Alternative to Graffiti Input? 157
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. "
Re:Faster? (Score:1)
Re:Built in cheat sheet helps (Score:1)
Yeah, good call. But I think that would only help beginners, or for those obscure punctuation marks that I can never remember in Grafitti either. A smaller square (without text) would help minimize path lengths and be quicker to use once you memorized the layout.
Perhaps a cheat-sheet can pop up on the Pilot's display area (a la the keyboard), and allow you to drag letters in either the normal writing space or on the display. (I don't have my HotSync cable on me, or I'd have tried their demo by now. Maybe the feature is already there...)
All in all, it's pretty cool. When I first bought my Pilot, I had visions of taking notes with the thing. Unfortunately, I can only write about 1/4 as fast with Grafitti as I can with a pencil; I keep making stupid mistakes and backspacing, or I don't move the pen far enough and end up with a dot-punctuation instead of two characters.
think of how well this could scale (Score:1)
A PDA which put a single thumb rocker for "typing" in the position you would normally put your thumb anyway would be much nicer for general input than the pen as your PDA would become a one handed machine. Alternatively, I'd love to have a glove that would monitor the movement of one finger.
Re:We need an X tool to do this (Score:1)
Almost along these lines... (Score:1)
Anyway, has anyone used these sort of things much? Do they work reasonably well with decent handwriting. This guy's biggest problem was his horrible handwriting. I print mostly, so it shouldn't be that hard for it to recognize, but I want opinions before I spring a few hundred for one. Of course, Linux support would be nice, but I'd imagine not many developers have one to test and write the drivers for it.
Re:Chording (Score:1)
Re:Faster? (Score:1)
Non-English characters (Score:1)
Freaky! (Score:1)
Re:Crashed my Palm III -- danger (Score:1)
Erase all data?
YES - "up" button
NO - any other button
It's easier than waiting for the batteries to drain.
text/plain strikes again? (Score:1)
Trying 128.122.47.64...
Connected to MRL.NYU.EDU.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 22:28:58 GMT
Content-type: text/plain
Last-modified: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 22:44:03 GMT
Content-length: 5446
Accept-ranges: bytes
Connection: close
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
Re:doesn't work for me?? (Score:1)
the line with while should have lessthan and greaterthan inside of the (). which there is no way to enter in
Can't wait to get this home (Score:1)
ZIP file mirror of binary for poor folk... (Score:1)
Re:Chording (Score:1)
Great solution, people...
--Chouser
This is great!!! (Score:1)
Now all I have to do is get a Pilot....
-Viper
I *dave* it a try... (Score:1)
Kudos to the QuickWiting folks for daring to try something new like this. I like it.
-Derek
Re:Almost as good, and easier to learn, would be.. (Score:1)
Crashed ,the sollution! (Score:1)
The problem probbably occurs because the program is executed and hangs in the boot sequence. At least that was the idea I got from the newsgroups. Anyone have a more enlightened answer?
Torbjörn
Re:You don't have to hard reset (Score:1)
Neat Idea... Cheap Name (Score:1)
I don't like the name, though. While playing it, I was reminded of an old parlor game I used to play when I was a kid. Why not call it "Ouija Write?"
Re:Yes it's amazing... but Paper? (Score:1)
As cr0sh predicted, it looks quite alien, especially when the inter-character segments are vertical or even diagonal!
This is really cool. (Score:1)
This really makes me wish I could afford a PalmPilot.
ken perlin==Perlin Noise->povray,renderman,et.,al. (Score:1)
but then again what do u expect from the man who bought us the 'perlin noise' function used in rendering tools such as povray, 3dmax, renderman etc
cant forget the day i rode 20 miles on my bike on a stinking hot summers day to pick up a copy of this book
AP Professional, Cambridge, 1994. my chapter is entitled: Noise, Hypertexture, Antialiasing and Gesture
http://mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/doc/oscar.html
Re:Practice people, sheesh. (Score:1)
The problem with a phonics-based keyboard is that English spelling is not a phonetic system --- it's what is called `morphophonemic', where individual morphemes (smallest units of meaning) are spelled consistently though their pronunciation often depends on context. For example, the `-s' at the end of `cats' and `dogs' is two different sounds. We spell it the same way because it means the same thing: plural.
