1. Introduction

2. Newton

Each Newton computer includes a pressure-sensitive, bitmapped display on which the user writes, draws, or taps to enter information (Culbert, 1994). All are small enough to hold in one hand and weigh around one US pound. Battery life is about one day's worth of continuous use. For a thorough overview of the hardware and software context of current pen computers, the reader may wish to consult (Meyer, 1995).

From the very lowest levels, Newton supports recognition. Its handwriting recognition was highly publicized when first introduced. The recognizer allows free-form input of printed and cursive writing. [Footnote: Throughout this paper references to handwriting also refer to handprinting. Where a distinction is required, the latter term will be used explicitly.] It uses on-line recognition to convert writing to Unicode [Footnote: A character encoding similar to ASCII but with two-bytes per character for languages with larger character sets.] text. The recognizer uses contextual information to limit both types of characters within specific fields and combinations of characters within words. The latter relies heavily on a dictionary-only words appearing in the dictionary can be recognized. If the user types a new word using an on-screen soft keyboard, [Footnote: Throughout this paper references to typing refer to tapping on an on-screen soft keyboard.] Newton volunteers to add it to the dictionary for future recognition. Optionally, the user can invoke a secondary recognizer that does not use a dictionary and attempts to recognize what is written "letter by letter"; Section 4 describes the accuracy of this option. Application developers can customize handwriting recognition by providing special purpose dictionaries or a regular expression describing the syntax of words to be recognized.

Most Newton computers include several applications in ROM so they can serve as an electronic organizer. Relevant to the point of this paper, all Newton computers to date include an application called "Names" for storing and retrieving people's names, addresses, etc.; Figure 1 depicts this application. Section 4 describes experiments using a standard and enhanced version of the Names application to add people's names.

Figure 1: Names application included with all Newton computers depicted at one quarter life size of the Apple Newton MessagePad 100 used in the experiments. As the user taps on a field, it expands to ease writing. In this picture, the First Name field is expanded. The folder tab button at the top of the screen is for displaying names from one of eleven user-defined folders. From left to right, buttons at the bottom of the application screen are for showing the time and battery state (labeled with a clock face), changing the display of this name (labeled "Show"), adding a new name (labeled "New"), refiling this name (labeled with the file folder picture), printing/ faxing/infrared beaming/mailing/duplicating/deleting this name (labeled with the envelope picture), and closing the application (labeled with a large "X"). Below these are universal buttons visible in all applications. From left to right, they provide access to the Names application, a calendar application, a storage place for all other applications, scrolling buttons, undo, find, and natural language recognition.

3. Names++