From: Michael Blazer (m.blazer_at_utoronto.ca)
Date: Sun Oct 02 2005 - 17:11:21 PDT
The maker of the (from all accounts, terrific) Mac backup/disk cloner
utility Super Duper has a post on his site that talks about the Newton
handwriting recognition as an example of something that can't possibly
live up to user expectations. OK, fair enough, maybe, and he goes on to
make some interesting points. But then he says this:
"Newton, near the end of its life, tried to get around this problem by
taking a bit of a Graffiti approach: it asked people to print, and
there’s a lot less letter variation in printed characters. Suddenly,
with that Rosetta recognizer (still in use in Mac OSX today), people
started saying the Newton did a good job recognizing handwriting when—in
actuality—it just shifted the burden onto the user some more by
restricting input."
Doesn't sound right to me. True, printing gives the greatest accuracy,
but I don't remember the Newton ever *asking* me to print. If I write
in a reasonably neat cursive, I get good enough accuracy on my MP2100
that I can use it for note-taking in meetings and seminars instead of
paper. And it's far better than it was in NOS 1.x.
Anybody more knowledgeable and more eloquent than me feel like posting a
comment there to clear things up a bit?
Permalink:
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/blame_the_weather/
Michael
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