Graffiti (Palm OS) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Graffiti is an essentially single-stroke shorthand

Shorthand

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...

handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...

system used in PDA

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

s based on the Palm OS

Palm OS

Palm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...

. Graffiti was originally written by Palm, Inc.

Palm, Inc.

Palm, Inc., was a smartphone manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that was responsible for products such as the Pre and Pixi as well as the Treo and Centro smartphones. Previous product lines include the PalmPilot, Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, Zire and Tungsten. While their older...

as the recognition system for GEOS

GEOS (8-bit operating system)

GEOS is an operating system from Berkeley Softworks . Originally designed for the Commodore 64 and released in 1986, it provided a graphical user interface for this popular 8-bit computer.GEOS closely resembled early versions of Mac OS and included a graphical word processor and paint program...

-based devices such as HP's OmniGo 120 or the Magic Cap

Magic Cap

Magic Cap was an object-oriented operating system for PDAs developed by General Magic. Tony Fadell was in charge of the platform. Darin Adler was an architect....

-line and was available as an alternate recognition system for the Apple Newton

Apple Newton

The MessagePad was the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was done in Japan by the Sharp Corporation...

MessagePad, when NewtonOS 1.0 couldn't recognize handwriting very well. Graffiti also runs on the Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...

platform, where it is called "Block Recognizer", and on the Symbian

Symbian

Symbian is a mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones and currently maintained by Accenture. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60; unlike Symbian OS, which needed an additional user interface system, Symbian includes a user...

UIQ

UIQ by UIQ Technology is a software platform based upon Symbian OS. Essentially this is a graphical user interface layer that provides additional components to the core OS, to enable the development of feature-rich mobile phones that are open to expanded capabilities through third-party...

platform as the default recognizer and was available for Casio's Zoomer PDA.

The software is based primarily on a neography of upper-case characters that can be drawn blindly with a stylus on a touch-sensitive panel. Since the user typically cannot see the character as it is being drawn, complexities have been removed from four of the most difficult letters. "A'" "F", "K" and "T" all are drawn without any need to match up a cross-stroke.

History

Graffiti was developed by Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins

Jeffrey Hawkins is the founder of Palm Computing and Handspring...

, who had previously created "PalmPrint" to recognize natural handwriting. By using a simpler alphabet, computers could easily recognize handwriting. Hawkins believed that people would take the time to learn Graffiti just as people learn to touch-type

Touch typing

Touch typing is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory. Touch typing typically involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard and having them...

. Hawkins recalled his insight: "And then it came to me in a flash. Touch-typing is a skill you learn."

Jeff Hawkins also envisioned a single area for writing letters on top of each other. Other pen computers used traditional writing from left to right. The drawback of this is that users run out of screen space after a few words. Graffiti used a different approach. Instead of writing letters normally, users would write one letter on top of another, lifting the pen between them. This meant that each letter had to be one continuous stroke—so, for example, it would be impossible to dot an "i"—but it made it easy for the computer to simply recognize letters in the order they were written, with added glyphs for things like spaces and upper case

Letter case

In orthography and typography, letter case is the distinction between the larger majuscule and smaller minuscule letters...

.

Jeff Hawkins called this system "PowerPalmPrint" or P3. Other engineers at Palm revised and expanded the alphabet that Hawkins had created. Joe Sipher and Ron Marianetti created more characters and punctuation and also designed a prototype of Graffiti that ran on a PC with a tablet peripheral

Graphics tablet

A graphics tablet is a computer input device that enables a user to hand-draw images and graphics, similar to the way a person draws images with a pencil and paper. These tablets may also be used to capture data or handwritten signatures...

.

Graffiti was also implemented on the Apple Newton

Apple Newton

. In 2008 an unauthorized version of Graffiti was introduced for iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices. An Android version was released in 2010 by ACCESS CO., LTD. of Japan, which acquired the rights to Graffiti when it acquired PalmSource, Inc. in 2005.

Lawsuit

The original Graffiti system was the subject of a lawsuit from Xerox

Xerox

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

, claiming it violated Xerox's patent relating to its Unistrokes technology . The Unistrokes technology was invented at the Palo Alto Research Center

Xerox PARC

PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....

(PARC) by David Goldberg. Palm got a demonstration of Unistrokes from PARC before they created their Graffiti system. During the original case, a court ruled that Palm violated Xerox's patent and ordered them to discontinue use of the original Graffiti system in further versions of its Palm OS software, which Palm did. It replaced the original Graffiti system with a licensed variant of the Jot system from Communication Intelligence Corporation, which Palm refers to as Graffiti 2

Graffiti 2

Graffiti 2 is a version of the Palm OS handwriting system, Graffiti, that was introduced in 2003. In January of that year PalmSource announced the change, and explained that Graffiti 2 was based on Jot by Communication Intelligence Corporation , and would replace the original version of Graffiti...

. It differs from the original Graffiti system in various ways, though it does recognize some of the original keystrokes (except the input method for punctuation and "i", "k", "q", "t" and "4").

Palm later appealed the original court ruling both on the claim it violated Xerox's patent and as to the validity of the patent in the first place. An appeals court ruled in favor of Xerox with regard to the original ruling that Palm had violated its patent but sent the case back down to the lower court to decide whether the patent was valid to begin with. In 2004, a judge ruled in favor of Palm, saying Xerox's patent was not valid on the basis that "prior art references anticipate and render obvious the claim." Xerox appealed the ruling. and won, obtaining $US 22.5 million in retrospective licensing fees.
Palm and Xerox agreed to not sue each other for seven years over certain patents, without publicly specifying which patents.

History

Lawsuit

See also