Chasing the rainbow and looking for love

[austin_dern]

On trying some out, I think I'm falling out of love with the palmtop concept. The ones with miniature keyboards seem right out; the keys are too small. The buttons are easy to press, but I can press only one or two at once. I type fast; my last measured speed was around 105 words per minute, and that's low as I ran out of typing material during the test and had to find the examiner for instructions. I don't type letters; I type words. Anything slower is achingly slow. Plus their miniature keyboards don't have semicolons, insufferably cramping my style.

The ones with freeform writing letters don't fit me either. I write small, newsprint-type small. This is small enough the devices can't make out my letters. Yeah, the cure is to write larger. I have tried for thirty years to write larger, in response to the pains I've given parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, and students. I must at this point conclude I'm not going to ever learn to write bigger.

The freeform draw-and-sketch-out types don't really work either; I tried scribbling a little spectral analysis and found the symbols turned to pixellated gibberish. Yeah, yeah, write larger. Not gonna happen. The stylus is part of the problem; my ideal writing instrument is a fountain pen, delivering precise lines exactly as thick as I want just where I want while gliding frictionlessly over paper. It's the only graceful thing I do, but I do it well. I'll try again, but I'm leaning towards the scanner and reference books.

Trivia: To raise money for his rubber research, Charles Goodyear pawned all his possessions, including his children's schoolbooks. Source: Life Science Library: Giant Molecules, Herman F Mark.

Currently Reading: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Did you ever get to play with a later generation Newton? I'm afraid I only ever saw one a couple times.. and was quite impressed, particularly with its pukka PCMCIA slot, so it was perfectly feasible to have, say, a modem/ethernet card installed. Wouldn't mind having one, actually, but even now, they're hardly dirt cheap.

That said, the handwriting recognition lives on in OS X as Inkwell, though nobody's quite sure why, given there's not much use made of it in the OS generally.

On the few occasions these days when I actually have to write something, I'm reminded how unaccustomed to the task my paws are now, after years of getting away with tapping away on little plastic squares. Not that I mind the results - I was taught a form of script writing early on, and it stuck well. (It did grate that a later school all but insisted I learn their scheme, even when they could see I could already write, and cursively)

Have you noticed your handwriting style evolve gently over the years?

On the budget front, something else you might consider useful: an external hard drive (handy for large volume backups, or transferring data easily from some office system elsewhere, without having to navigate the network perils), and/or a wireless data card, for being networked on the move (3GPRS, HSCPD, or suchlike).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never got to actually touch a Newton, no. I'd seen a demonstration of how some bit of its coding snuck into OS X, but actually missed the name Inkwell and couldn't figure where to find that.

My handwriting hasn't changed all that much, except for getting a bit more legible and quicker since I started trying to adopt ham radio-style quicker moves for writing block capitals. That's based on writing letters with less movement so you can keep up with the fastest Morse code speed you can decipher, which in my case isn't that fast.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I was sure I'd hate the little thumb keyboards, but I found they actually weren't bad. I wouldn't want to type any long texts on one, but for writing short notes they're just fine. For me they're marginally faster than PalmOS Graffiti writing. I don't currently own one, though.

I have a regular folding keyboard for my current PalmOS handheld, which is just large enough for me to touch type on. (I have skinny fingers.) The main use I've found for it is answering email while on airplanes. Those tray tables aren't nearly big enough to comfortably use a laptop, but the Palm/keyboard combination has a much smaller footprint. I hotsync the Palm before leaving the office to load it up with mail, then hotsync again by modem after I arrive to send the responses.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I didn't think of the plug-in keyboards. I'm going to have to find one with the plug-in keyboard and see if that works now.

The ridiculous thing is I've got plug-in keyboards for my iBook, too.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

There's no question that mini-keyboards don't permit the rapid speed of a full keyboard, but they're relatively acceptable for input devices for most people. Far superior to the one-to-four keypresses I need to get each letter to send Cell phone SMS. Still, I can tell the level of discomfort for you is fairly significant, so perhaps that's not the best route.

The scanner sounds like a definite choice, indeed.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

SMSes being slightly more well-received than oxygen here in Singapore I've got plenty of chances to be amazed at the typing speed some folks here manage with the numeric keypad entry. I guess it's a bit easier when you have automatic-word-completion stuff, but I still can't imagine it.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Auto-word completion is something I've not been comfortable with, attempts to use it have only slowed me down. I've gotten to a reasonable comfortability adn familiarity with my cell phone that lets me go rather briskly with two-thumb-typing, and I can do a slow amount of typing 'blind', one handed, while driving. What slows me more than anything else SMS-wise is punctuation, capitalization, and stubborn insistence on 'to', 'thanks', 'later' and such. I'm very comfortable with acronyms, and occasionally typo-ridden, but something in my soul recoils against 'Fine thx how r u', even if it would be 30% faster. I just wish the asterisk didn't take 6 key presses to access, as that's a need for *emphasis* or *emoting*.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you have that reaction to SMS abbreviations like that. I may be longwinded but the assurance that a glossary isn't needed for an average English-reading person to understand me is worth it.

