Another gripe is that because Jot is an application, its reference is not always readily available--unless, of course, you have SwitchHack installed. SwitchHack is a marvelous hack, which let's you switch back and forth between the last two accessed applications.

Speed demons
So, is Jot actually faster? Will it speed up your writing? In carefully controlled experiments conducted by me, I couldn't tell. My impression was that the speed factor was about the same for Jot as for Graffiti, but I wound up being more accurate in Jot. The virtual keyboard was always faster than Jot or Graffiti and incredibly accurate. I don't think the great American PalmPilot novel is going to be written in Graffiti or Jot (and I would be afraid to read it if the author had actually pecked it out using the virtual keyboard). Although both Graffiti and Jot represent a significant improvement over the early Newton handwriting recognition, I find them tiring for entering anything more than a sentence or three.

Who needs Jot?
The primary audience for Jot is probably people who are new to the Palm computing platform and are reluctant to learn Graffiti. Since these folks have not spent several months or a year learning Graffiti strokes, they will not have mental interference from Graffiti when writing the Jot strokes.

However, short of a deal between 3Com and CIC, these are the very users who will probably never discover Jot. Let's face it. Most Palm device users never download a single piece of software and use the device as it comes from the factory.

The other audience are those hard-core Palm device users who are looking for one more way to soup up their organizers while maximizing its inherent benefits.

So, which is it to be: Jot or Graffiti? Different strokes for different folks.

Bob Freud is an active PalmPilot enthusiast and a Computer Communications Consultant specializing in Web Design and Multilingual Computing. He can be reached via email at quick@intac.com. Learn more about Freud Consulting at http://www.intac.com/~quick.