Palm/3Com Graffiti A Patent Infringement on Xerox 220
Olmy's Jart writes "According to this article on money.cnn.com, a judge has ruled that graffiti, the one stroke shorthand used on Palm Pilots, infringes a Xerox patent for "unistrokes". Really light on details and no links to betters sites, unfortunately." MSNBC also has the story.
This does not bode well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone know if BeOS had any non-infringing handwriting recognition? This might force Palm to move ahead with a switch to ARM and a new OS.
Graffiti's been around a while (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder when Xerox filed that patent, as Palm (or whatever they were called originally - before 3Com bought them) was selling the software to use graffiti as input on the Apple Newton back in 1994 or so? I think we still have one of the original packages at work.
-"Zow"
The Irony - Palm knew about this patent (Score:3, Interesting)
Article: "touch-Typing with a Stylus", by David Goldberg and Cate Richardson, (9) pages total/
Xerox patents relating to handwriting recognition, (5) pages total.
Goldberg is the inventor listed on Xerox's patent [uspto.gov]. I'm sure someone at Palm (perhaps Hawkins and Haitani) saw this one coming a mile away.
How about prior art of FIFTY YEARS? (Score:5, Interesting)
I learned Morse code in 1978 from a fine old geezer in Sweden, who amongst other things taught me to write all characters as a single stroke: backwards 3 for "E", a sort of a triangle for "A", and so on - just like graffiti. It was all just to make copying Morse code easier, but it seemed such an easy way to write that I took to it in everyday life.
Now, I'm not saying that the Xerox or Palm dudes ripped off this idea from Ham Radio geeks. All I mean is that if you're pressed into having to print the standard Latin letters quickly, you are naturally going to end up with something that looks awfully much like the Ham/Morse chicken scratch, or Graffiti, or whatever you want to call it.
Won't this effect other PDAs as well? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder why the actual language was not taken into account since unistrokes seem to have only a couple of characters that match Graffiti strokes.
It seems that this patent, based on the ruling, would cover any interface that uses a motion (it did mention the fingers of the writer) that is recognized and translated to text. Even if another type of program was used what is to stop them from claiming the same case of infringement?
Microsoft licensed Unistroke from Xerox (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In a related story... (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't it funny... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not.
MSNBC == MS PR + NBC's journalistic integrity bought and paid for.
Re:quick question (Score:2, Interesting)
Are mouse gestures in Opera "unistrokes"?
Re:quick question (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
QuikWriting, FlowMenus and Finger Pies (Score:3, Interesting)
One alternative is Ken Perlin's [nyu.edu] QuikWriting [nyu.edu], which has been discussed on slashdot [slashdot.org] and covered by Wired [wired.com].
"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF [nyu.edu] or PostScript [nyu.edu], which was published at the ACM UIST'98 [acm.org] conference."
Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's [stanford.edu] and Terry Winograd's [stanford.edu] FlowMenus [stanford.edu], published at UIST'00 [acm.org].
"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."
I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies [fingerpie.com]", which are simply pie menus [piemenu.com] that you can use with your finger!
To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman [umd.edu]: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation [useit.com] user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen [nec.com] devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging [washington.edu], tightly coupled [umd.edu] feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement [freeform.org] in an immersive experience [jtap.ac.uk], and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]
Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.
Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.
One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.
Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.
Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.
Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.
-Don
Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html [aol.com]
Re:Patents and prior art (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless this is a licensee of the same patent that was very much later granted to Xerox, then this is clearly prior art
I am not sure when I bought it. I had it long before I moved in 1987, perhaps as early as 85.
Some old email to Mark Weiser (Score:3, Interesting)
From: Don Hopkins <hopkins@uk.ac.turing>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 92 22:33:08 BST
To: Mark Weiser <weiser.PARC@com.xerox>
Cc: hopkins@uk.ac.turing
Subject: cmu
Thanks! I sent email to Myers and phoned him up, and after a while he remembered that I was the guy who sent him the pie menu video tapes [...] I'm quite interested in his work, which involves programming by example and demonstration, visual languages, and constructing GUIs with graphical editors using inferencing and constraints, instead of doing so much boiler plate programming.