An asterisk six keypresses away? That's almost as bad as not having a semicolon at all.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The msot common punctuation is available via the '1' key, which cycles period, Excalamation point, question mark.. The comma is around 6, which is a fair enough place, given that my SMS speech tends to be a bit shorter and choppier.

The asterisk is mostly through 'joystick' presses to get through a menu: (Left- not always needed), Center, Down x4, Center, Down, 1. So that's 7 or 8, alhough the four downs can be executed fairly rapidly. There is room for automatic text.. so I could store phrases like "Good morning" and "Oh, work was fine".. but it's 6 keypresses to get to that menu, and then scrolling in there, so it never gets used.

Now, this is one of the *best* SMS clients out there for a non-keyboard phone, at that. Given my propensity for SMS, I'm pondering switching to something with a full keyboard, at such time I can justify the $40 a month cost up from my current $20-25.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Wow ... really, that's a lot of keypressing. I suppose there aren't many alternatives available, given the nearly fixed set of keys and the needs on them but it's still intimidating to this outsider.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

I've owed two stand-alone PDAs: A Handspring "Visor" Palm device I paid $20 for when my old company folded, and a Dell Axim X5. (Which was a Christmas bonus from my current company.) Frankly, I could never find a reason to use either of them. The keyboardless variety seem primarily useful as "little black book" replacements: handy for carrying around short form reference information, but utterly useless for notetaking or the like. I don't carry around a little black book, so... you can see the problem, there. It's a solution in search of a problem.

The only PDAs I'm drawn to at all anymore are the "data-enabled" ones, since I can see the attraction of being able to look up arbitrary information at will. (As opposed to having to fill the device with data beforehand, and maintain a valid data set on the device as an ongoing obsession.) Since most of those devices have cell phones built in, carrying one wouldn't require any changes to my habits, either. But... those things are *expensive*. And the data service ain't cheap, either.

If you're serious about notetaking as your application you *could* consider something like the AlphaSmart Dana:

http://www1.alphasmart.com/collegestore/products.html

It has a real keyboard, at least. And if 802.11 hotspots are common in your college I could see the appeal of the wireless equipped model. I'd much rather have one of these then a "Palmtop" PDA myself. The other choice would be a sexy superthin "Subnotebook" laptop, but that's $2000, and the battery life is miserable by comparison.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The sense that I was trying to find a problem that the palmtop would solve has been rather pervasive this week. The big need I have is recording stuff I see that I'll want to comment on later, honestly, and while an endless supply of writing space would help, it would probably be easier to just get a few blank notebooks ...

Wireless hotspots are no problem to find; the whole campus is one, and most of the bigger malls are too. In another year it might be a challenge to find a spot in the country that hasn't got free wireless.

Understanding Input Devices on PDAs

[reptilemammal.livejournal.com]

Too many folks think the purpose of the built in keyboard is to type lots or rapidly on a PDA. This is usually an incorrect analysis, the built in keyboard is more for not having to use a handwriting analysis module or the display keyboard.

At the most you are going to write a couple paragraphs in about ten minutes and to do this takes practice (not something you can judge in a couple of minutes). Documents you create you then further edit on a PC with a machine that has a real keyboard.

If you seriously are fixated on a full sized keyboard your better choice is try to find a tablet PC instead, then you can plug in a keyboard easily.

There are also other ways with bluetooth and wireless technology to use a full sized keyboard with a PDA, but remember you're adding that to what your carrying, so it starts losing its portability aspect.

A PDA does not replace a PC by any means, its just a handy way for having a number of computer tools (text editing, drawing, music, electronic books, video player, games, sorting bus time etc.) in one little box.

Re: Understanding Input Devices on PDAs

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Mm, yeah, thank you. I was thinking along the lines of something where I could write in lecture notes or such while eating lunch (or given my styles, breakfast), or so, and that'd be ideally a couple pages of material. Obviously that's overestimating the convenience of one of these for entering blocks of text.

Electronic books seem appealing, at least in principle, though I've only read a few with my full-sized computers. I don't honestly know if I could stand reading longer lengths on a computer screen as more than an occasional novelty.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

like... yeah! ;>

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't even know if it does smileys.