palmOne Wins Graffiti Lawsuit

Ed Hardy · 05-21-2004, 07:59 PM

palmOne has just announced that Xerox's lawsuit claiming Graffiti infinges on Unicode has been dismissed.

Read more at http://www.brighthand.com/article/pa...suit?site=Palm

cscullion · 05-21-2004, 08:49 PM

Does this mean I can have my old Graffiti (1) back? I hope they decide to have the Graffiti style (1 or 2) switch-able in the Preferences.

NewtonDKC · 05-21-2004, 11:37 PM

Yeah for Palm!!! The Xerox suit was ridiculous - they wish Unistrokes were even half as good as Graffiti. Obviously a lame attemtp to make money on something that was lame to start with. Frivolous lawsuits and ones like these - where it's obvious to anyone above diaper stage that it's not a valid claim - just make me nauseous. IS there anyway Palm can claim damages for all the time and energy lost in this case? I'd love to see Xerox have to pay Palm for starting such a ridiculous battle to start with. Heck, maybe now Palm can focus on building better handhelds and include WiFi and Soft Graffiti on more models!

Also, to the above poster, there is a method to get original Graffiti back in place of G2 on most Palm handhelds - do a search (or I'm sure someone can post the fles you have to copy form an older device to replace the newer ones).

If nothing else, it'd be nice to see Palm offer GRaffiti 1, Graffiti2, and the soft kEyboard all as options on any SOft Graffiti device (similar to the way Pocket PC has Multiple input methods - so long as palm makes them easier to choose between (i.e. copy some ideas off the PPC Palm!).

ANyway, congrats again to Palm, this was disturbing and I'm very pleased at this ruling - i just hope it sticks!

Scott R · 05-22-2004, 06:30 AM

IMO, this was not a frivolous lawsuit and I actually believe (based on a lot of web research a while back) that Unistrokes did predate Graffiti. That said, I'm a big fan of Graffiti and big hater of Graffiti 2 and I also do believe that while Hawkins probably did steal the idea from Xerox, the changes he made were not just surface changes to make them seem different. The differences offered real usability improvements. Xerox's character set offered characters that were more unique and, therefore, had the potential to be more accurately interpreted. However, their uniqueness also meant that most of the characters didn't look a thing like their Roman alphabet counterparts. This would have required that a user basically learn an entirely new alphabet.

While many people have complained about the learning curve of Graffiti, the learning curve is actually quite small and once you've learned it, the speed and accuracy of using it over a character set that would require you to enter characters exactly like they look "in real life" is clear.

I would like to echo cscullion's comments...so when can we have our Classic Graffiti back?

Scott

Timothy Rapson · 05-22-2004, 02:08 PM

Hurray!
Idiotic court decision score 100,000
Common sense score 1

We'll call it one step forward. And I echo the others. I could use Grafitti 1 in a pinch. Grafitti II is a utterly unusable for me. I am looking to a quick release of software patch to get Grafitti 1 on my Zire 71 for the few occassions when I may want it.

pixelator · 05-22-2004, 09:12 PM

I agree with Scott - the suit wasn't frivolous (especially compared to some of the other PDA-related lawsuits pending right now). Graffiti 1 was a vast improvement - and still is, over its inferior 'sequel'.

Let's hope palmOne moves ahead with this shot in the arm and delivers us the choice between the original Graffiti and its redheaded stepchild.

NewtonDKC · 05-22-2004, 09:45 PM

in retrospect, frivolous is a bad description for the suit. But I do feel that Xerox saw this, recognized it as a much more highly evolved (not to mention useful immediately to the user, and an essential tool with a minimum of training), whereas their own attempt was probably something only a few hard core geeks have bothered to learn. If that had been Graffiti, then the silkscreen area would have never gotten used other than the buttons, as the soft keyboard would have always been used. :-)

Bad adjectives aside, I'm still glad that the suit was dismissed. If Xerox truly was wronged, then I stand corrected and feel bad for them, but in the form that we seen in comparison to Graffiti's character set, I highly doubt UniSTrokes would have ever been licensed by any vendor (due to the steep steep learning curve) or used by Xerox itself.

