Palm Kills Off Graffiti 440
Ed writes "PalmSource, the company that makes the Palm OS, has decided to stop using Graffiti for text input in all future versions of its operating system. Instead, it will switch to using a version of CIC's Jot recognition system, which will be called Graffiti 2. PalmSource was forced to make this move after losing a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Xerox. Jot is already used by the Pocket PC operating system.
You can read more about it on Brighthand."
Don't toss out those spray paint cans yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully it will be easier for non-geeks... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just hope that the "new" graffiti is easier on non-geeks...
RickTheWizKid
Stupid Muggle technology...
I LOVED Graffiti! (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple thought it was so important to have real handwrighting recognition in the Newton, for example, that it was willing to adopt the technology before it was ready. Conventional wisdom said that ordinary users wouldn't want to learn a funny way of writing.
Boy was Conventional Wisdom wrong! It was FUN to learn grafitti. When I first got my Palm, I couldn't wait to learn it, so I can be "in the club" like everyone else. I ran their practice app, and got good at it within an hour.
Jot's probably not too different; maybe they can put in a "Graffity Compatibility mode" now that Palm's paying the royalties.
Well, that's it for Palm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Consistency (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe people have different opinions. Slashdot isn't made out of people who think the same way everyone else does, or else that'd be boring. With the exception of liking technology, the slashdot community is diverse and sometimes friendly.
PS If you're remotley sly, see what else i wrote.
Darn. (Score:2, Insightful)
Any chance anyone will ever resurrect the Newton's handwriting recognition engine? It was actually starting to get good near the end, before Jobs killed it.
Well, hey, if I got used to the Newton and Graffiti, I should be able to get used to something else...
Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Xerox patent on UNISTROKES? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds to me like another bogus patent. If something is very easy to re-invent independently, it shouldn't be patentable. I thought patents were supposed to be non-obvious.
Hmmm. We want to recognize letters. Our big problem is that it's hard to tell which stroke belongs to which character. Hey... many characters are only one stroke; why not make a simplified alphabet so they ALL are only one stroke?
I mean, it's a little bit more complicated than using XOR to draw a cursor, but not that much.
P.S. Xerox may score a few bucks from this, but that is all they can manage. Palm doesn't really need Graffiti anymore.
When the PalmPilot first came out, it really did need Graffiti; handwriting recognition on an 8 MHz CPU with a tiny amount of RAM needs all the help it can get. Now, with much more computing power in the latest Palm devices, a trainable system that adapts to the user's writing is probably the right thing.
Re:I LOVED Graffiti! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you aren't kidding, sure, maybe you wanted to learn it for "fun," but you are a big geek (not an insult, just a fact). Most people do not want to have to (weeeeeeeee) fiddle around for ages to figure out how to use their new organizer.
The Palm didn't succeed because of Grafitti, it succeeded in spite of it. It was cheap, small, with a simple interface (Grafitti notwithstanding). The Newton is still far superior in just about every way, it just wasn't as marketable at the time.
- j
Re:Hopefully it will be easier for non-geeks... (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking for "most non-geek people" is a big thing. Do you have any data to backup your claim?
I've got an even better idea (Score:4, Insightful)
contrary to some people's belief, knowing graffiti doesn't elevate you into an exclusive club. it simply means that you're willing to put up with corporate work-around solutions instead of demanding something that actually fits your needs.
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, the failure of the pen and keyboard. Some of of the silliest inventions.
One would think that by now someone could make a device that read minds--but apparently that is hard.
(And probably not desirable anyway. "Computer: I wanted a spreadsheet not a girl spreading on the sheets. I don't care what I was thinking this is my office! )
Graffiti was Inexcusable in the First Place (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers and PDAs are made for humans, not humans for PDAs. I know Newton was not perfect, and I've only tried a Newton once, but I see no excuse why the leader in the market can continue to sell a product that requires people to change habits in something as basic as handwriting when the Newton, a product that was discontinued, was able to do so much better. The only reason I can see for Palm's continued mediocrity in this field is because, as the leader, they didn't want to fix something they didn't have to.
While Graffiti may work for people that spend a huge amount of their time w/ computers and learning computers, for me, who just wanted to use my Palm V as a tool, it is pathetic.
I think Palm would be MUCH better off (and so would a lot of customers) if they would just go on and develop a "real" handwriting recognition program. If Apple came so close w/ the Newton's handwriting rec., I'm sure an industry leader in the PDA field could.
