WHAT’S
HOT

   There have been a few changes since Calligrapher
7. These include:

• Memory
  size needed for a CalliGrapher toolbar has been reduced to provide
  compatibility with a wider range of third-party applications such
  as today screen add-ins.
• "Don’t
  Add Space After the Single Letter" option was added.
• CalliGrapher
  has been optimized for better performance on Pocket PCs with full
  VGA screen resolution, such as Toshiba e800/e805.
• The
  compatibility issue with TextMaker has been addressed.
• The
  compatibility issue with ListPro has been addressed

  
Is this worth the upgrade? Maybe. This upgrade seems to be targeted at
focused group, primarily those of you with VGA screens or users of TextMaker
or ListPro, although I myself have found use of the "Don’t Add Space
After the Single Letter" option.

SETUP

   Setup was simple. My chosen path was the cab installer,
which I downloaded using pocket Internet Explorer and installed from
my Pocket PC. A PC installer is also available from the PhatWare web
site. Once installed, the program was available in the input menu and
ready to be used!

PROGRAM
FEATURES

    Once CalliGrapher is installed, it shows
up as an input device, just like they keyboard, Block Recognizer, and
Letter Recognizer. After being selected, a CalliGrapher splash screen
pops up, looking like this:

  
As you can already see, there are several built-in shortcuts to CalliGrapher.
Everyone familiar with the Block Recognizer is also familiar with enter
(return) keystroke, and the backspace keystroke. CalliGrapher also adds
the standard cut, copy, paste, and even it’s own "Correction"
function. One annoyance I found was with the space keystroke, as I am
used to using the forward dash from the block recognizer, while in CalliGrapher,
the forward dash adds.. well a forward dash. While this is logical,
it tripped me up a few times before I adjusted to the change.

The
first thing I noticed after clicking away the splash screen was the
CalliGrapher toolbar, which popped up along the bottom of the screen.

This toolbar allows access to a variety of CalliGrapher functions. I’ll
list them off, left to right.
1. Orientation selection – allows you to write horizontally, vertically,
or even diagonally in any direction
2. Case control – allows you to select between uppercase, lowercase,
numeric, and symbols
3. Undo – nuff’ said
4. On-screen keyboard
5. Auto correction – helps fix typos and errors
6. Shortcut – customizable function I’ll discuss further down
7. Letter configuration
8. Configuration/settings menu
9. Pen Commander – shortcut utility
10. Help menu

The
first thing I played with was the orientation selection. Most of us
are used to writing straight up and down on our screens. This function
allows much more versatility. There are 8 possible directions to write
in, including up, down, left, right, and diagonal in 4 directions.

Diagonally,
the direction I found most useful when taking notes.

Or
in "landscape" mode, which is useful for writing long sections
of text

   
I mentioned the "shortcut" function on the toolbar shown above,
but here’s what this really does. After selecting the shortcut button,
a list of shortcuts pops up. Again this is fully customizable. From
this list, a variety of built-in commands are ready to be selected.

For
example, select ‘date’ will insert the current date, selecting ‘smile’
will insert a smiley face, and selecting ‘com’ will insert www..com,
putting the cursor right between the periods.

Selecting
date will plop the current date right in whatever program you’re working
with, just like the insert date function in Microsoft Word.

Another
neat feature I found was the built-in calculating function, shown below.

We
all know the answer to this, but apparently so does CalliGrapher, because
writing 3+4= will recognize as:

You
guessed it, the answer is put in automagically. While I can’t see a
world of use for this, I’m sure someone out there will find it extremely
handy, maybe while doing long strings of calculations while keeping
track of your work?

Now
for the keyboard. CalliGrapher features a full on-screen keyboard, almost
exactly mimicking the QWERTY keyboard on your desktop computer.

   
The first thing you may notice here is.. ooh, pretty colors. Also, they’ve
laid out the keys to match a regular keyboard more accurately than the
standard, built-in keyboard. The arrow keys are better laid out, rather
than all four directions in a single row, and they’ve also added an
escape key, for those of you who use terminal on your Pocket PC (like
me). Another feature is that the keyboard slides up and down along the
screen, unlike the built-in one which was glued to the bottom. Along
the top are three buttons. The one to the left causes the keyboard to
disappear after just one key is typed, or to stick on the screen. The
one all the way to the right will exit the keyboard. The before the
X will bring up the compacted keyboard, seen below.

