Anyone using alternative input devices with Squeak?

Russell Allen Russell.Allen at FirebirdMedia.com
Mon Nov 9 00:44:14 UTC 1998


Alan,

I found when using my Newton that although the character recogniser was
useful (especially for things such as email addresses), for ease of use I
ended up using it in cursive mode (it felt faster and more natural).  

Is it possible to modify the Squeak/GRAIL interpreter to handle cursive?
Or would that require a completely new recognition engine?

Also, Grafitti is not entirely based on single stroke characters -
characters such as "x" ( \ / ) and capital letters (upstroke letter) use
more than one stroke.   This makes it hard to fit Grafitti into GRAIL as it
currently stands.  (This may or may not matter...)

cheers,

Russell.


At 08:26 AM 7/11/98 -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
>Carl --
>
>I don't know where the Newton OS 2.0 recognizer came from (or anything
>about it).
>
>I don't think anything makes GRAIL unique except that it was the first
>really good and comprehensive all-pen-based GUI. RAND invented the tablet
>(in 1964) in order to do such an interface. The recognizer was done in '66
>by Gabe Groner, and fit into 2k words of the single user 360/44 that was
>used as the host machine. Their basic notion was that whatever a UI does,
>it should do it essentially perfectly, because it is so jarring to have
>something that is supposed to feel like a transparent extension of one's
>body constantly stop the action with errors. So they opted for a recognizer
>that the user would have to learn -- and eventually decided to try to do
>everything with single strokes for speed. The result was really great, and
>the totality of human factors was better than grafitti on the palm pilot.
>
>The one I did that is now in Squeak comes from a long line of recognizers
>that go all the way back to GRAIL. It is only a page of Squeak code, and
>you can see that the GRAIL approach was quite elegant and simple.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
>
>-------
>
>At 3:19 PM -0000 11/7/98, Carl E Gundel wrote:
>>On Sat, 7 Nov 1998, Alan Kay wrote:
>>> In the early Dynabook design, Engelbart's idea was adapted to a pen-based
>>> interface. RAND had done GRAIL, a really great pen-based system with a
>>> recognizer similar in spirit to and better than Grafitti. We realized from
>>> experience with Engelbart that even a perfect recognizer (which GRAIL
>>> almost was) was still too slow for some interactions, so I put a keyboard
>>> on the Dynabook model. Again the scheme was to navigate, give commands,
fix
>>> typos, and do short text inputs with the pen, and then to switch to the
>>> keyboard for intensive text entry.
>>>
>>> This scheme was argued for the Newton and rejected (not on logical
grounds).
>>
>>Alan,
>>
>>What makes GRAIL unique?  I understand that the Newton OS 2.0 does come
>>with a character by character recognizer.  Do you know where this came
>>from.  I read someplace on the web that is was from Xerox.
>>
>>Carl
>>------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Carl Gundel  carlg at world.std.com  Shoptalk Systems  508-872-5315
>> author of Liberty BASIC, a 1996 PC Magazine Awards Finalist!
>> http://world.std.com/~carlg/basic.html
>>------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
Russell Allen
russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

Random Quote: "They must often change who would be constant
in happiness or wisdom."  Confucius, Analects.

------------------------------------------------------------





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