FIGURE A


New users should be able to get up to speed more quickly using Jot than using Graffiti. Roll over picture for a larger image.

A real plus is that Jot makes it very easy to access extended characters (symbols, etc). For the most part, I had given up on entering most extended characters in Graffiti, and I usually wind up popping up the virtual keyboard. It is not that the Graffiti shortcuts in themselves are difficult. It is just that they are not memorable, as shown in Table A. With Jot installed, in most cases I just write Jot's shortcut gesture (a vertical line written from bottom to top) and draw the character I want. With a fairly intuitive way to access the extended character set, I would be more inclined to include them in what I'm writing.

I really like the way capital letters are written in Jot. Each one saves me a stroke in comparison to Graffiti. To write a Jot capital letter, write the letter in the area between the letters and the numbers in the Graffiti writing area.

Included in the Jot application is an animated tutorial. Rather than merely showing the letter/character forms available, the tutorial shows an animation of how each character is written. I found this helpful, but some users have complained that the animation is too quick and would like a way to control the speed. The downside for me is that once I have learned the basics of Jot, I want to be able to see a quick reference guide and NOT have to see an animation each time. CIC are you listening? I also wonder how much of that 115k is being taken up by the tutorial.

Negatives of Jot
The biggest downside of Jot for people who have been using their Palm platform machine for any length of time is that many of the characters which we make automatically in Graffiti are not available in Jot. True to their association with everything Windows, the Jot folks consider this a feature rather than a flaw.

On the Jot section of the CIC web page, the banner touting the superiority of Jot shows the "bizarre" Graffiti characters like K, Y, and T. Actually, I find these one-stroke characters easy to write. I'd be a much more ardent supporter of Jot if they were available, even as variants of the main forms.

Consider also your memory requirements. The program is HUGE: 115 kb. You have to compare this with 0K required for Graffiti (included in the Palm OS ROM). After using Jot for only a short time, I started to notice that the Jot recognizer is noticeably slower than Graffiti. Try the letter h in both Jot and Graffiti and you will notice a slight lag after the Jot version.