Just my
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Reality (Score:3, Insightful)
You're forgetting history. Until recently, computers didn't have the processing power to understand arbitrary input (and a computers attempts to still aren't perfect.) Dispite this, people who wanted the computer now instead of later adapted.
Sure, true handwriting recognition was adequete and available when the Palm first came out. But it was also processor intensive. Certainly more demanding than the puny 16 Mhz processor in the Palm. To support handwriting recognition would have required a faster processor and thus, a shorter battery life. In fact, about the time of my first Palm, Microsoft's PocketPCs had handwriting recognition. Of course, they were surprisingly warm to the touch when running and measured their battery lifespan in hours. The Palms of the era generated no noticable heat and measured their lifespan in weeks! As someone who easily forgets to buy new batteries (or recharge my newer PalmOS device), I appreciate this.
Yes, ideally my computer would perfectly understand my handwriting without any training period. However there will need to be a balance between price, battery life, heat, and ease of input for the forseeable future. For many people (including the millions of Palm users), Palm achieved the best balance available at the time.
Great News (as sarcasm oozes out of me) (Score:5, Insightful)
Another wonderful example of our fouled-up intellectual property laws stifling, instead of promoting, the use of technology.
Palm brings a great idea to millions of people, and Xerox can quash it years after the fact because the filed some papers years ago.
It doesn't even make me feel any better that Xerox may be one of the worst run companies of the last decade. It's a negative-sum game. They are still fouled up and now I can't use Grafitti in the future. If it was up to Xerox, their patent would still be collecting dust.
It is clear that too many patents are not truly unique and deserving protection. A "one-stroke writing system"!?! I guess all shorthand dictationists owe their salaries to Xerox. This patent is for shorthand on a computer! Gimme a break.
There really ought to be a "use it or lose it" rule with patents, and the patent office needs to be much more strident in considering prior art.
Inventors are turning into high-priests to give themselves exclusive use of tabooed (patented) ideas.
Like Dvorak for Palm owners? (Score:1, Insightful)
I hope this doesn't set a precedent, I don't like the idea of having to change my input methods year on year...
Re:Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they don't. Quite a few printed letters we write every day require multiple strokes to write them cleanly and properly.
But it's not just a matter of correctness; it's also a matter of efficiency: it takes far more movement of your pen/stylus to write standard letters. So even if you expended the effort to keep your pen on the paper to draw the entire letter, it would take you a lot longer to do that than to write the Graffiti equivalent.
That's why the Graffiti system was considered innovative: it provided simple characters that were quicker to write, and easier to write consistently---but which still resembled the original letters enough to be somewhat easy to learn.
Look, people thought that the Graffiti system was inventive at the time it was introduced. Nobody back then said "oh, some people just write like this anyway, what's so cool about that?" Now that this patent dispute has come about, we can't just go back and decide otherwise.
Re:What about PocketPC's? (Score:5, Insightful)
By reading the Federal Circuit opinion [ipo.org] that reversed the district court's summary judgment, it seems that the key issue that prevents Jot from infringing is that it "does not allow for 'definitive recognition' of symbols immediately upon pen lift by the user." Certain letters and symbols in Jot [cic.com] -- 'T,' 'X,' the question mark, and so on -- require multiple strokes to create the character. The actual shapes of the characters are not part of the patent, so there's no problem with Jot and Xerox's Unistroke sharing swooshes.
This leads one to wonder why the Graffiti 'X' doesn't allow Graffiti to escape infringement -- the appellate court opinion quotes the district court as citing accented characters in this sense, but not Graffiti's two-stroke 'X.' If I had to make a wild guess, I'd assume this was proffered by Palm in district court and refuted by Xerox on the grounds that the first slash in the 'X' is actually the stroke to enter extended mode, and thus the 'X' is still technically a unistroke character. If Palm had simply reversed the direction of the strokes so that the first stroke wasn't extended mode, then they might have been immunized. Of such tiny errors are great patent cases decided.
Re:People don't want Graffiti, Jot and so on (Score:3, Insightful)
Competing PDAs (usually running Windows CE) have offered handwriting recognition and keyboards for a long time. Dispite this, Palm's with Graffiti dominated the PDA market for a long time. Those people who were willing to pay for PDA chose the optino that provided a smaller form facter, longer battery life, and in many cases a lower price. While they may not want Graffiti, they're clearly willing to live with it.