I am quite interested in pen based stuff, but I don't want to work for any of the companies currently making pen based products because they are so short sighted and limited by perceived market demands and low end technology. (IBM-PC based technology, MS-DOS, bad languages, etc.) Go is using C with crude object oriented scaffolding, but their ideas are sound, and they're at least using their own OS, however the programming environment sucks, they just can't get away from MS-DOS. Momemta is using smalltalk, which, as one of their engineers told me, allowed them to catch up with Go in a very short time. But they definitly have a set of problems of their own, like running on top of MS-DOS and Windows. It's nice that they use smalltalk, but it's rather slow, and more glitzy than well designed. There was a big battle at Momemta between the programmer who's responsible for how nice it is, and the engineering manager in charge or the project, where the manager refused to use smalltalk because it was a "homosexual programming language". Guess he never heard of Lisp! But the programmer certainly proved his point, and the manager took all the credit for making the decision to go with smalltalk. (That's what the manager claimed at their product announcement, and I shook his hand for using smalltalk, and when I told the programmer about that later, boy was he pissed!) But you still can't program the damn thing in smalltalk, *using the pen*! I guess that's one reason they also have a keyboard. There were some other stupid user interface decisions made as well -- my impression from talking to the programmer was that the manager read some books on user interface design principles, and enforced them to the letter without really understanding them and knowing when they should not apply, and when to just use common sense instead.
So far nobody I've heard of has a programming language you can use with a pen, let alone a pen based user interface *written* in and around such a language. What good is a pen computer with a scripting language if you have to use a keyboard to program it? And if it's not programmable, you might as well be using recipe cards. The pen has so much potential, but everybody's trying to use these computers to simulate a piece of paper running MS-DOS. I think it's all well and fine to take advantage of metaphores people are used to (i.e. writing on paper, or beating their head against MS-DOS) but if you limit yourself to simulating paper then you've severly crippled the system, especially when at the same time you severly break the metaphore you're limiting yourself with by trying to be MS-DOS compatible. No piece of paper ever locked up and asked me if I wanted to Abort, Retry, or Ignore. As an example of how you could make a pen computer easier to use by transcending the paper metaphore: when you write on a piece of paper, the information that it stores is two-dimensional. The time componant is completely collapsed and lost. This is not the case with a pen computer, which can remember ink as a three dimensional entity. Why should I be required to write in a fucking comb, if the computer can tell where one letter ends and the next letter begins by the *temporal* separation between letters instead of the visually obvious and traditional spatial separation? Why hasn't anybody written a handwriting recognizer that lets me keep my hand in one place and just write overlapping letters or words without moving my hand back and forth, looking at the page to see when I reach the right margin, moving my hand back to the left margin and no further and down exactly one line, and then writing another line making sure it's parallel with the first? Why can't I just relax, and keep my hand in one place while writing? (I discovered this handwriting technique when I would fall asleep in class while still taking notes. I would wake up and there would be a big ink blob where I kept writing but stopped moving my hand back and forth.) Of course my hand is used to spacing letters out when writing a word, but I think it would be pretty natural to have an input field in a convenient location that I write a word into, which is recognized, then zaps over to where the text input caret is in my document, in a nice font, and the caret moves on, but the place I'm writing stays in the same place. Just like how a keyboard works. Imagine of you had to move the keyboard to the right a bit every time you typed a character, and then move it down and all the way to to the left whenever the cursor reached the right edge of the screen? Nobody would put up with that. Why put up with such a horrible interface using a pen computer? It's only *paper* that forces you to do that.
Well I doubt it would be possible to develop such a non-conformist interface for a company that was rushing to market as fast as they could. Let alone develop a pen based programming language and then write a user interface around it. Did you read the article in Dr. Dobbs Journal (the December UI issue, the same one with my pie menu article) about the pen extension to X-Windows? What an total abortion! I'm sure the next big market demand made on a company like Go or Momenta will be to implement X-Windows for their machine. During the time that every company with a pen computer is trying to do that very same thing and failing miserably, but thinking it's OK because everybody else is failing just as bad, and the users asked for it anyway, so that's what they get, I would like to be doing something completely different, not wasting my time with the latest fads, stampeeds, and lemming dunks.
-Don
Palm has patents, too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why on earth is this a patent? (Score:3, Interesting)
How is that patentable? Computer science's *usual* approach to difficult problems is to make them less general, and this seems like a completely obvious way to do it. Ok, maybe I can understand a patent on a particularly innovative *method* for recognizing Graffiti characters (for instance, some new way of feeding the data into a neural network). But this appears to be a patent on any recognition system that uses a unistroke alphabet even remotely like Xerox's.
Out of morbid curiosity, I developed my own Graffiti-like input system a while back. It used a completely different mathematical trick than any other recognizer I know of (email me if you're interested, I'd be happy to share), and it could be trained to recognize almost any unistroke alphabet. I wonder if it would be covered by this patent, even though it's not limited strictly to the Graffiti alphabet and it uses a completely different algorithm.
As an interesting data point, I showed my system to an AI guy at Georgia Tech, and he was not impressed at my system's capabilities. He said I was sidestepping the problem by requiring unistroke characters.
That said, I am not surprised that Xerox got a patent on this, nor that it was held to be enforceable. I just think it is absurd.
-John