The rest of the oft-cited difficulties of English spelling are leftovers from several centuries of changes in the way we pronounce words (e.g. we used to say `light' more or less the same as the German `licht', and vowels have changed a lot), as well as quite a bit of borrowing from other languages. However, the system is still quite consistent and rule-based.
See Wier, Ruth and Venesky, ``English orthography: more reason than rhyme'', in The psycholoinguistic nature of the reading process, K. Goodman, ed. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1968. pp. 189-199.
Re:Key pad vertion (Score:1)
"left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket"
in three plases.
while ("left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket") {
$t = "left angle braket" STDIN "right angle braket"
Faster? (Score:1)
If it works for someone, somewhere, more power to it. One feature of Graffiti that I really appreciate, though, is its position-independence.
IE ignores Content-Type header (Score:1)
IE ignores the header and looks at the URL as if it were a filename with a n extension. If the extension is
Basically IE's non-compliant behaviour is masking a problem with the webserver's configuration. It's not really Netscape's fault. Point out the problem to the webmaster, and complain to Microsoft and the WSP.
Is this what is used in Star Trek? (Score:1)
just a pseudo though
scottwimer
Ah ha! (Score:1)
Kewl thang!
Wow :) (Score:1)
[that is, one without a keyboard, the one I had gotten before was a Sharp Zaurus which was nice, it had a stylus and a mini keyboard, even with my huge fingers I could still type about 20wpm. unfortunately it broke
Picture using a dual mouse or mouse/penpad combo (Score:1)
For righties...
* One mouse for normal point and click stuff on the left hand for speed or right because it's easier.
* A pen pad for the right and a cheap monitor or status window for those who have yet to memorize the interface (to track position).
Inverse for lefties.
I think this seems like a great low impact alternitive to typing(smooth sweeping movements rather than short jerky ones.) But how fast can a skilled user manipulate it 20,30,40 wpm? Anyone have an idea?
Matthew Newhall
Yes! I'm in heaven!
This is nice.
How to Use (Score:1)
It takes a little practice to get used to and seems to be a faster way to input. But I think I'll stick to my conventional alphabet.
Re:WARNING! This locked my IIIx, have to hard rese (Score:1)
It looks amazing, though. I can't wait until someone fixes it... because I'll use it 99% of the time.
Layout logic? (Score:1)
This is the coolest thing I've seen all week! (Score:1)
I HATE graffiti, and my handwriting stinks so bad that I can't even read it, much less a computer. Grafitti is so darn slow, it just can't keep up with my thoughts, and after using it for a couple of years, I still need to check the cheat sheet for obscure punctuation and the like.
But this, man. I spent about five minutes puzzling over it, and had was writing at a reasonable speed not much thereafter.
This would actually make pda's useful for me. Now if only they had a Newton version...
-LF
Re:Graffiti (Score:1)
[All in good humour
--
Ian Peters
Damnit (Score:1)
First Dvorak, and now this. . .
Re:I *like* this! (Score:1)
you can get perl for win32 at activestate [activestate.com]
Damn, that is awesome (Score:1)
Andrew
--
Options for desktop useage (Score:1)
Some considerations for making a desktop, pointer-driven version:
Solution to the chording keyboard (Score:1)
Remember, I thought of the idea first...
Re:Built in cheat sheet helps (Score:1)
> minimize path lengths and be quicker to use
> once you memorized the layout.
Yeah, but a smaller square would be more error-prone, and would therefore negate any speed gain from the shorter paths.
