WRITE ON

Dick Pountain/17 February 2011 14:53/Idealog 199

Around a year ago in issue 186 I pronounced that the iPad's touch interface was the future of personal computing, which was greeted with a certain scepticism by colleagues who thought perhaps I'd become an Apple fanboi or else had a mild stroke, the symptoms being very similar. Events since have made me surer than ever: the touch interface feels right in exactly same way the windows/icons/mouse/pull-down interface felt right the first time I used it. The number of people who got iPads this Christmas was further evidence, and most convincing for me was a good friend who hates computers (but likes iPods and email) who bought himself one for Christmas. When I visited a few weeks ago he had it on a perspex stand with one of those slim aluminium keyboards underneath, and told me that he'd junked his hated laptop completely: the iPad now did everything he needed (apart from a raging addiction to Angry Birds). Evidence is piling up that 2011 will be the year of the tablet, and even Microsoft will be only one year late to the party this time around, with a Windows 8 tablet by 2012 according to PC Pro's news desk. HP's recent announcement of its WebOS tablet perhaps offers real competition for Apple, in a way that cheaply thrown-together Android tablets can't do until some future version of that OS arrives. 

I don't have an iPad myself, partly because I won't pay the sort of money Apple is asking, partly because I've never been an Apple person, partly because I hate iTunes. Also I *don't* hate laptops, I have a gorgeous Sony Vaio that weighs no more than an iPad, and I'm in no hurry. I do now use an Android phone and am using that to familiarise myself with the quirks of touch-based computer interaction, and so far I love it except for one aspect, and that is entering text.

I often just find myself staring paralysed inside some application when I need to enter a word but nothing is visible except a truly tiny slot and the keyboard hasn't popped up yet (yes Wikipedia, that means you). My phone's screen is smaller than an iPhone's and typing at any speed on its on-screen keyboard is hard, even with vibrating "haptic feedback" on. My Palm Treo had Blackberry-style hard keys which makes the contrast greater still. I've eventually settled on CooTek's Touchpal soft keyboard which puts two letters on each enlarged keytop (sideswipe your thumb to get the second) and has a powerful predictive text capability.

I appreciate that the larger screen of a tablet makes using an on-screen keyboard less finicky, but there's another mental factor at work because on generations of Palms I was an enthusiastic and expert user of Grafitti handwriting recognition. I'm totally used to being able to roughly scribble a letter with my fingertip onto the screen in the Contacts application and have it go straight to someone's name, invaluable on dark nights, in the rain, when you've lost your specs and so on. The reason I got so good at Grafitti was no thanks to Palm - which completely screwed up with Grafitti 2 - but thanks to Tealpoint Software whose wonderful Tealscript app enabled me to use the whole screen area inside any application, to get caps and numbers by shifting over to the right, and to customise the strokes for particular glyphs I found difficult.

Now handwriting recognition just isn't feasible on Android or iPhones as their screens are too small and the capacitive technology they employ lacks positional precision. However it ought to be possible, using a fingertip rather than a stylus, on the larger screen of a tablet, and indeed there's already a handwriting application for the iPad called WritePad, mostly aimed at children, which lets you scribble with a finger over a wide screen area. It seems to me that by combining such a recognition engine with two other existing software techniques, handwriting could become a major input method for tablets. The first technique is predictive text, as employed in TouchPal, which gradually analyses your personal vocabulary into a user dictionary and so improves its guesses. The second is the "tag cloud", a graphical UI trick familiar from social networking sites like Flickr, De.licio.us and Technorati, in which a collection of user tags gets displayed in a random clump in font sizes proportional to their frequency of use.

I can imagine a tablet interface in which you scribble with your finger onto the screen, leaving a semi-transparent trace for feedback, and the predictive text engine generates a tag cloud - also semi-transparent - of the most likely candidates, in which both the size and the proximity to your current finger position of each candidate word is proportional to its probability. This cloud would need to be animated and  swirl gently as your finger moved, which should be possible with next generation mobile CPUs. When you see the right word in the cloud, a quick tap inserts it into the growing text stream. From what I've seen of the development tools for iPad and Android, I'm well past writing such a beast myself, so I bequeath the idea to some bright spark out there.

[Dick Pountain is impressed that a Palm Pilot could decipher his handwriting, given that most humans can't.]