Why Graffiti 2 Sucks

I have had a CLIE NX-80V for a few weeks now, ever since my last CLIE died on me. (It turned out it was only playing dead -- but it didn't rise from the grave until after I had the new machine in my hand.) Even though I knew that the NX-80V was an excellent machine in nearly all respects, I had resisted upgrading for a couple of years anyway, since I knew the NX-80V used Graffiti 2, and I feared that Graffiti 2 would be a disaster. My initial fears have proven sadly true. Graffiti 2 sucks. I tried really hard to adjust, to unlearn eight years of Graffiti and relearn the new system, and although it doesn't suck as badly as I thought at first, it's still bad enough that I had to finally find an alternative.

I've been using Graffiti ever since 1997, and it only took me a couple of weeks to reach a plateau of proficiency at which it was really useful. For short pieces of information, i.e. phone numbers or email addresses, it was excellent; and in settings such as classes or business meetings, I could very nearly take decent notes with the thing. (I still prefer paper and pencil for free-form notes, because it's faster and less error-prone, plus it's less confining than ASCII text -- I can draw diagrams, for example. At the same time, it's always nice not to have to type up my notes -- because they're already typed.)

That was all with the original Graffiti. I find that with Graffiti 2, I can't achieve anywhere near the speed and low error rate I had with the original. The worse failure, however, is that with Graffiti 2, I am concentrating far less on the content I am entering, and far more on how to enter it, than I was used to.

Here are three examples of how much Graffiti 2 sucks:

Using Graffiti 2, it is common for me to attempt to enter a word ending in an L, followed by a space. Usually, this case ends up with a T at the end of my word. (Turning "the full effect", for example, into "the fulteffect".) This error is extremely common, occurring 90% of the time.

Graffiti 2 almost always (75%) renders my H's as N's.

I tried to enter someone's phone number, in which a group of digits began with a 1. What did I end up with? Not "999-999-1999"; I got "999-999+999".

These failures are representative, but they are only a subset of what I was seeing. Graffiti 2 is constantly frustrating. It sucks.

The original Graffiti isn't just single-stroke, it's stateless, meaning that when I'm making a stroke, I don't have to think about what my last stroke is. Each stroke uniquely maps to a character. If Graffiti 2 was stateless, if, for example, a left-to-right stroke was only ever the horizontal line on the T, then it would be OK. But sometimes, when I draw a vertical followed by horizontal, I mean "T", and sometimes I mean "L-space", and so I have to think more carefully about what I'm doing. I have to remind myself, "I just drew an L. Now I either have to wait a second before entering my space, or I have to draw my line down on the bottom of the Graffiti entry area". But I only want to be thinking about the text I'm entering, not how to enter it. With Graffiti, I didn't have to think about it. With Graffiti 2, I do. Therefore, Graffiti 2 sucks.

Why does Graffiti 2 suck so bad? Based on its name, you might expect that Graffiti 2 is the second revision of Graffiti, with improved functionality and more features. If that's what you thought, you'd be wrong. Graffiti 2 is a direct result not of any engineering or marketing decisions, but of a court decision that the original Graffiti infringed on a patented Xerox technology called Unistrokes. I don't know a lot about the lawsuit, but apparently the court decided that Graffiti infringed Unistrokes precisely because of its one-to-one correspondence between a single stroke and a character. Therefore, Graffiti 2 is pretty much a crippled Graffiti, crippled just enough that it doesn't infringe on Unistrokes.

(To be precise, Graffiti 2 is a slightly modified version of CIC's Jot, itself created to sidestep the Unistrokes patent. The effect is the same. Jot had been trying to supplant Graffiti for years without much success. Now they have succeeded.)

Now, I know Palm didn't want to foist this garbage on me intentionally, but they did try to put lipstick on this pig by claiming that Graffiti 2 is "easier to learn", "more natural and intuitive" than Graffiti, but that's baloney. If it was really easier to learn, I'd have achieved a similar level of proficiency with it by now. Instead, I'm far behind where I was at the same point in learning Graffiti.

Graffiti 2 isn't all bad. To be fair, its design has some good points. I like Graffiti 2's "a" and "e", for example, and using the middle of the writing area for capitals is a good idea. The trouble is that its good points don't go anywhere near outweighing its deficiencies. And the deficiencies are all in the state-bound nature of the system. It's like any other aspect of product design: good design gets out of your way and lets you concentrate on what you're trying to accomplish. Bad design forces you to think about details of how the machine works, details which are irrelevant to your task.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. For example, I could always switch to using one of the way-hot Xerox PDAs, using Unistrokes.

Oh, wait. There's no such thing as a Xerox PDA, with or without Unistrokes; and there never has been. (Clearly, Xerox loves to develop technology that it never sells; and then it gets mad when somebody else successfully brings something similar to market.)

Since I do have a Sony CLIE, I can use the built-in keyboard, or one of two (two!) on-screen keyboards.

Another alternative, built into the NX-80V, is a system called Decuma, which is definitely very cool. This is a good high-resolution handwriting recognition system which isn't as fast as Graffiti, but it is more fun to use. I use it occasionally, and I can see how someone might use it as their primary means of entering text. Check it out and try it.

For a really good solution to this problem, however, what I really needed was to be able to install the original Graffiti on my new handheld. Fortunately, a little desperate digging produced a procedure for accomplishing just that, provided I had a Palm handheld with Graffiti already installed; and fortunately, I had one at hand: my CLIE NX-70V, the rumors of whose demise had been exaggerated. The procedure was easily followed, and worked exactly as advertised.

Now, I have a late-model CLIE with the original Graffiti installed, and it's great. And that's the way I'm going to keep it, until Xerox sues me.