Which reminds of a question I've been meaning to ask - were there any products ever released that featured UniStrokes? ALso, in regards to how the product worked if it had been adopted -Did UniStrokes feature a "box" in which the characters had to be written to be recognized (ala the silk screen graffiti area or the moveable box that was featured on the Newton Messagepad version of Graffiti...ahhhh, the good ole days of PDA's!). :-) JUst curious to see how it would have worked in an actual device. I wonder if Xerox ever sued anyone else (like APple or PAragraph for the Newton Handwriting recognition...since Unistrokes bore about as much resemblance to it (which was natural handwriting) as it did to Graffiti (very close to natural handwriting for some characters, and natural for almost all characters outside of those). I wonder what the Xerox developers did when they saw GRaffiti, which is far more elegant, logical, and easy to learn characters? "NOw why didn't we think of that? It's brilliant! Let's sue them for thinking up a better way to do this than we did - arrrgghhh!!!"

Seriously though, if anyone has any ansers to the questions on how Unistrokes would have worked, devices that used it (if any), etc, then I'd love to know! :-)

Newton

Scott R · 05-23-2004, 12:09 AM

Someone made a Unistrokes plug-in for the Apple Newton back in 1996. See here:
http://www.eskimo.com/~jet/newton/unistrokes/

I don't believe this was an authorized product by Xerox. Beyond that I don't know.

Also, here's an excellent old usability study on Graffiti with some direct comparisons made to Unistrokes:
http://www.yorku.ca/mack/GI97a.html

Lastly, I came across this old bit of news which reveals that Judge Telesca is the same judge who ordered that Palm and 3Com pay a $50M bond in order to ensure that Xerox could collect some of the damages:
http://www.devxnews.com/article.php/980891

So, my question now is what ever happened to that $50M? Does Palm have some extra play money all of a sudden thanks to this new ruling? And, if so, who gets that money, palmOne or PalmSource?

Scott

NewtonDKC · 05-23-2004, 07:47 AM

Great information, thanks!!! Like a total geek, I read the University comparison paper with intense interest - and am more impressed with graffiti than ever!

Also, I couldn't open the postcript unistrokes links, but now that you mention, I think I remember this app. DId it have a weird looking..."circle" of strange shapes that you wrote the unistrokes chatracters over? If so, I remember downlaodning this app because of the higher level of recognition it offered over graffiti - but I could never (even after reading the directions a few tmes) figure out exactly how to get it to work, and soon deleted it all three times I installed the package (compared to graffiti, which I picked up in minutes after finally taking the time to read what had come for free on the pcmcia card I purchase for memory storage - versus the total lack of anything fruitful coming from playing with the uni app for several minutes at a time - the point I'm making is that once graffiti is useful quickly - no one is goingt o bother learning something that takes infinitely longer to learn to achieve the same results).

Now, of course, I understand how unistrokes is supposed to be written, after all these years later. But if I recall correctly, the shapes on the entry "wheel" confused the heck out of me - it reminded me of just writing a bunch of half circles at random and it somehow was supposed to form letters.
:-) LIke I said, glad the mystery was solved even if it was years later - because I could never figure out who the heck wrte such a pointlessly confuisng application! :-) (again, I'm assuming that this was indeed the unstrokes entry app I'm remembering - any other former NEwton-ites remember what I'm talking about (and poorly describing)? :-)

Scott R · 05-23-2004, 09:15 AM

I can't help you there. I never owned a Newton. I just found the link towards the top of the heap with a Google search for Unistrokes.

I think Hawkins' team were also smart to include that Giraffe game. Though I don't think I ever bothered with it, I would imagine that it may have helped out some users.

I've heard a lot of arguments in the past about how Graffiti is inferior to input methods that allow you to write the way you do in real life, because of the usability issue. The thing about PDAs is that someone buys one and they use it for a long time. We're not talking about a bank ATM where someone needs to be able to use it right off the bat. A small learning curve with a PDA is not unacceptable if it pays dividends in the long run. The fairly unique character set combined with the reduced number of strokes means that writing with Graffiti is both faster and more accurate than writing with the Roman alphabet.

That being said, I'm growing more fond of the thumbboard concept these days but I'm not happy with any of the thumbboard designs used by any of the Palm OS licensees. I'd like a Palm OS or PPC device with a thumbboard similar to the Danger hiptop or the original (wider) Blackberry. But I digress...

Scott