to not make a user speak to/write for a computer any differently than for another human.
Just to get another vote in there... I use Dvorak and Qwerty both, having started learning Dvorak this spring. Within a month I was full speed on Dvorak as well as on Qwerty. I use a Mac and sometimes run into cases when I have Dvorak in an OS X window and Qwerty in an OS 9 ("Classic") window, and I found that I can go back and forth pretty easily. I prefer Dvorak because my hands feel more relaxed, and because it lends a certain nerd credibility, I feel...
Thanks for your answers, all. I was able to present my advisor with a pretty comprehensive list of alternatives. And I think I am hooked on Ask Slashdot for life...