Of course, as technology advances, handwriting recognition or usable keyboards may become an option. But such devices are still larger and have a shorted battery life at the moment. Palm's market share has certainly started to slide, but it's not a dead yet.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Graffiti was Inexcusable in the First Place (Score:4, Insightful)
I love grafitti. Well, I like graffiti, although it would be nice to train it a bit for my own illegible scrawl. Still, it's easy to enter stuff into my palm pilot.
But...for actual writing? No way! A PDA is simply not (yet?) a platform for extensive text creation. Use a computer with a keyboard, or actually write on paper and then scan it into an OCR program. Don't blame the poor PDA too much for being lousy at a job it wasn't designed for.
That said, I can hardly wait until we DO have such beasts working well.
Graffiti-1 open-sourced? (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux community would appreciate it as it is a shame that Linux still doesn't have any good freely available well working hand-writing recognition software.
Re:I've got an even better idea (Score:3, Insightful)
roll-up keyboard for when you've got a little extra time.
see? that wasn't that hard. it took two of us a grand total of 3 thought processes in the course of about an hour and we already came up with a system that's better than graffiti. someone ought to give us absurdly huge grants or corporate hush-money for this.
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Is printing superior to scripting? No, scripting is much faster, but you had to learn that too. Typing is much faster than writing by hand. If repetitive-stress disorders are a problem now, think of what they'd be if everyone was trying to write out things on tablets for data entry.
The problem most usability "experts" have is that they think it's never a good idea to learn a new interface. That is not universally true. While it is a bad idea to break interface concepts that are common (like red=stop, green=go), it doesn't mean every new interface is bad. When farm tractors were first introduced, several models had the operator driving the same way they drove a team of horses. The steering mechanism was designed to mimic the old horse-drawn equipment. While this method was familiar, it wasn't superior to the car-style interface that it now used.
What? (Score:2, Insightful)
This holds PDA back once again...
Re:Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet? (Score:3, Insightful)
--jeff++
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to work in the computer voice recognition field, building command and control systems for the Macintosh. One thing we noticed was that when the computer misrecognized a word, the user never blamed themselves for poor pronunciation. They always blamed the computer for poor recognition. And why not? After all, you learn to speak at an early age and other humans can understand you under a wide variety of conditions, so why can't the computer?
Contrast this to entering data by the keyboard. If the user types slowly or makes a typo, the user perceives it to be her fault, not the computer. This is a critical distinction.
The genius of Graffiti is this: by forcing the user to adapt to an unnatural style of handwriting, the user blames himself for misrecognized letters. Palm not recognizing your R's? Better fire up Giraffe and practice some more!
This led to a much better PERCEIVED user experience, regardless of the Palm's text recognition error rate.
Re:Graffiti was Inexcusable in the First Place (Score:4, Insightful)
But why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Point being, hacking up Jot to do Graffiti would be a step backwards in my opinion.
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like we all learned to type, on a QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to slow typists down so they didn't jam the early mechanical typewriters. Yet another example of designing for the machine and not the human. I'd say you've proven his point quite nicely.
Why not? Cost! (Score:2, Insightful)
A brilliant move by Xerox... (Score:3, Insightful)
In trying to prevent another oops-we-lost-the-GUI, Xerox just managed to do just that.
Ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
For Xmas, my bud got me a Dell Axim for a present. One of the first things I figured out, was how to put it in "Block Recognizer" mode, so that it understands Grafitti.
Now Palm's moving away from Grafitti, basically leaving all of their existing customer base wtih their best upgrade option for the future, being to move to the competitions products, since it better suits their ingrained habits.
Seems like a disastrous decision to me.
Who cares? Keyboards are better (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently got a Handspring Treo for christmas, and I'm already used to the controls - I didn't have to waste time teaching myself a new writing system, or trying to teach the thing my handwriting style. When I need to enter 'Q', I just press the button that says 'Q'. How much simpler can you get?
I've noticed that a lot of new handhelds (Treo, Blackberry, Hiptop) have integrated keyboards instead of handwriting-recognition. I think this is because the "gimmick" factor of writing on a computer have faded, and people are more concerned about usability now. It's just too bad Palm decided to go to another flaky "writing system" instead of putting a decent keyboard in.
Re:Hopefully it will be easier for non-geeks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Xerox patent on UNISTROKES? (Score:4, Insightful)
The two problems are:
1) How do you recognize the end of a character?
2) How do you maximize the SNR given sloppy human input?
