The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

On a random whim I decided I was going to try some handwriting recognition on my iPad. I grabbed a stylus and an app called WritePad. This turned into a really strange trial and error cock-up that really made me wonder whether this is ever going to be a thing. On a first attempt, it really tends to impress. You scribble some shit on there and it appears like magic. All well and good. However, the moment I tried to really give a good write on it, things went to shit quite fast.

Here’s a sample of what a sentence looks like without me correcting it first:
I would really like to write ab log po A quickly by wrI2g on the sirun.
Honesty, that did better than usual at figuring out my words and such. Maybe it is learning my particular brand of scratches as I go along. It’s supposed to, so it would be nice if that was the case. I also find that the “one line mode” is a lot more usable than the full-screen mode that I wrote that sentence in.

Okay, back to a keyboard, fuck that noise.
But yeah, people were saying really good things about it, and the thought of being able to scribble words down would make writing stories and things on the go much more accessible. I mean, I’m not bad at writing on the on-screen keyboard at this point. I’m getting good at typing at an acceptable rate. At the same time, I still make a lot of typing mistakes, and I can’t go as fast as I’d like because of the lack of tactile feedback. Writing on the screen would solve that, as I’d have a different type of tactile feedback, that of the pen moving on the screen. Then I could get rolling at a good clip. I wanted it to work.
However, to make it register my words in a way where I’m not constantly having to correct, I have to be really precise with my handwriting. I’m never precise with my handwriting, and to do so makes me go slower than making those little corrections due to typing errors on the on-screen keyboard. In addition, using the previously-mentioned “one line” mode for accuracy makes writing go slower as well, as you can’t even fit an entire sentence on that one line. Being able to fill up the whole screen with writing would make it faster, but then you lose the readout of the program constantly telling you what it thinks you’re writing, which is important to being accurate. It just doesn’t work for me.

To be fair, though, it really might just be me. I use a very scratchy print style when I handwrite. My mother, who was a third grade teacher and thus has extremely clear natural handwriting in cursive, was much more successful when she used the app. It still wasn’t perfect, but most of the errors came from her touching the screen in other places than from the handwriting recognition. Maybe it’s just way easier to have it recognize cursive? I’m not sure. I haven’t used cursive in years, except to sign my name, and attempting it on the screen made me have to constantly think about how to do it, so that’s not an option for me. I tried disabling the cursive recognition in the app, thinking that might make it more accurate because it wouldn’t be looking for cursive letters when I swooped about, but it didn’t really seem to help much.

I remember back in the day when I had a Palm Pilot. It used a set of “Graffiti” gestures to write that used little symbols that were close to the letters, but not really the letters. That worked fantastically, once I learned them. I could play IF on that thing, typing up all kinds of shit. Something like that might work well, and they might want to consider using that in the program. I mean, I may be able to set up something like that in here, but I’m not going to fuck with it if it’s not supported. I’m just saying, things have done this stuff before. I’m sure there has to be a way for it to work. However, so far, it’s really not working for me. I will probably keep playing with it, just to see if it ever learns well enough to be useful, but for now, my dreams of scribbling down bits of stories on the go doesn’t seem like it will be realized. Oh well.