PalmSource has licensed CIC’s Jot character recognition system for its new handwriting system, replacing Graffiti for all devices, and added a unified soft Graffiti area.
Graffiti is Dead; Long Live Graffiti (2)
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Now if they’d only use the pretty little BeOS icons, we’d be all fine and dandy…
Sorry Eugenia, you knew something BeOS-y was coming. 😉
This is truly a shame. Palm’s graffiti was the reason I bought my Handspring Visor a few years ago. It took a little playing (about an hour) to get used to at first, but once I did I found it to be a great way to input data in my Visor. I even found myself using graffiti on paper when my PDA wasn’t handy. Single stroke characters are the best way to take notes fast when you don’t have a keyboard or recording device handy.
Apparently Xerox (even though they don’t make PDAs to my knowledge) thought that one of their patents could be used to bilk a little money from Palm and deprive consumers of a really good product feature from a company that wasn’t even stealing sales from Xerox. Man, do we ever need tort reform! Another good technology goes to waste at the hands of our legal system. What a shame!
Exactly how big an innovation is single stroke letters? After all, there are only a few multi-stroke letters in english anyway! Any moron trying to work on a PDA input system would immediatly see the ambiguity introduced by multi-stroke characters (for the computer) and introduce something like this.
I don’t see what’s so great about BeOS icons. Especially for a PDA screen that most of the time is in black and white.
Besides, I don’t think Palm licensed Jot because it was good but rather the fact that it had to pay royalties to Xerox so they are just much better off using Jot in the first place. But I think Palm should consider placing support for Graffiti 1 characters, Palmtop users like my brother is very very very very used to it.
Jot came as standard on the VTech Helio (the PDA I used before I got my Zaurus) – it’s much more intuitive than Grafiti, so it’ll be a good thing for Palm in the long run.
I’ve been using palms since the palmpilot5000. I don’t see the advantage of replacing graffiti with jot. It’s allows you to enter standard letters instead of using one stroke letters. IMHO Palm should upgrade to a real handwriting recognition but leave graffiti as an option as it will disorient long time palmos users.
as for beos icons (yeah i like them too) i don”t see the advantage of having these on a mobile device. Just keep’em as simple as possible
flo
I suspect that this development is designed to pick up the people that are not long time users of graffiti and that is a good idea because the PDA market is pretty small as far as things go. Any attempt to expand it is a good thing for palm. It also means that palm will be more competitive with pocket PC. I am sure it’ll piss off some loyal long-time palm users but they’ll get over it. Plus jot is a good thing in the long run. More intuitive is always better.
Yes, lets all switch to a devise that requires more power just to run handwriting recog. program because no one wants to spend an hour to learn how to use a single-stroke character set.
It literaraly only takes an hour to learn it! The nice thing about the Palm platform is that it was fast and power-cheap…
PalmSource selected Jot most probably because Jot is in general a better technology. What made it a bad choice for the older Palms is slow processor speeds. Now that Palm started to use faster Arm processors, it is a good move.
Only a retard would suggest that a device that requires effort on the user’s part to use it is a GOOD thing. Grafitti sucks. A minority of people can master it while most resort to using the pop up keyboard. That means its a failure.
PocketPC devices use Jot and thats one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful. Another technology, the built in keyboards, would not have the demand they do now if Grafitti wasn’t so awkward to use. And the even worse problem with Grafitti is it doesn’t always recognize your input even when you are doing it correctly. If its hard to learn and doesn’t work well when used properly just what good is it?
Simply put, if someone already knows how to write why should they have to learn ANOTHER way of writting just to use this one device? Take it from me, someone who can write at a speed of 82 strokes per minute using Grafitti, it sucks. It really does. I had to buy an app called TealScript that allowed the Palm to learn MY writting instead of the default other way around.
By requiring more powerful hardware, driving down battery life, and making the entire system slower. There is a balance that can be reached between low system requirements and usablility.
Remember, for any system, there is some learning curve. Only an idiot would think otherwise… (Sorry for the rudeness, just felt the need to throw it back… hate doing that). Until I can sit down at the device, and tell it what to do in plain spoken language, there will always be a learning curve. And as someone pointed out earlier, its <u>is</u> much quicker to enter characters in a single stroke format than a mult-stroke format. And if you could enter 82 characters a minute, how does it suck? Are you telling me you could free-hand faster than that?
When the Newton was discontinued and mine died, I bought a Palm and returned it after about a week of struggling with Graffiti. I’d been spoiled by a cursive character recognition engine that learned MY writing style rather than forcing me to write a certain way. To this day, Graffiti is nowhere near what the Newton’s character recognition engine was 5 years ago.
I certainly hope that Jot is smarter. Otherwise I won’t consider buying a Palm.
The key to this is whether or not you are forced to print one single character at a time IN a certain way, or write cursively whole sentences in whatever writing style you are used to. That’s what I hope any character recognition engine could do, and Palm needs to strive for that ideal. Graffiti to me falls far short — basically ignores — such expectations.
I’ve tried several different handwriting recognition apps, but I find them all so slow compared with an onscreen keyboard. A single tap on a mini keyboard will always be faster than writing a letter. At the moment I have a Fitaly overlay for the graffiti pad on my Visor and I can accurately enter text at 50-60 WPM. Hopefully something similar will be available for the new Palms.
Actually, every looser that buys a PocketPC simply because (s)he is afraid of graffity is a user buying a toy not a PDA. They just want to showoff.
Keyboard is not meant for PDAs. And if you want colour in order to play Quake 3 on a 10 cms screen, buy a PocketPC following M$ attitude (“let’s try to fit a 1024×768 working environment to 300×200 UI”).
The Palm has been so succesful because it is smaller, faster, more efficient and it feels (and works) like a PDA, not a 10×5 laptop computer.
The Newton’s HWR is still the best out there after almost 10 years! (well 5 if you count from the MP2000) I actually quite liked grafitti but it can’t compare to my Newton’s HWR.
My point exactly. Thank you george.