The classic Palm keyboardless stroke-input technology is available for Android! This is simultaneously cool, geeky, and not nearly as useful as I had hoped.
If you’ve been using a Palm for the past 15 years, this will help you transition. If you love weird input devices (**ahem**), you’ll find this interesting. If you need a fast, accurate method of inputting text to your Android phone —this might not be it.
However it is far from useless. And I may well change my mind. The QWERTY keyboard is made for ten fingers in a large area. Finger-tapping that layout makes no ergonomic sense. Swype and other glide-entry virtual keyboards are moving to the gesture-paradigm, but they’re still stuck with the QWERTY-layout [uh, there are some squirrely candidates out there, but no major players, yet]. Graffiti, while a remnant of a barely-touchscreen-age, was solidly in the gesture paradigm — you use not-too-large gestures to approximate the letters. We all know how to write, right? Even if our handwriting is crappy….
According to the Graffiti right-holder, it is “the most popular handwriting recognition software ever developed for mobile devices” (What’s in second-place, the Apple Newton?!??). And after fiddling with it throughout the day, I wasn’t all that slow. But while DVORAK may be better than QWERTY, we still use QWERTY, because we are used to it. And it is tough to break the habits of finding letters where we expect them — especially when there are NO letters to find.
And although this is the 2.0 version of the app, there are some elements that seem not out of beta. It’s tough to get punctuation (which isn’t even mentioned in the keystroke guide). Lots of virtual keyboards come with alternate screens including URL fragments, special symbols, cut-copy-paste shortcuts, etc. Nothing like this exists for Graffiti; indeed — the FAQ says “Short cuts, including those for cut, copy and paste, are not currently implemented.”.
Update: After using Graffitti for nearly two days, it’s continuing to grow on me. The touch screen is designed for a single finger, and so is Graffitti. The lack of an on-screen reference (like a keyboard) is offputting, but the strokes are rapidly learned, since they are so similar to “normal” handwriting.
Screenshots
The classic entry screen — alphas on the left, numerics on the right. Bonus: word-prediction. I never had that on my Palm III
Swype er, Stroke upwards out of the entry-area, to get a keystroke guide. Tap the guide to get successive pages, including cursor keys, punctuations, and special characters. No copy-n-paste, though. Fortunately, some paste support is built-in to Froyo 2.2.
See Also
End Gadget: Graffiti for Android scribbles Palm OS memories all over google
download Graffitti (Cyrket link)
Data-Entry-for-the-touch-screen-challenged
Recent Comments