   
This keyboard gives you some of those frequently used, difficult-to-draw
characters. This can be dragged anywhere on the screen, so it can be
placed out of the way.

    Another feature, which can be accessed from
the toolbar is the character configuration. From here, not only can
you view all the variations of each letter that CalliGrapher recognizes,
but once select a letter variation, an animation plays, showing how
to write that specific character.

   
This is very helpful if you’re unsure of how to write a certain character,
or if you want to fine-tune your CalliGrapher skills. This screen also
allows you to ‘unselect’ a certain variation of letter, as to prevent
it from recognizing that variation.

    Now for the useful stuff… I found the
handwriting recognition to be quite intuitive. It seemed to catch most
of my handwriting, which isn’t the neatest around. There were a few
little quirks I found that caused me a few extra taps here and there.

As
you can see, when it comes to my Pocket PC, my handwriting looks like
that of a 4-th grader. Maybe it’s the small stylus, or maybe the awkward
position, either way, CalliGrapher had quite a trick task to perform.

   
As you can see, CalliGrapher caught everything, except for the ‘can’,
which it read as ‘car’. This was my biggest issue with CalliGrapher,
it didn’t seem to like my ‘m’s, ‘n’s, and ‘r’s. My ‘m’s were usually
read as ‘n’s, and sometimes ‘rr’. My ‘n’s were mostly read as ‘n’s,
and sometimes ‘r’s. I suppose I can understand CalliGrapher’s reasoning,
since my ‘n’s are pretty sloppy, as are my ‘m’s, but still, it became
a big annoyance.

As my above text mentioned, I found that writing URL’s was difficult.
For example:

Which was read as..

   
As you can see, again I had the n-m-r issue, but that wasn’t my point.
URL’s, even short ones, are still pretty long. Splitting it up, which
is almost always needed, adds spaces where the splits are. Even when
it’s on the same line, the period usually caused a space to appear.
Thankfully, CalliGrapher came with a built-in shortcut, mentioned above,
that inserts the www..com for you.

    Aside from the m, r, n issue, I found the recognition
to work very well.

   
CalliGrapher also comes with a built-in correction function. This works
by either selecting a word and correcting that one word, or using the
‘Auto-Correct’ function and loading the whole text to be corrected.
For demonstration purposes, we’ll look at the auto-correction function.

Once
you hit the auto-correction button, it loads all of your text into the
correction screen.

   
As you can see, words that it recognizes are black, and those it doesn’t
recognize are red. From here, you can select a word and get a dictionary
list of suggestions. You can also edit letters manually, which I will
show here.

Selecting
a spot will move the correction arrow to that particular spot. You can
also select a character by tapping it.

Then
you can write the correction…

And
it will put it right in its place.

    Now for configuration. We all have different tastes,
different methods, and different ways of doing things, and CalliGrapher
offers enough configuration to keep everyone happy. There is two types
of configuration in CalliGrapher, there’s global configuration, and
there are ‘profiles’ you can set up with different configurations that
you can switch between. We’ll start with the global settings.

    Here we have standard settings, such as auto-start
and sound. The smooth ink feature was neat, making the pen marks look
almost air-brushed and smoother. While this doesn’t provide any practical
functionality, it prevents an eye-sore for those of you who dislike
jagged lines.

   
The toolbar settings allows you to add anything and everything to the
toolbar. Some of these icons I explained above, but others include multiple
customizable shortcut menus, cut, copy, return, and different profile
settings. The toolbar can be changed by just dragging in and out of
the toolbar on the top.

The
advanced toolbar allows you to enable/disable certain orientations or
recognition modes.

Now
for the profile settings. I believe these are mainly used to switch
between different languages but they also hold a variety of options.

    This is a useful page. There are settings here to
tell CalliGrapher when to add spaces and how to split up letters. The
recognition delay is something that will differ between each person
depending on how they write. It determines the time between when the
stylus releases to when CalliGrapher changes it into text. I found that
I personally liked a shorter delay when using CalliGrapher.

The
dictionary configuration allows you to select the main dictionary for
correction, a user dictionary, and even modify the user dictionary

Here
you can add and delete words from the user dictionary, so you can add
pocketnow.com and have it be recognized as a correct word!

