Re: [NTLK] Palm LifeDrive

~~~ On 2007/04/13 00:15, kevin_ondre@vermontel.net at
kevin_ondre@vermontel.net wrote ~~~

> Also, most Newton users I've known spit fire and blood at the mention of
> any single-character recognition system like Graffiti. If you can get
> past this prejudice, it will double or triple your input speed with just
> a little practice. There is a learning curve tho.

Kevin, with respect, there's a reason why some of us "spit fire and blood"
about mere character recognition: for us, it's a retrograde step from the
*handwriting* recognition of the Newton. When I was a very little boy, I
was taught to learn new words by sounding them out, letter by letter. That
went along with learning to print, letter by letter. Before long though, I
was expected to go beyond that, to recognize whole words at a time, and
along with that I was taught to write whole words, using a cursive script.
In my school it was the Palmer script. It was attractive, legible and most
of all, faster than printing. Even though my handwriting has seriously
degenerated over the years, it's still faster than printing. I've timed
myself both with cursive script and with printing; it does NOT "double or
triple" my speed to print even with the alphabet I already know, let alone
some made-up set of symbols. And that's where the Newton comes in.

Until I used a Newton myself, I wrote off [sorry!] the claims for the Newt's
HWR and assumed the jokes about the first iterations were true. When a
friend let me try his and I saw how easily the Newton learned my
handwriting, that was it, I was convinced. Against all odds, my Newt can
read my scrawl. And for people who really learned cursive handwriting when
they were young, I'd argue that it's miles faster than mere printing. (And
for those that didn't, I'd suggest that their teachers didn't do them any
favours.)

BTW, in this context comparing HWR to typing for speed is spurious even for
people who type faster than they write. I can stand in a queue at the bank
or post office, Newt in one hand and stylus in the other, and make notes
without any need of a flat surface or anywhere to sit in order to type.

...just to reassure you we aren't simply irrational or crazy. :)
 
Shalom.
Christian

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