Access Company’s Graffiti for Android is a free download that installs the original version of Graffiti on your Android device, giving us another input option. Graffiti is the original way we old folks entered text on our PDA’s. It took a little time to learn, but it was our only option, so we picked it up pretty quick. Personally, I liked Graffiti to the point that I noticed some of my handwriting uses its characters (especially the G).
It is the ‘original’ Graffiti, so it lacks a lot of the niceties of the newer versions, like the ‘cross the center line to capitalize’, but it was not hard for me to get back to it. I can now Graffiti about as fast as using the regular keyboard- although Swipe is still a bit faster with text only.
One of the strengths of Graffiti is that most letters, numbers, spaces, backspaces, periods, and a few other things can be entered with a short gesture. To capitalize something, a quick upward flick enables caps, and a double flick is caps lock. Most punctuation is enabled with a tap.
The download is free and it is available at most Android app stores. When downloaded and installed, you select it under the ‘Keyboard’ in ‘Settings’, then do a long press in any text-entry window to select ‘Graffiti’. You can call up a ‘cheat sheet’ by swiping from the entry area upwards. When the cheats show up, you can page through them by swiping side to side.
It installed and runs properly on my HTC EVO and feels quite natural. It just somehow seems more logical to use gestures to input data on a touch screen device. After all, it is 2010. Should we still be using keyboards?
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You beat me to it! I have had fun playing around with it. I LOVE the fact that it is not Graffiti 2, that was horrible. It even knows the alternative characters like writing ‘v’ backwards instead of with a tail.
You’ll have to imagine the Graffiti font here, but I made a sweatshirt with the following written in Graffiti font next to a photo of Pilot 1000 with the text displayed.
You know you’ve been using your Pilot too much when your handwriting starts to look like this.
I met Donna Dubinsky and her comment was that I’d have to change “Pilot” to “Palm”. I don’t think she realized the problem with that. 🙂
I’d love to see a Graffiti iphone app … always when using the onscreen keyboard I miss my various Palms – Graffiti is so intuitive you can take notes without even look what you’re doing and get away with it virtually without typos.
Graffity must have been one of the best ever input methods for handhelds.
@Brian- Ha! It’s going to be tough with two of us doing Android, so I’m trying to branch out more- just not sure where to go yet.
I don’t think I’ve slid the hdw keyboard on my Samsung Moment more than twice since I downloaded Graffiti for Android.
It’s so much easier for me to enter text than on the QUERTY keyboards. I just wish the developers would implement the shortcut feature so I could shortcut in my e-mail address, etc for posts like these.
Best app I have downloaded in a while (but I’m an old PalmPilot user…)!!!
FOLLOW-UP: I cannot count how many times I have re-loaded Graffiti after an upgrade, rooting, etc. A recent upgrade includes a somewhat annoying ad on the screen, but not a big deal.
There are also some times when it is hard to get out of the Graffiti screen or get it to do exactly what you want, but overall, it is a lOT better for me than most of the other keyboards.
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