Casio Zoomer review, part 3 (pen, HWR, and ink)
brian@piano.grot.starconn.com (Brian Smithson)
From: brian@piano.grot.starconn.com (Brian Smithson)
Message-id: <9310161927.ZM5626@piano.grot.starconn.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 19:27:05 -0700
X-Mailer: Z-Mail (2.1.1 01dec92)
To: zoomer-list-1993@grot.starconn.com
Subject: Casio Zoomer review, part 3 (pen, HWR, and ink)
Status: OR
This is part 3 of the Casio Z-7000 review, -- pen interface, handwriting
recognition, and ink.
Pen interface
=============
Pen use is pretty straightforward, and I'm not going to cover it in much
detail. The Z-7000 is my first experience with a pen interface, and so
I can't compare it to other pen interfaces or otherwise speak particularly
intelligently about it. So here are the basics:
To push buttons, pick menu items, or position the text insert point, you
tap the screen once. In the case of pulldown menus, the menu sticks
and waits for your selection; tapping an item selects it, and tapping
elsewhere dismisses the menu.
To select recognized text, you place the pen at one side of the letter or
string and drag to the other side. To select a word, you tap twice on
the word; you can drag this across multiple whole words. Selections are
highlighted by reverse video.
In sketch mode, the pen is used to write, erase, create a rubber-band
rectangle for selection, and move selected graphics.
Selected is overwritten by the next text entry, or it can be deleted by
drawing a vertical line through it with a pigtail at the top, similar to
the traditional proofreader's mark. Alas, there's no way to drag selected
text around or anything like that.
So basically, the pen interface is used for operating traditional GUI
controls, selecting things, moving things, drawing, and writing, with
the one addition of a "delete" gesture. Nothing fancy.
Handwriting recognition
=======================
Again, I don't have enough experience with other HWR systems to compare
the Palm HWR with anything else, and so I won't.
Basics
------
It can only deal with printing (i.e. not cursive writing). The basic
way to use it is pretty much free-form -- there are no on-screen lines
for guidance to you or the HWR. It doesn't look up words in a dictionary,
but it does seem to look at adjacent characters to help it distinguish
upper/lower case (e.g. C vs. c) and alpha/numeric (e.g. l vs. 1).
It doesn't seem to support punctuation except for period, question mark,
plus, minus (or hyphen), multiply, and divide, and it also has gestures
for space and for new-line.
To help out, there is an optional pop-up keyboard. The keyboard can be
a standard QWERTY, or alphabetized, or international, or math symbols, or
a "writing grid". I found that the keyboards are so small that I have
some difficulty using them to write anything substantial. However,
the writing grid (which isn't really a keyboard at all) is pretty useful.
It floats in a window at the bottom of the screen, and is composed of
a string of seven character boxes and some buttons for "scrolling" the
text through those boxes. When you write a character in a box, it is
recognized and overwrites the current contents of that character position
back on the main screen. I've found it to produce more reliable recognition
(probably because the cell boundary gives the HWR more information to
work with) and its easier for editing existing, mis-recognized text.
There's also an "insert mode" button if you want to insert text rather
than overwrite.
My experience
-------------
Upper versus lower case: it seems to have a lot of trouble with letter case.
I'm guessing that the HWR looks at adjacent characters to help it determine
upper and lower case, and that doesn't always produce the intended result.
I can understand confusion between "C" and "c" or "S" and "s", but I've
seen it insist on giving me a "D" when I wrote a "d".
Alpha versus numeric: similar trouble to case. The manual recommends
crossing zees and sevens and slashing ohs, which certainly helps.
Nonetheless, there's quite a bit of trouble distinguishing 1 from l from I.
Spaces and newlines: to put spaces between words, you are supposed to
- put space between the words (which I haven't found to be reliable,
unless you put a LOT of space)
- put each word on a new line (which works, but is neither intuitive
nor space-conserving on a small screen)
- use a small double line near the baseline of your writing (which is
dreadfully unreliable, and usually results in "=" or "-."
and so sometimes I just keep a keyboard popped up and hit the space bar.
Newlines are a problem too. You have two choices: a little "down-then-left"
gesture, or use the Enter key on the pop-up keyboard. The gesture takes
some practice.
In general, I'm a little disappointed with the HWR on the Zoomer.
This isn't by comparison to other HWRs, nor does it imply that I think
it's unusable. First results for me were pretty terrible, but others who
have tried it have had good success right away, and I'm getting much better
at getting correct HWR after five days of sporadic use. I never expected
it to read my "normal" writing, which even I have trouble recognizing :-),
and so I'll be quite happy if I can train my writing style to get good
results eventually. I don't mind a training period, because after all,
it took me a while to learn how to handwrite and how to type and how to
chord, so why should this be so different?
Ink
===
There aren't a lot of ink features to talk about. Basically, you can
scribble anything you want. There's an "erase" for your last gesture,
and a "clear" for the whole page. There is also a little pop-up for
"sketch tools", which include a pen tool, eraser tool, rubber-banding
selection box, cut, copy, and magnify/de-magnify.
If you're entering text for a text field (see previous review parts
for details, but one example is entering a name in the address book),
the writing is scaled down when it's displayed in the text field. This
is kind of nice, I think.
There are some cut and paste features for both text and ink, but I haven't
really played with them much yet.
That's it for now. Stay tuned for mini-reviews of the applications.
--
-Brian Smithson
brian@grot.starconn.com