![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prusikThe Apple Store is down the street from the supermarket. My cell phone contract actually expires today, so why not take a look? (I decided last month that if I buy one though, it won't be until the excitement has died down some. This would like be in September. There was no danger of me actually buying the thing. Besides, since I'd be moving my phone number, I'd have needed my Verizon info which I didn't have on me.)
Anyway, the line wasn't as long as I thought it might be. Only twenty or thirty people? Fortunately, since I had no plans of actually buying an iPhone, I could go right and head for the demo models. There, I tried out the only new feature which makes iPhone worth buying: Chinese handwriting recognition. (After all, if it's important to me, it must be important to everyone else on the planet. It's inconceivable that people may have different needs, have different reasons for buy a given product, or that anyone may legitimately have a reaction to a product different from mine. In fact, I can't even understand the previous sentence I wrote. That thought simply won't stay in my head.)
Turning on Chinese handwriting recognition was pretty simple, as is switching between virtual keyboards. My first attempts at writing sentences met with mixed success. It got all the complicated characters right, but failed utterly on the simple characters. By "utterly", I mean that the correct character was none of the possible alternatives that it throws up on the right hand side of the virtual keyboard.
Now, where have I run into this before? Oh yeah, every piece of Chinese handwriting recognition software I've ever tried (except WinXP Tablet). So, I try it again, this time paying scrupulous attention to stroke order and making sure I draw my horizontal stroke from left to right. Yup, now the recognition is terrific. And, honestly, more fun than it ought to be.
There's a big area in the middle to draw the character. To the right are your first four choices of character based on what you've written. To the left are buttons to switch keyboards, and to see the next four alternatives, space and return. (Not all buttons are there at the same time, only the buttons you need.) Pretty much all the time, the character you want is one of the first four on the right hand side of the screen. It automatically displays its best guess as part of the text, however, you still need to tap one of the alternatives in order to clear the drawing area and actually enter the character. The process, for the most part, goes quickly and smoothly.
That it enforces stroke order is probably good for me. That it insists the horizontal stroke be drawn from left to right is unfortunate. If you're right handed, you do this naturally. If you're left-handed, it's awkward. It's doable, obviously. However, unlike a right handed person, you need to be trained into it. (Obviously, I should have been.) I run into the same problem with the letter "o." I draw them clockwise which English handwriting recognition software confuses with the letter "s."
What's bizarre is that despite the obvious right hand bias in the recognizer, the virtual keyboard layout is wonderful for a left handed person. It's so wonderful, that I wonder what right handed people do. Because I draw characters with my left hand, I hold the iPhone with my right hand. My right thumb is in exactly the correct place to choose one of the four alternatives. My drawing hand doesn't block me from seeing those four choices. I draw with the left, then select with the right. The process goes really quickly.
Now, I didn't try it right handed, but wouldn't a right handed person have to move his hand out of the way? Also, the right handed person won't have his thumb in place to pick one of the four alternatives. His thumb will be in place to hit the button which lets you see the next four. That's a rarer event than pick one character out of the four you see. (Remember, you have to pick one in order to write the next character.) He has to move his hand over to pick a character. The right handed person doesn't get to do the alternating hand thing that makes the text entry feel so natural to me.
(I'm not actually complaining. Usually, user interfaces screw me over. However, I never ask for user interfaces to be biased towards left handed people, but not biased against.)
It's a small thing. Just that thinking about it, I'd have expected the interface to have been mirrored so that right handed people can pick the correct character with their left thumb while their right hand is already in place to draw the next character. Obviously, I don't mind that it's the way it is.
The only real criticism is that occasionally, the ink is laggy. i.e., every once in a while, it may be several strokes behind me. It always catches up though. The unresponsiveness may be a problem with some of the really complicated characters. However, I didn't try any of those. (My vocabulary of characters I know well enough to write is smaller than my vocabulary of characters I know well enough to read.) Likewise, I didn't try the Chinese equivalent of cursive. I expect the recognition to be as good or better though, if past experience is any indication.
*sigh* If it had some sort of text editor app with cut and paste, and some way of getting arbitrary text files on and off the thing, I'd probably be all over this. (Note: cut and paste, or moral equivalent thereof doesn't have to work across applications. I'm thinking strictly in terms of editing text.) Like I said, I've been looking for something that fits in my pocket that I can write with where I don't have to then transcribe the text into a computer. But it's not quite there yet. The Chinese handwriting recognition is definitely a plus though. I know of one Chinese-English dictionary being developed for the platform. It'd almost be worth it just for that. (I'd consider an iPhone over an iPod touch only because, in the former case, I'll always have access to the internet. Of course, I'd be paying a premium for this.)
Stupid, stupid tech lust...
