[NTLK] Another perspective on Graffiti and Rosetta

From: Adam Tow (tow_at_tow.com)
Date: Thu Dec 05 2002 - 14:29:05 EST


Ben and all:

Having gotten pretty good at using both Newton's HWR (Rosetta) and
Palm's Graffiti over the past 9+ years (man, it's been a long time!),
I can say that both input systems have their benefits and drawbacks.

If you want to write naturally, there's nothing on the market today that
quite matches the elegance of the Newton's print recognizer. It isn't
perfect, however, and it isn't suited for certain tasks that Graffiti
excels in.

My experience tells me that people typically write between 20-30 words
per minute (see http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/aug00.asp).
Writing with a pen results in far fewer mistakes that writing on
the Newton, due to the quirks in the HWR system. For instance, Newton
frequently upcases characters such as 'S' and 'O' if they are
at the beginning of a word. If you pause while writing a word, Newton
will interpret that as if you have finished the word already. This
results in frequent editing of what you've written, which has the
effect of slowing down your wpm rate.

I wrote WriteHere and Corrector+ to deal with some of the quirks of
Rosetta on the Newton. alt.rec.... (Paul Guyot) is another good
program that fixes some of the flaws in the Newton's HWR.

With Graffiti, once you have learned and programmed the alphabet, it's
possible to hit 30 wpm with 100% accuracy. The strokes for each character
are sufficiently different from one another so that a higher degree
of sloppiness is tolerated by Graffiti over Rosetta. Because I took
the time to practice and internalize the Graffiti alphabet, I can
write very, very fast with it today.

Graffiti is useful in other situations like writing email addresses or
URL's. With the Newton, you have to resort to the keyboard, since the
Newton will constantly be adding spaces to your input. Some application's
input lines are really, really small, making handwriting difficult.
Graffiti wins here again because you write in one area that's always
available. Graffiti is also better and faster at writing difficult
characters such as ':', ',', '.', and quotes without having to
resort to the keyboard or the caret popup.

Today, I use a combination of the Newton's HWR system (with WH and C+
active sometimes) and Graffiti to input text. Both systems work well,
though one is often significantly better than the other depending
on the situation. My recommendation is that if you want to get
really good and fast on the Newton, use both systems!

Hope this information helps.

-adam

>Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 02:01:52 +1100 Subject: Re: [NTLK] Palm negative
>comments (was eMate vs Alphasmart Dana) From: Ben Wells
>
>Talking about graffiti versus HWR, I was yakking to a local Mac dealer
>a few days ago, and pulled out my 2100 to show him. He asked me
>wouldn't using Graffiti be quicker to input text?
>
>Certainly if HWR can understand your cursive (it struggles with my
>script, but then again so do people, including myself), then the
>answer is no. But printing? I know I have to print pretty carefully to
>have flawless recognition; when I start rushing myself I end up doing
>a lot of editing.
>
>I've never used a Palm device long enough to figure out graffiti...
>occasionally I play with a friend's m100 and spend most of my time
>staring at the Graffiti hints sheet. But I could see, for some, that
>Graffiti's shorthand-style alphabet COULD perhaps be a very fast - if
>not particularly intuitive - way to input data.

-- 
Adam Tow <adam_at_tow.com>
tow.com <http://www.tow.com/>
Tomorrow begins today.

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