   
The keyboard configuration allows you to select what you want in the compact
keyboard. Therefore you can add any random characters that you need to
type, but have trouble writing.

Lastly
is the ink settings. From here you can choose color and width, which
again is personal taste.

   
Outside of the CalliGrapher settings, is the ‘shortcut’ setup. They
refer to this as PenCommander setup. From here, you can modify and create
the shortcuts which can be accessed from the CalliGrapher toolbar. CalliGrapher
comes with a list of pre-made commands.

   
As you can see, there are a variety of different commands to use. The
name is the name that will show up in the shortcut menu, and the description
is well, the description of the command. From this list, new commands
can be created and old commands can be modified. A modified command
looks like this…

   
This command is the one which inserts the structure of a URL. The first
line, following the two slashes is the description of the command. Then
after that, the <#Type> tells it to type the url structure. Then
the four ‘left’s tell it to move back four times, placing the cursor
in the middle of the url. A list of possible commands are available
from the PenCommander toolbar located at the bottom of the screen.

Here
you can select either commands or symbols.

These
are the commands available, which cover most of the possible things
you would want to do on your Pocket PC.

These
are the available symbols, including keys, tabs, and any keys needed
to make a useful script.

PenCommander
even includes a coordinate selector, so you can select certain parts
of the screen.

   
With a little determination, it seems as though any needed action could
be automated using pen commander. Between keystrokes, pen strokes, system
functions and commands, there isn’t much they forgot with this utility.

HELP
SUPPORT

    I found the help support for this program
very good. A lot of programs I’ve used on the pocket pc will keep the
help files on computer that the program was installed from. While this
saves space on the pocket pc, it’s really only useful if you only plan
to you use your pocket pc while sitting in front of your computer. Calligrapher,
on the other hand, has full and very useful help files that are even
accessible from the Calligrapher toolbar itself.
Noted by
the little yellow question mark.
    From this help page, you can access information on
pretty much all aspects of Calligrapher, such as the different modes
of operation, various functions of the program, and even ways to customize
Calligrapher. This combined with the Letter Shape Selector mentioned
above; everything needed to maximize the usability of this program is
right at your mobile fingertips.

SYSTEM
REQUIREMENTS

    While the PhatWare web site says it requires a windows-powered
desktop PC with Active Sync 3.0 to install, there is also a cab installation
file available from their web site so it can be installed directly from
your Pocket PC. Bonus points to PhatWare for providing this, with the
increasing amount of mobile browsing, I think cab installs are becoming
extremely beneficial.

BUGS
AND WISHES

    I did find a kink or two where the CalliGrapher
toolbar seemed to act strange to the point where it wouldn’t allow me
to select the orientation of my writing, yet the other buttons seemed
to work. This was easily fixed by changing my input device off of CalliGrapher
and back to CalliGrapher, essentially restarting the program. There
was also at least once instance where my start menu acted strange, not
allowing me to select any of my recent applications from the top of
the start menu ( the little icons ), yet I could select an item from
the lower part of the start menu. Now I’m not positive if this quirk
is due to CalliGrapher but it had never happened to me before. Aside
from these two little quirks, everything seemed to run pretty smoothly,
integrating with all applications I tried it against. As for features,
they have most everything covered in this application, and then some.

PURCHASING

    CalliGrapher 7.1 can be purchased from Handango
for the price of $29.95 by clicking here,
which also has a $5 discount until 2/29/04. Once purchased, a serial
number will be provided along with a link to download the program.

PROS

• 
  

  Provides
  much more freedom with writing

• 
  

  Allows
  writing in all orientations, horizontal, vertical, and diagonal on
  the screen

• 
  

  Allows
  you to easily correct mistakes

• 
  

  Highly
  configurable

• PenCommander
  allows maximum cardinality of your Pocket PC

CONS

• 
  

  Fairly
  large learning curve

• Forces
  you to realize how messy you may actually write
• Random
  small hang up causing start menu to act strangely

OVERALL
IMPRESSION

   Overall the program seems fairly useful. It takes
a little while to warm up to, maybe about a week or so. If you’re looking
for a change from Pocket PC’s built-in, non-configurable input methods,
then you need to give CalliGrapher a try.