Why develop another character recognition product for the PalmPilot? Simple.
"Speed," said Ken Perlin, the developer of Quikwriting. "Graffiti is too slow."
Perlin, a computer science professor at New York University, has developed Quikwriting, an alternative to the Graffiti software that comes with every PalmPilot.
Perlin and NYU's Media Research Lab plan to spin off a commercial software company to sell the software, with a targeted August launch.
"I set out to design a shorthand that was designed for speed."
Graffiti allows users to hand-write characters on the PalmPilot's touch screen. The built-in software translates gestures representing letters into onscreen text for to-do lists, appointments, notes, and so forth.
"Graffiti is phenomenal, and it's very easy to learn," Perlin said. "But the fact that you have to trace out the general shape of each letter and lift the pen between each character makes it a letter-by-letter system."
As Perlin sees it, the pause between letters kills speed. Quikwriting eliminates that problem. The user never has to lift the PalmPilot stylus from the screen, and therefore doesn't have to pause between letters.
The software divides the PalmPilot's writing area into eight zones around a central resting spot. To form a character, the user drags the stylus from the center to one of the outside zones. Each contains a range of three to five possible characters.
That outward stroke -- combined, if necessary, with an additional stroke within the selected zone -- determines which character is entered. All strokes come back to the center, so the user can flow seamlessly into the next one.
The result is text entry far more fluid than that offered by current software, Perlin said. "You never have to pick your pen up off the surface." He reports a speed increase of two to three times over Graffiti. Other formal testing showed similar results, he said.
Perlin presented Quikwriting at the User Interface Software and Technology symposium last fall, where copies of it spread quickly. After he mentioned the software to a woman who would later attend his talk, she used her PalmPilot's wireless modem to download a demo version of Quikwriting to her PalmPilot.
"By the time I gave my talk, she had beamed it [via the PalmPilot's infrared connection] to several people in the room," he said. "It spread through the room like a virus."
There is a catch, however. Quikwriting has a steeper learning curve than Graffiti. Perlin said people get the general hang of it in about an hour, but the more infrequently used characters take longer to learn.
But Perlin expects that experienced Piloteers will think the added learning time is worth it. "Once you learn, you just want to be able to go as fast as possible."
