New Rasterman Image...

[Joel Newkirk]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 20:32:34 -0600, "Ori Pessach" <opessach at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I have a question about the "predictive" keyboard shown in one of those
> movies - what on earth is the justification for providing the following
> predictions - User input is on the left, prediction is on the left:
> 
> w - a
> wo - so
> wor - wot
> worl - work
> world - ? (I'm not sure what was the prediction, but at this point it's
> moot... It was probably wrong, anyway.)
> 
> The qtopia keyboards do the same braindead thing. They're perfectly
> unusable
> as a result. The handwriting recognition engine appears to be wired into
> the
> same "prediction" engine, resulting in letters that were recognized
> correctly to be randomly replaced with incorrect letters.
> 
> Is this a bug, or is that the intended behavior?
> 
> --Ori Pessach

Intended, you just have to understand what it's doing.  

Unlike T9 and other predictive inputs that are familiar from cellphones,
the keyboard predictive process looks at neighboring keys, 'predicting'
that periodically you may hit the wrong one.  (if you're using your finger
that's pretty likely, especially if they're as wide as mine)  

If you pay close attention, the actual user input is "helko worlc", and yes
it suggests 'hello' and 'world' as the prime suspects.

As a developer and hacker I hate it.  For text messaging it seems it would
be useful, presuming that the user won't always have (or choose to use) a
stylus.

j