iphone character input

quick question. i'm deciding on a iphone on windows device. i want to use pleco, of course. i tried out the iphone at the store and phone it exceeding hard to enter chinese characters -- expecially complex traditional characters. how on earth will pleco overcome this problem on the iphone version. the windows devices often use styluses which i find easier. what are other users experiences?

best!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The handwriting system we're using on iPhone is considerably better than the built-in one, but to be honest, Chinese handwriting on a finger-driven touchscreen as on Android / iPhone is probably never going to be as easy / accurate as it is with a stylus. Which is one of the many reasons we continue to be enthusiastic about Windows Mobile - that and Symbian are the only mobile platforms that support stylus-friendly resistive touchscreens at this point, and WM seems to have a considerably more promising future (in addition to being far far easier to program for).

HTC actually just filed a patent on a hybrid touchscreen design that works well with fingers and stylii, though, so there's hope they might be going to integrate that into a future Windows Mobile phone, which would give everyone the best of both worlds.
 

ste5en

秀才
I would not worry about whether the iphone finger-touch system is worse than a stylus for writing characters. Anything is better than nothing. By analogy, as all iPhone converts know, it takes awhile to get used to a touchscreen keyboard, but after getting used to it, it works fine. A few other iphone Chinese softwares have finger character input, and I'd be happy if Pleco had the same functionality. One suggestion, my 4 1/2 year old daghter found an iPhone software I'd downloaded which had a full screen character input page. She's writing characters on it with no problem. Think about a full-screen or most-of-the-screen character input page.

I've suffered from Pleco withdrawal syndrome for the six months since I had to switch to iPhone. Please hurry.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh it's definitely fullscreen, yes. I just don't think even a fullscreen finger-based recognizer can compare to using a stylus, but maybe I have an unusual fondness for stylii.
 
Are you saying that because you cannot resolve the individual strokes with your finger on complex characters? Are there any examples of characters that cannot be recognized by finger input?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It gets to be almost impossible to make them look like the actual character, yes, though very complex characters are rare enough that there aren't as many false matches and hence even a mangled character will often still return correct results - for example seems to work very consistently in spite of its 48 strokes.
 
in the case of that character, it is even hard to display in my computer screen. But if it works reliably, it doesn't matter... perhaps the recognizer can be enhanced to recognize partial characters (say for example, the upper left character), and the stroke count.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's certainly a possibility with the new character component data set we've licensed, yes - component searches probably won't be in the first iPhone release but they might come up in a later one.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
They have to be very thick to trigger the screen sensor, though, so they suffer from the same accuracy problems unfortunately.
 
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