If you're an long-time Palm user like me, you may also resent the apparently bizarre changes in Palm's handwriting-recognition system, Graffiti.
I'm a regular Graffiti writer, with probably a couple of megabytes of text composed over the years in various Palms. I use a full complement of punctuations in my Palm-based compositions. So it came as an unpleasant surprise that as we transitioned to newer Palms, so too we were forced to change to a "new" handwriting-recognition system Palm calls Graffiti 2. As it turns out, Palm had to stop using G1 because they got sued by Xerox over infringement of a handwriting recognition system. So Palm had to come up with something else. The terms of a settlement in June 2006 suggest Palm could return to the original Graffiti - but that won't help users of existing Palms with G2.
Initially, I found that the "hack" that had worked for our Zire 71 would NOT work in my T5. I accepted that as a consequence of wanting T5 features. I un-learned G1 and learned G2, but some G2 gestures are ridiculous: 2 strokes each for an "i" or a "t" - two of the most common letters. The deal-breaker was that some applications, such as Pocket Quicken, auto-fill based upon the first character, but were never updated to recognize G2. The workaround for this was as follows: entering a bogus one-stroke first character, then entering a real first character, then cursoring one character left, then deleting the bogus first character, then forward-cursoring one, then entering the second character - only then would auto-fill work. Easy, huh? Quite maddening.
Fortunately, the hobby community has provided solutions to revert most G2 models to Graffiti 1. This web page details the procedure to restore Graffiti 1 functionality to most newer Palm models. There may be some stability issues in the modified files for Palm OS 5.4 devices (T5, TE 2, Z22 and TX), but I'm willing to suffer an occasional crash to rid myself of G2 forever.
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