Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available

Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available

Today, April 16, 2008, 4 hours ago
Holy Egg Freckles! A third-party developer has released handwriting
recognition software for the iPhone. Similar to Graffiti, the classic
writing software for Palms, you can setup HWPen from Installer.app to
give you an a writing area that can take over the standard keyboard at
the touch of button. The best thing: it works.

http://digg.com/apple/Handwriting_Re...Available_PICS

4phun <vic.healey@gmail.com> wrote in
news:840caf55-0d68-4328-a98a-03c20feb9bee@k37g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

> Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available
>
> Today, April 16, 2008, 4 hours ago
> Holy Egg Freckles! A third-party developer has released handwriting
> recognition software for the iPhone. Similar to Graffiti, the classic
> writing software for Palms, you can setup HWPen from Installer.app to
> give you an a writing area that can take over the standard keyboard at
> the touch of button. The best thing: it works.
>
> http://digg.com/apple/Handwriting_Re..._Now_Available
_
> PICS
>

Now, what was the resolution of this iPhone finger screen? No, not the
VIDEO resolution, the touchscreen resolution! Every time I see the tech
specs for the iPhone there's no mention of it.

How much resolution can a greasy finger dragging across a piece of
plastic capacitor have, anyways? Try it for yourself. Press your
forefinger to a rubber stamp pad inker, then write your name as small as
you can, say, 3.5" wide, like the iPhone screen.

Now, how is the iPhone going to convert that black smudge into RELIABLE
text input like stylus devices have, whos resolution is the width of the
stylus tip?

Here's how a real one works:

If a letter stumbles, you add your letter/number/punctuation/special
character to the recognition list.

It works pretty cool, especially with phrase storage doodles.

I can't imagine how iPhone is going to work without stylus resolution.
Maybe one letter at a time like low res Palm Pilots?? that sucks.

Notice on the webpage there is no URL to this new application website or
any reference as to what or who wrote it.

Vaporware??

Dreamware??

There is, in fact, a pen for the iToy.

Unlike the iPhone, the iPod Touch is sold in Japan. Unlike the silly
westerners who insist upon finger-poking their iToys, the Japanese
immediately recognized the need for a pen, and stores in Japan all sell
the iPod Touch pen. The cost is 1950 yen or US $20. It is not at all
like a stylus; it has a spring-backed (for dragging) rubber tip at an
angle which puts about 1/8" diameter surface on the iPod Touch screen.

Handwriting recognition, or more accurately kanji recognition, is quite a
bit more important in Japan than in western countries. It it MUCH faster
to draw a particular kanji than it is to enter it phonetically through a
keyboard, but the latter is the only thing that Apple currently offers for
its Japanese input method. What's worse, Apple only offers an alphabetic
keyboard and not a kana keyboard, so even the phonetic characters require
twice as many keypresses to enter. [To be far, some Japanese, especially
programmers, prefer alphabetic input over kana input.]

I tried drawing kanji using the Sketches application (one of the many
useful applications after jailbreaking an iToy) on my iPod Touch, and
determined that it was completely ridiculous to try with a finger. With
the pen, it was a bit better, but it was quite slow and nearly impossible
to draw a character in the normal size that you do on a normal Japanese
PDA. Kanji drawing requires precision, that requires a stylus; and a
stylus can't work on an iToy.

The pen definitely works better for input with Apple's keyboard (which
takes a ridiculously large amount of screen real estate to accomodate
fingers), although a stylus is faster. However, fingers seem to work
better on the icons.

Now, to be fair, most phones (as opposed to PDAs) in Japan do not have
handwriting recognition, much less kanji recognition. Text input in
normal phones is done on the numeric keypad, and typically the Japanese
language requires many more keystrokes than English.

However, keys provide one thing that the iToy does not even with a pen:
tactile feedback. The user knows from the feel on his or her (I've seen
teenage girls text at a rate that I would not have considered possible)
fingers whether the input is correct without having to look at the screen.

