PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Graffiti Alternatives

As good as Graffiti is, it’s not the only 100%-accurate handwriting-recognition system available for the PalmPilot. Software companies have raced to the cause with specially shaped alphabets of their own. Only single-digit percentages of Palm fans use these replacement systems, but what matters is that you have a choice.

Jot

The Jot alphabet’s claim to fame is that it’s the official alphabet of Windows CE palmtops (the PalmPilot’s rival). It offers several immediately apparent advantages over the Graffiti alphabet. First, most punctuation marks require only a single penstroke. Second, you can write on the upper portion of the screen, not just in the Graffiti area (although the shareware Palm program ScreenWrite, on this book’s CD-ROM, offers the same feature). As you write, the shape of each letter appears on the screen, to provide feedback (as the shareware TealEcho does)—great for refining your letter-making skills. Finally, many of the letter shapes are more “normal-looking” than Graffiti’s. As Table 3.2 illustrates, Jot’s shapes for A, E, F, K, T, and V are much more recognizable than the corresponding Graffiti shapes. (If your name is Eva Teffakeva, install Jot this minute.)

Jot also has some downsides, however: it costs $40 (from http://www.cic.com), takes up 120K of memory, and doesn’t permit you to turn off the “shape-echo” feature when you’ve outgrown it. Still, it’s one of the most ingenious solutions to the making-machines-understand-printing problem; ...