Originally Posted by Karel Jansens

I used to write stories on my Newton MessagePad, and use it for a whole year to take minutes of meetings almost dayly (actually finishing before "the other guy"; the one with the fancy-schmancy laptop).

Of course I can type faster than I write (I'm a touch-typist), but
a) one doesn't always have room to plunk down an entire notebook and
b) I find that handwriting keeps me "closer" to the material.

For students, the latter point might be important. Back when I was still a student (thirty years ago), I experimented with typing out class notes, compared to writing them out and I found that the handwritten material inserted itself better into my brains. Pretty subjective, I agree, but I can't be that unique.

Can I?

Originally Posted by barry99705

Hahaha! Neither of my Newtons could decipher my hand writing. I'd just plunk down the keyboard and if anybody said anything I'd just give them the "what?" stare. I haven't had the chance to play around with the new tablet pc's. Hopefully the HWR has gotten better, though I'm pretty sure it's still based on the stuff developed for the Newton. Too bad they don't make affordable rugged tablets.

Originally Posted by Karel Jansens

I so don't get this "Newtons cannot recognize handwriting" thing. I have 2 MessagePads, both 2100 models; I write in cursive exclusively, both in English and in Dutch (I added Dutch dictionaries from Paul Guyot's site) and I get 99%+ correct recognition in English and about 99% in Dutch. This means that I only ever so often get a word with an error in it; and I repeat: that's with ParaGraph, the so-called "bad", cursive recognizer of the Newton. I used to meet other "newtoneers" and they had similar experiences; the trick with HWR seems to be the same as how to get humans to read handwriting: the neater it is, the better it can be read.

On my tablet I use the multilingual version of PenOffice, which barely ever makes a mistake. The HWR engine of PenOffice is the same ParaGraph as the Newton's; if anything, it's got better (the problem with PenOffice is that it is trying to do its work in a crappy operating system that has the mouse paradigm bolted on so tight it makes pen operations needlessly difficult).

Originally Posted by barry99705

Let's just say, I started off life as a lefty. My step-mom couldn't figure out how to teach me to write left handed, so she forced me to be a righty. I moved back in with my mom and she said I could wright with whatever hand I felt comfortable with. So now I can write with either hand, but it's really crappy looking no matter which one I use. Thank god for check cards, cause no one could read my hand written checks.

On a side, my palm with it's input method works pretty good for text input.

Originally Posted by Karel Jansens

Did you know that Graffiti was originally developed for the Original MessagePads, mainly because newton's first stab at HWR was so horribly bad?