Anyway, the line wasn't as long as I thought it might be. Only twenty or thirty people? Fortunately, since I had no plans of actually buying an iPhone, I could go right and head for the demo models. There, I tried out the only new feature which makes iPhone worth buying: Chinese handwriting recognition. (After all, if it's important to me, it must be important to everyone else on the planet. It's inconceivable that people may have different needs, have different reasons for buy a given product, or that anyone may legitimately have a reaction to a product different from mine. In fact, I can't even understand the previous sentence I wrote. That thought simply won't stay in my head.)
Turning on Chinese handwriting recognition was pretty simple, as is switching between virtual keyboards. My first attempts at writing sentences met with mixed success. It got all the complicated characters right, but failed utterly on the simple characters. By "utterly", I mean that the correct character was none of the possible alternatives that it throws up on the right hand side of the virtual keyboard.
Now, where have I run into this before? Oh yeah, every piece of Chinese handwriting recognition software I've ever tried (except WinXP Tablet). So, I try it again, this time paying scrupulous attention to stroke order and making sure I draw my horizontal stroke from left to right. Yup, now the recognition is terrific. And, honestly, more fun than it ought to be.
There's a big area in the middle to draw the character. To the right are your first four choices of character based on what you've written. To the left are buttons to switch keyboards, and to see the next four alternatives, space and return. (Not all buttons are there at the same time, only the buttons you need.) Pretty much all the time, the character you want is one of the first four on the right hand side of the screen. It automatically displays its best guess as part of the text, however, you still need to tap one of the alternatives in order to clear the drawing area and actually enter the character. The process, for the most part, goes quickly and smoothly.
That it enforces stroke order is probably good for me. That it insists the horizontal stroke be drawn from left to right is unfortunate. If you're right handed, you do this naturally. If you're left-handed, it's awkward. It's doable, obviously. However, unlike a right handed person, you need to be trained into it. (Obviously, I should have been.) I run into the same problem with the letter "o." I draw them clockwise which English handwriting recognition software confuses with the letter "s."
What's bizarre is that despite the obvious right hand bias in the recognizer, the virtual keyboard layout is wonderful for a left handed person. It's so wonderful, that I wonder what right handed people do. Because I draw characters with my left hand, I hold the iPhone with my right hand. My right thumb is in exactly the correct place to choose one of the four alternatives. My drawing hand doesn't block me from seeing those four choices. I draw with the left, then select with the right. The process goes really quickly.
Now, I didn't try it right handed, but wouldn't a right handed person have to move his hand out of the way? Also, the right handed person won't have his thumb in place to pick one of the four alternatives. His thumb will be in place to hit the button which lets you see the next four. That's a rarer event than pick one character out of the four you see. (Remember, you have to pick one in order to write the next character.) He has to move his hand over to pick a character. The right handed person doesn't get to do the alternating hand thing that makes the text entry feel so natural to me.
(I'm not actually complaining. Usually, user interfaces screw me over. However, I never ask for user interfaces to be biased towards left handed people, but not biased against.)
It's a small thing. Just that thinking about it, I'd have expected the interface to have been mirrored so that right handed people can pick the correct character with their left thumb while their right hand is already in place to draw the next character. Obviously, I don't mind that it's the way it is.
The only real criticism is that occasionally, the ink is laggy. i.e., every once in a while, it may be several strokes behind me. It always catches up though. The unresponsiveness may be a problem with some of the really complicated characters. However, I didn't try any of those. (My vocabulary of characters I know well enough to write is smaller than my vocabulary of characters I know well enough to read.) Likewise, I didn't try the Chinese equivalent of cursive. I expect the recognition to be as good or better though, if past experience is any indication.
*sigh* If it had some sort of text editor app with cut and paste, and some way of getting arbitrary text files on and off the thing, I'd probably be all over this. (Note: cut and paste, or moral equivalent thereof doesn't have to work across applications. I'm thinking strictly in terms of editing text.) Like I said, I've been looking for something that fits in my pocket that I can write with where I don't have to then transcribe the text into a computer. But it's not quite there yet. The Chinese handwriting recognition is definitely a plus though. I know of one Chinese-English dictionary being developed for the platform. It'd almost be worth it just for that. (I'd consider an iPhone over an iPod touch only because, in the former case, I'll always have access to the internet. Of course, I'd be paying a premium for this.)
Stupid, stupid tech lust...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 03:30 pm (UTC)What constantly frosts me about UI design is how much people *still* don't pay attention to things like handedness, color-blindness and alt-display techniques. *grumble grumble*
I have techno-lust for a new shiny, but I'm sitting on my hands at the moment.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 06:49 pm (UTC)I'm not thrilled about the lack attention to handedness in UI design either. (Usually, I'm the person who gets screwed.) I don't know if it's that big a deal in convention computer programs. With these touch, stylus, and gesture based interfaces though, it's definitely something that people have to take into account.
A color blind friend of mine, not surprisingly, can't stand it when developers distinguish things by using the colors red and green. This actually happens quite often. *sigh*
I'm sitting on my hands with respect to the tech lust too. Like I said, even if I to buy an iPhone, I think I'll enjoy the process so much more in September.