The soution to the first problem is fully obvious -- use a single stroke to indicate a character. That is, implement the characters as a set of "gestures", where a gesture is a single engage, draw, disengage sequence. I believe people have been using gestures since the early sixties, for instance in "Sketchpad", an ealy mouse based graphics program. On a film I saw of Sketchpad in action, the operator would draw something like a circle, and the program would replace it with a perfect circle. There were gestures for circles, rectangles, and lines. The obvious and standard way to solve the problem of character distinction is to treat the charactes as gestures, i.e. single or "uni" strokes. I do not see how this can be fairly patented.
To maximize the SNR the standard pattern recognition trick, one I learned in a pattern recognition class in 1984, is to try to arrange your feature space so that the classes (letters in this case) are as well separated as possible. Any gesture based system will be concerned with the class separation of the gestures in feature space -- this is standard practice in the art of pattern recognition. My reading of the patent is that Xerox was trying to patent the set of getures that best separate in their specific feature space. This seems as valid as any other software patent to me: the calculation and selection of features can be subtle.
But what actually happened is that Xerox obtained, apparently, a patent on the use of any set of gestures used as an alphabet in the context of an electronic device. What this means practically is that Xerox somehow now owns the lower case alphabet, except for f, k, t, and x. Palm did not at all follow Xeorx -- they chose the gestures first for similarity to natural characters, then for separation in whatever feature space they are using. It is probably not the same feature space that Xerox was using since the approach is so different.
Note that Xerox owns these characters only in the context of some electronic or computer based input device, so it is still ok to use the alphabet to write on paper. Also it is ok to use these characters to write full words, i.e. where letter placement matters. You just cannot use these characters in some sort of input box, in a sequential fashion.
I think the patent as written is not so bad for a software patent, but I think the use of it against Palm is a disaster. It really does make it seem like there is no point in trying to do anything if they will allow patents to be applied so generally.
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Should a screwdriver have to use a hammer's interface because the hammer interface is intuitive because it's ALREADY learned? Should the hammer not have a handle and instead use the interface of the pounding rocks that preceded it?
How do you improve tools if you can't optimize the UI for the task and instead have to optimize it to avoid learning. If the learning is costly, at least the cost stops when the learning is accomplished and the result is an efficient tool. If the tool is not optimized for it's purpose, then you continue to pay for that loss of optimization forever, and eventually it will be more costly than having the user learn the task and method at hand.
Of course you should use known metaphors, and use real world tools and metaphors, but in the end we want the best tool, we are tool building. Tools are not automatically bad because they require knowledge or expertise to apply. In fact, the best tools, the most powerful tools, always do involve learning the tool itself. The interface needs to seem convienient once you have learned it, not before so.
I think you are mistaking a marketing imperitive and marketing principle for an engineering principle.
As for Newton's handwriting recognition... it's so unbelievable I think I might have been trolled! Not the Newton's I used...
Re:I wouldn't worry too much... (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like Pocket PC basically copied Grafitti. At least /\ does the expected thing in "block recognition" mode. But now if Palm drops the support, most users will just decide to try a PPC for their next handheld, since they have to learn something new anyway. On the other hand, they will not thing much of paying extra $5 for the Xerox license.
Re:I LOVED Graffiti! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep. The boring, bone-simple issues that make or break a product almost never come up at the focus group, only to pop up in the final stages of production, or even after product launch! Then the team scratches their heads, wondering why no one's buying.
I've been involved with the development of a few retail products, one being a purple, external storage device you may be familiar with. The regular Joes and Janes around the table at those early sessions never discuss practical details; they're off spinning an ideal use scenario that has zero to do with their actual use patterns.
Case in point: everyone's ragging on Graffiti, and handwriting in general, in this topic at the moment. A keyboard is always easier, right? With the original Palm, you do everything with the device in one hand, and the stylus in the other, like a pad and paper. Simple. Well, I was recently forced to upgrade from a Graffiti Palm to a keyboard Treo. With a keyboard, I'm forever switching between tapping menu items with the stylus, then gripping the thing with two hands to attempt typing with my big, ham-like thumbs. Not elegant.
I didn't know how much worse it could get until I needed to write someone's contact info in a darkened club. With Graffiti, I could write away without even looking at the writing area. With the keyboard, I couldn't see what keys I was hitting, and had to fall back to the napkin method for the first time in two years.
If you need a light to see the screen, doesn't it follow that you'd need one to see the keys too? Looks like the focus groupers missed that little detail.
If anyone has a Graffiti Treo they'd like to trade, post a reply. Really.