Re:Practice people, sheesh. (Score:1)
Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Re:NUKE!!! I had to HARD reset after trying this. (Score:1)
Re:Impressive, But How Generally Useful? (Score:1)
1) It lacks the intuitive feel of graffiti where the input strokes resemble their corresponding characters.
2) There is less tolerance for positional errors. If I'm writing while looking elsewhere, my pen tends to drift around in the input area a bit. Granted, you do need to be somewhat sensitive as to your position with the letter/number distinction, but there's still more tolerance than this new system.
Now, I'll admit, perhaps I didn't give it enough of a chance. But I really don't have enough complaints about graffiti to make the effort to change either.
One mnemonic comment (Score:1)
On the other hand, there's a nice symmetry to the keyboard in their current positions. Down could mean "hitting the space bar," up could mean "stretching your pinky up to hit that backspace key," and down-left looks like the symbol on many enter keys.
I just think it's more viscerally appealing to see the cursor move the same way your pen moves; besides, that's the way Grafitti already does it, so it can't be wrong. :) Perhaps there could be an option (or HackMaster thingy) to swap the N/S fields with E/W...
--
Re:Layout logic? (Score:1)
That's same problem I have with ultra small keyboards. Once I can't touch type, I'd rather just have an alphabetical layout because my eyes don't know where the keys are, only my fingers do.
-harry
Not a Conflict (Score:1)
I have tried several times since having to reset (No data to worry about now =) and have gotten the same results.
Anyone with any suggestions?
NUKE!!! I had to HARD reset after trying this. (Score:1)
A reset gets you the PALM splash screen and nothing else, you cannot turn your palm off, it's zombied. At this point I executed a HARD reset nuking my schedule that hadn't been hotsynced yet (DOH!) and tried again with just the ROM portion of PALM OS installed, no upgrade performed... Same results.
Just wanted to STOP you guys before you ended up in Hard reset ville with me...
Re:THIS IS AWESOME, just what LinuxPDA needs, but. (Score:1)
So far, though, I haven't been able to get the hang of it.. I'll give it time.
Perlin (Score:1)
an Academy Award for his special effects technique.
my vote for Graffiti (Score:1)
i've used tealwrite for sometime and it helps a lot to distinguish between characters. graffiti ha s been fast enough for me. i'm not in class taking notes with it, i dont know if i could ever enter data with one hand, one stylus for that matter as fast as i can touch type. ok now i had to learn that too, but if i forget where a character is that i dont use that often is it doesnt take me that long to find it
Points to note (Score:1)
- The "common letters" list for English begins "e a t o n". After that there are a load with roughly the same frequency. They seem to have incorporated that pretty well.
- It would be easy to avoid "drift", and so to be able to enter text without looking, if the pad you were writing on had a raised border. Sound would also help (as suggested). The raised border could be implemented in software if using a joystick etc. (no movement beyond a certain radius).
- Given that the hassle of having more than one "version" of this would far outweigh the convenience of swapping a few letters, it's VITAL that the layout doesn't fragment within one language if this is to catch on. Remember the annoyance of different keyboard layouts.
- Imagine the size you could get hardware down to! I could do this on the face of my watch. Forget voice recognition; this is the future
- It's very, very cool, and anyone can learn and use it given a few hours. If it was standardised on, it could become a skill everyone knows, like typing.
Gerv
My thoughts on the Java Demo (Score:1)
It seems extremely cumbersome with a mouse. But then again, it's not designed to be used with one.
Anyone got a light pen and X drivers? Using a light pen would be a more fair assessment, considering what the program is designed for, than using the clunky mouse.
Graffiti (Score:1)
$ loadkeys dvorak (Score:1)
Re:Faster? (crappy PC mouse!) (Score:1)
yeah, I like my drawing tablet for this applet. it works great with a real pen... but you have this feeling you should push the pen down like on the PP to make it work. oh well, force of habit, i guess.
Re:I *like* this! (Score:1)
Re:Almost along these lines... (Score:1)
Re:Crashed my Palm III -- danger (Score:1)
No support for foreign languages (Score:1)
Re:Faster? (Score:1)
Go center -> right center zone -> right lower corner zone -> back to center.
