February 03, 2004
PalmCorner Weekly Feature--Indispensable Utility Program 1
If you use your Palm religiously as I have done for the past 8 years, you start to understand that there are a number of programs that become so indispensable. For the past few months, and especially last week or so, Tealscript emerged as one of those programs in my T3. Ever since Palm abandoned the original Graffiti writing recognition system (G1) for the new Graffiti 2 (G2) system, I had not particularly enjoyed using G2. I have always found the letters i and t were cumbersome and inefficient in G2. I installed G1 over G2 in my Tungsten C and Tungsten T3 for a while, but number of conflicts got in the way (including restoring the handheld from hard reset--if you installed G1 over G2, then you cannot restore the device after hard reset w/o getting rid of G1 from the backup directory to prevent fatal exception loop).
So, several months ago, I switched over to using Tealscript from Tealpoint Software. One of the biggest advantage of Tealscript over either G1 or G2 is that you can customize your handwriting stroke to fit your needs. As seen below, I've programmed "g" to accept the standard "g" in G2. You can turn on the option to allow alternate strokes, and I've also programmed "g" to accept the standard "g" in G1 as well (see picture below). Also, as you can see, I am now using the original "t" from G1 instead of the cumbersome "t" from G2. You can train the program to recognize your stroke and save your customized profile--you can also backup or clone your profiles. . You can also test recognition to make sure the program is recognizing your stroke.
There was however one feature that was sorely lacking for the T3 users including myself. That was the incompatibility between the T3's write anywhere system (activated from the button in the status bar) and Tealscript. Well, with the latest release of Tealscript, this incompatibility has been resolved. Now, when you activate Tealscript globally, Tealscript takes over G2 completely (including the write anywhere mode), and you can also activate or deactivate Tealscript from the status bar button as well. This has been one of the best upgrades.
All in all, a great and indispensable utility if you ever want to customize Graffiti to your liking rather than to become a slave to the prefixed system (especially if you don't like it).
Check it out at Tealpoint software.
Couldn't agree more! However, its a pity TealPoint don't seem to notify registered users when an update comes out. I was really eager for the use of the status bar button (I actually wrote to Teal to request this - they didn't reply) and have just found out about it here. This program is now just about perfect.
Posted by John Hallett at February 3, 2004 01:01 PMHi Ken,
Have you tried fitaly? I've been demoing it this week, and I am getting much faster with it than I ever was with G1 or 2.
Posted by vegheadjones at February 4, 2004 12:05 PMI've tried Fitaly on and off several times in the past, but I could never get used to it. I guess I didn't use it enough to get facile with it. Last time I checked, they had the beta versin for the T3, and I'm sure they have released it by now.
Posted by Ken at February 4, 2004 10:58 PMDon't know if anyone else has had this problem, but with this new version, if on-screen writing is enabled and I use iSilo to read documents, I can't use the stylus to drag pages up and down.
Posted by John Hallett at February 9, 2004 01:44 PMAnother method you might look at is Quikwriting. This is from New York University's Media Research Lab, and was invented by Ken Perlin. The Graffiti area is divided into 9 regions, and all characters are 2 or 3 strokes, with the stylus starting and ending in the middle region. With practice, short words like "the" and "of" become fluid sequences without ever lifting the stylus off the screen. It's potentially much faster than Graffiti, but it's not "intuitive" -- the characters are not similar to block letters at all, so it takes longer to learn. Software is available for free at .
Posted by dwl at February 20, 2004 03:42 PMTo leave a comment or read updated entries, please visit GearBits' current site. Thanks.