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Fan of Palm OS Graffiti? Get it for Your Android Phone

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phandroid

Admin News Bot
The original Palm OS featured a single-stroke input method called Graffiti to allow users to write characters out quickly through a touch interface. While it definitely may have taken some getting used to as certain character gestures were reworked to be slightly altered versions of their alphabet alternatives, it has developed quite a little following [...]

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Omg, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou, Access! Finally, a stroke-based input method that consistently recognizes "up, right" as "f" and (left-side) "6" as "g". For the first time in literally YEARS, I wrote "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs, then smiled with ecstatic joy and happiness because Graffiti finally works properly again!" at (nearly) full speed, with ZERO recognition errors. With MS Block Input, I'd be lucky to make it to 'dog' with only one or two recognition errors, and with StrokeKeyboard & MobileWrite I just gave up after it became obvious that whatever algorithm they were using was NOT the same as the one I grew up with (I don't think either one ever truly recognized "up, right" as "f").

The only way it could possibly get better would be if there were a way to overload one of the phone's hardkeys to activate a mostly-transparent input field when pressed, and make strokes entered in that fashion appear to be indistinguishable from hardkeys to the app (ex: press and hold "volume down", and a ghostly input field appears over the screen without affecting anything underneath. Draw 'c', and a key input event gets generated that's indistinguishable to apps and the phone from pressing 'c' on a slide-out keyboard. Release the volume up key, and the input field goes away. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there's no graceful way to achieve this under the current Android API.

Long live Graffiti 1 :-)
 
I AM old school. The Palm Pilot had a great suite of apps, most of which cannot be replicated in quality, yet, via Android. I still have, and use, my Palm Vx, because the applications are so very good.

Swype is good, but Palm's Graffitti was much, much better. Now, "finger" graffitti might be another thing entirely, since the original was used with a stylus. My initial work with this Android App is just so, so. It might get better with time.
 
Swype doesn't even compare to graffiti, keep up the good work. I'll admit to being a graffiti 2 user so I'm not as fast on this app as on my tungsten but it works well. With some practice I could replace my other keyboards.
 
Tip: if you use this a lot, and your phone hasn't been rooted yet... root it now, install SetCPU from Market, and crank it up to "performance" mode. Once I did that, Graffiti accuracy went from "high" to "nearly flawless" without even TRYING to be accurate or careful.

It's just a theory at this point, but I have a hunch that Android (or at least HTC's phones) might throttle down the clock rate when a soft input area is active, on the theory that it's probably just displaying the picture of a keyboard and waiting for a press somewhere. Or maybe the clock rate moving up and down during a stroke skews the sampling and/or normalization algorithm. Either way, the improvement was perceptible.
 
Graffiti for Android is awesome. I'm getting 100% accuracy and very fast input. Night and day to the keypad pop-up. Droid was nice, but it finally arrived for me with this app!
 
Finally I'm ready to dump my old Palm TX & Nokia Music Express for, probably, the Samsung Vibrant. I guess with Graffiti and my Palm bluetooth keyboard I see no reason to have a physical keyboard now. And I hear the latest Docs-To-Go has a sync to PC option.

Or maybe I'll wait to see what T-Mo's full HSPA+ offering is about.
 
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