Gather round, children, and let grandpa tell you about the olden days that we called the 90s. Times were dark, then. We didn’t have smartphones. Instead we had PDAs — personal digital assistants. The leader of the field was a company called Palm, and their operating system was a little thing called PalmOS.
One of the major components of Palm’s success was their handwritten input language dubbed Graffiti. First created for the notoriously hard to write on Apple Newton, Graffiti was so popular that it was not just on PalmOS, but was also ported to Windows Mobile (as Block Recognizer) and to Symbian. Eventually, we saw devices like the Treo add physical keyboards and move away from handwriting input. Then, a lawsuit from Xerox led to Palm implementing Graffiti 2.
- The New Coke of input methods.
A few years back, someone came out with a Graffiti port for iOS. However, this was unofficial and is a copyright violation in and of itself. Fortunately, the company that now owns the rights to Graffiti has decided to release it for Android. While they’ve also added a pro version with no discernible difference, ACCESS has made my day by releasing my favorite handwriting tool as a free app.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be dusting off my HTC Hero for testing.
Lies!
Next you’re going to tell “us “stories” about how “Windows” actually once lioked like windows, aren’t you??
Great news. Thank you for bringing us this story. I have missed a writing input system for the Android. I spent so much time using graffiti that it changed my handwriting.