Edgewrite should perhaps be called "Cornerwrite;" in its optimized alphabet, the every stroke begins and ends in a corner and every change in direction is at a corner.
One thing we learned from our testing was, the absolute speed and accuracy weren’t actually the critical point. It was really the overall experience...
So with the [Apple] Newton [handwriting recognition] and other technologies, you would write something, and you would go one Mississippi two Mississippi, and boom it would show up. And if it’s wrong, oh crap. You erase it, and then you try again like one Mississippi two Mississippi. But with Graffiti you’re just going a-b-c-d-e, and if you make a mistake, like your keyboard on your computer, you just have this backspace stroke, and so it’s very fast to recover from errors, so you just keep going.
I think there's a parallel here with swiping gestures for words on smartphone keyboards, where I find that when the gesture is misinterpreted, it's frustrating because I'll have to delete the entire word and redraw it, or tap out individual letters. Which just feels bad.
As a side note related to that, in the same class there was also a guest lecture from Shumin Zhai, who worked on SHARK and subsequent systems which would eventually become ShapeWriter/Swype [2]. Very cool overview to how the system works conceptually.
[1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
[2] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Yes it seems that swype's spiritual ancestor somehow is edgewrite / graffiti text entry systems.
please check out my rss http://tbf-rnd.life/feed if you want to get more info. I have a long backlog and I hope some interesting views as well. Also there'll be code!
I'd like to do a web demoable implementation of edgewrite but it's kind of hard for me to get a hand on a Palm Pilot.
Have you used that system?
Edgewrite and Graffiti both have the advantage of leveraging off of your existing writing knowledge, but I have to say after using Graffiti that it sure seemed like it would be a lot faster to just abandon writing as the metaphor altogether.
Actually, I guess that's what MessagEase originally was, since Wikipedia tells me that it was originally released for in 2002 for the Palm.
I'm going to keep this installed and see if I can get faster.
I also notice that there's no autocorrect, which I miss especially when it comes to typing the pronoun "I."
Actually, the uppercase support is one thing that I dislike about MessagEase. For swipes you just swipe one way and then back to where you started, which is easy and natural. For taps (your most frequent characters) you have to draw a circle. I've found this to be error prone, and the fact that it's different for the two sets of characters tends to trip me up. If you text as much as a teenager, you could probably get this into muscle memory, but I can never quite get there.
It seems like a rather quick method, but wouldn't it be quicker if all letters started and ended in the same corner?
There's a pretty cool demo with a Javascript implementation in a couple hundred lines here: http://depts.washington.edu/madlab/proj/dollar/index.html
[1] http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.01.pdf
Seems like Jacob Wobbrock went on to become quite influential after his work on this.
I find that there are a lot of places where keyboards doesnt cut it - VR - Disabilities - international settings - productivity for tablets
My hope is to create a framework in code where experiments can be made and benchmarked.
Also to create a loose umbrella organisation that can coordinate the effort.