Windows Mobile based smartphones have either a keyboard or a stylus; and
with the latter comes the possibility of handwritten kanji input and
recognition.

What's more, the Japanese phone makers have not been idle. Sharp's 912SH
for SoftBank steals much of the iToy's thunder in the phone market, as it
has many of the iToy characteristics plus the facilities that the iToy
lacks but are essentially for any mobile phone in the Japanese market.
It even includes a 1seg digital TV tuner.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

Mark Crispin <mrc@Washington.EDU> wrote in
news:alpine.OSX.1.10.0804170826340.28886@pangtzu.p anda.com:

> The user knows from the feel on his or her (I've seen
> teenage girls text at a rate that I would not have considered
> possible) fingers whether the input is correct without having to look
> at the screen.
>
>

Thanks for the response, Mark. I've seen teenage girls do a LOT of things
I wouldn't have considered possible...but that's another OT thread...(c;

But, back to the iphone, quickly, I was referring to its capacitive
screen's touch pixel density. Any touchscreen is a matrix like flyscreen.
To do accurate character recognition requires a very fine matrix to get
enough pixels to represent a small character. I was amazed the handwriting
input on the N800 would actually let you write on a line and convert that
line, character by character into fairly accurate text, sometimes with a
little extra instruction from the learn mode. I had Palm pilots where you
had to draw big letters, one at a time, in odd ways that were unnatural to
get ^ turned into an "a" for instance. I suspected with the low resolution
capacitive touchscreen, the iphone text input would be similarly requiring
large letters so it could identify them.

With a stylus, will it identify letters as small as you would normally
print them with a ball pen?

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:58:47 -0700, Mark Crispin <mrc@Washington.EDU>
wrote:

>However, keys provide one thing that the iToy does not even with a pen:
>tactile feedback. The user knows from the feel on his or her (I've seen
>teenage girls text at a rate that I would not have considered possible)
>fingers whether the input is correct without having to look at the screen.
>
>Windows Mobile based smartphones have either a keyboard or a stylus; and
>with the latter comes the possibility of handwritten kanji input and
>recognition.
>
>What's more, the Japanese phone makers have not been idle. Sharp's 912SH
>for SoftBank steals much of the iToy's thunder in the phone market, as it
>has many of the iToy characteristics plus the facilities that the iToy
>lacks but are essentially for any mobile phone in the Japanese market.
>It even includes a 1seg digital TV tuner.


Your biased opinion is at odds with the Market.
iPhone outsells the Windoze Mobile phones.

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Ron posted:
> Your biased opinion is at odds with the Market.
> iPhone outsells the Windoze Mobile phones.

As of today (April 17, 2008) any Windows Mobile phone outsells the iPhone
in Japan (which is the market under discussion).

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Kurt <labolide@spacegmail.com> wrote in news:labolide-37DC83.17203817042008
@news.giganews.com:

> Don't know about you, but I was happy to get away from the Palm-Treo
> stylus thing, even though I was pretty fast with it.
>
>

Well, I did hate the Palm stylus and its letter interface, too. But,
stylus is still the most accurate way for a human to point to something
with resolution on a small screen device....so far. Fingers are too large
to point to click spots on a normal webpage, for example. Oh, you can
drive yourself crazy spreading fingers so it will only click one link, then
zooming back out so you can read what it says. But, you need not magnify
the webpage with a stylus and calibrated screen.

Text entry with the stylus on these more intellegent machines isn't such a
chore as it was, either....unlike the Palms...yecch.

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:27:43 -0700, Mark Crispin <MRC@Washington.EDU>
wrote:

>On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Ron posted:
>> Your biased opinion is at odds with the Market.
>> iPhone outsells the Windoze Mobile phones.
>
>As of today (April 17, 2008) any Windows Mobile phone outsells the iPhone
>in Japan (which is the market under discussion).
>


And in Japan those sales are miniscule for Windoze, and
nonexistant for iPhone which hasn't reached Japan yet
so you're just blowing smoke.