StrokeInput 4+

When you choose a predicted word, Stroke Input doesn’t automatically add a space after the word. For all practical purposes, you always want that automatically added space. After all, you have chosen the word, and now you want to start entering the next word.

If the developer doesn’t agree, could we at least have a setting to enable an automatic space? Thanks.

I miss Graffiti, and there’s no reason (with an accurate modern touch screen) that it shouldn’t work as well with a finger as a stylus. But this app isn’t quite reliable enough to use.

The biggest problem is that some of the strokes just aren’t recognized well. When I try to move left, more than half the time I get a C instead. When I try to move right, usually I get nothing, sometimes a T or other symbol, and only occasionally right. And so on. Maybe with autocorrect that used contextual information to guess what I really meant it could be good enough, but as-is, I have to keep looking at what I’m writing and trying to edit it (and because the cursor movement keys are the least well recognized, this is particularly frustrating).

There are also some minor problems. The documentation doesn’t tell you how to switch modes, although anyone who wants this app probably had the muscle memory for them. The “try it here” box is light grey on very light grey so it’s almost impossible to see what you’ve entered. Most of the alternate strokes are missing. (I don’t remember exactly what they are, except a backward K for an X, but I do find myself doing something for other letters, like V and G, that worked on a Palm but doesn’t work here.) It’s missing a few characters like backtick. The font used for the help is missing some symbols, so instead of € you see nothing.

A few extensions to Graffiti would be nice. In particular, after Palm switched to Graffiti 2 and then broke the hack that let you get the real thing back, there was a third party patch that gave you real Graffiti but also allowed most Graffiti 2 strokes (which was sometimes handy for rarely-used characters, because the Graffiti 2 is harder to draw, but easier to guess because it’s closer to normal handwriting), and worked with Graffiti 2’s WriteAnywhere and caps-over-the-line modes. Working with Apple’s standard auto-capitalization would be nice. Also, some of the features of Graffiti Pro for Android, like swiping up from the Graffiti area to overlay the help screen. Learning from corrections like Android’s swipe keyboard would be very cool.

But even without fixing or adding any of that stuff, I’d give this app at least 4 stars, maybe 5, if it just recognized all of the major characters reliably enough to use.

Using it to write this now. Works fine.

Will update if that changes