Quikwriter

Handwriting recognition is a spectre that never goes away, but is always just around the corner, like artificial intelligence and other such bug bears. The Newton was killed by Apple just as it had reached the CPU power (and the stage of software development) to become a workable system. Graffiti, which as a gesture recognition system was developed only shortly after the Newton, has inspired a number of colse competitors including both Jot and T9 for Windows CE. Graffiti still seems to be a better system as it is faster than either, thanks to both a simpler set of gestures (which take slightly longer to learn than Jot) and shortcuts. A new system has been talked about (and won user interface awards), called Quikwriting. This is most simply described as a gesture based system that uses a T9-like keypad to shape letters, rather than any association with letter shapes, and is supposed to be much faster than Graffiti, but with the cost of extra learning time. All gestures start and return to the centre of the recognition area, and form a line out the one of eight zones around the circumference that contain groups of three to five letters. A small hook like diversion is used to pinpoint the exact character required, and then returns to the centre.

Quikwriter demo on Palm

and a forthcoming product on CE

http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/demos/quikwriting.html
http://www.conduits.com/ce/

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: August 18, 1999