;-)
Re:Practice people, sheesh. (Score:1)
Answered my own question
Re:Looks fast with a steep learning curve (Score:1)
ummm, looks kinda funky.... (Score:1)
Re:ummm, looks kinda funky.... (Score:1)
Give it a try
Dam these hands!!!! *curses*
Re:Practice people, sheesh. (Score:1)
So, if you were to use this, would you need some sort of sticker over the writing area? Or would you just have to remember the symbols postion?
Re:It's a download problem -- check the file size (Score:1)
doesn't work for me?? (Score:1)
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$
369
7
369
2
quit
quit
^C
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$ cat test.txt
beta:/usr/home/jblachly$
:(
any idea what the problem might be? I cutnpasted from slashdot
James
Not optimized (Score:1)
Just a quick comment -- the layout isn't quite optimized. The space and backspace are great, but I seem to recall 's' being one of the most used characters in english, but its position here is "secondary" (not just an in-out stroke).
Also, the position of the zero is secondary. I'd assume that's the most used number.
Any other thoughts about the optimality of the placements?
Graffiti wins in my book (Score:1)
I own and use a pilot every day, and I've been playing with the downloaded app for twenty minutes now, and I can't see how it can be as fast as graffiti. I can hammer out graffiti strokes almost as fast as I can write, but I can't even generate random characters with 'QuickWrite' as quickly as I can generate meaningful graffiti.
Besides, graffiti is actually easy to learn.
This may be useful for some people, but I reckon it will never appear in a marketed device. The learning curve is too steep. Many people don't even seem to be willing to take the 15 minutes or so it takes to learn grafiti, so very few will take the (IMO) 3 hours it would take to become somewhat adequate with 'QuickWrite' - as it stands right now, after 20 minutes, I couldn't imagine trying to use it without the cheatsheet right there. Graffiti, on the other hand, is easy without the cheatsheet after 20 minutes.
Re:Pilot (Score:1)
A new graffiti system would be nice because I could use it while standing on the train.
Ken Perlin's the Man (Score:1)
neat, but practical? (Score:1)
--
Re:You don't have to hard reset (Score:1)
Java Graffiti Demo (Score:1)
http://www.palm.com/products/input/index.html
My take: while this secondary system is FAST, it will take lots of memorization before you can use it without a crib sheet, and you'll never be able to use it without looking at the pad. Graffiti isn't perfect, but neither is this, the quest for the perfect pen input system continues...
T-Cube (Score:1)
At the end of the paper there is a reference to T-Cube. It sounds pretty similiar, but I wasn't able to find an online copy of the T-Cube paper. There's an implementation for Newtons (with a short description) here [visi.net]
Re:Not optimized (Score:1)
Thats my opinion, at least.
Note - you could shorten 3-key combos to just 2 (Score:1)
Perhaps someone could create a parser for long strings with the 5 key as the character seperator: 71569535415795 = "quick"
Re:Adding a heads up mode (Score:1)
The Fatal Flaw (Score:1)
I like to have the option of doing other things (ie watching a movie) while I write. When I am looking at what I'm doing, I prefer to look at the actual letters on the page rather than my stylus. Thus, I don't see getting into this device.
Re:Almost along these lines... (Score:1)
YMMV.
Impressive, But How Generally Useful? (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
--
Graffiti = Heads-up writing (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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. (Score:2)
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/OS
Built in cheat sheet helps (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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! (Score:2)
*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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
(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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:3)
FWIW, Quikwrite.prc does not lock up on my Palm III.
Key pad vertion (Score:3)
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
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, $t);
while () {
last if
chomp;
chomp ($t = ) and $c{$_} = $t;
}
print map "$_ => '$c{$_}',\n", keys %c;
It's a download problem -- check the file size (Score:3)
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! (Score:3)
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 (Score:4)
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...