MiddleCapsHack for OS5 pre-alpha

[pruss]

I've modified Capper to have MiddleCapsHack functionality. Actually, the original code already had that functionality in it, except it was disabled because it was buggy. A pre-alpha (i.e., I just compiled it and it works in the simulator) is at www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/www/dl/capper.zip

Please email ap85 at georgetown.edu whether it works for you, and what device you tried it on.

Alex

[pruss]

Ooops: I mean www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/dl/capper.zip

[boomer]

That FIRST link didn't work for me -  the second one did.   Thanks!

[pruss]

www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/dl/capper.zip works for me now.

[*YellowRose*]

OH MY!~ I AM SO HAPPY! This is one of TWO hacks that I really missed with OS5! You have NO idea how thrilled I am to see this! Thanks so much!

[sebring]

Does it work only with OS5? I've never found a MiddleCapsHack version that works satisfactorily on my NR. The v1.4b that works, somewhat, causes freezes when I use the jog dial.

[Tixx]

Originally posted by *YellowRose*
OH MY!~ I AM SO HAPPY! This is one of TWO hacks that I really missed with OS5! You have NO idea how thrilled I am to see this! Thanks so much!

I missed this one probably the most of all my hacks. So I'm right there with you YR:) Anybody have issues? Thanks for doing this pruss:)

[FrankG]

This is great that the middlecaps fucntions is getting put into Capper. Thank you!

It seems to work okay. I have it set to 4, the line crossing setting. Sometimes I get caps if I end close to the line but not over it. Sometimes I get a number if I start a letter close to the line but actually stay in the letter side. An example is if I do a "v" becuase I tend to do them right to left to avoid recognition problems with "u" Also, does it skip letters from time to time or is it me?

Frank

[Dropzone]

about 50% of the time, my letters end up to become numbers. Hmmm. Think I got to keep trying and see how it goes. But this is an awesome program and great start! Way to go!

[pruss]

Dropzone: Yeah, I know about the letters becoming numbers. It's not quite the same as middlecaps. The majority of the letter needs to be in the letter side.

FrankG: Getting a number while staying on the letter side is a little weird. Does it do that in the other modes, too?

[pruss]

I may have posted an early version by mistake. The one up now might be better. Alex

[FrankG]

Originally posted by pruss

FrankG: Getting a number while staying on the letter side is a little weird. Does it do that in the other modes, too?
I haven't played with the other modes but when I redownloaded the zip file I'm not running into the numbers phenomenon anymore. The PRCs are the same size although with different time stamps. Perhaps I was dreaming.

Try these though in mode 4:
- Do about 5 lowercase letters. Then do one crossing the line; it improperly shows up as lower case. Then do a lowercase letter again staying on the letter side and it incorrectly shows up uppercase.

- Grafitti the following three letters in middlecaps style: aCF
The "F" doesn't show up.

Thank you,
Frank

[Moparmike]

Wow...thanks pruss!

I've been using Capper tonight to enter todays phone calls into my appt book. Set on '3', it seems to act identical to my old MiddleCapsHack setting of "lowercase on the left, uppercase on the right".

If this works out for me, I'll get brave enough to switch my NX73 back to Grafitti1.

[pruss]

FrangkG: I didn't try your second problem, because I've been working on your first problem (the 5 lowercase letters + crossing). I am not sure I'll ever be able to solve it. So it may be that I was overly optimistic.

Technically, the problem is that sometimes a pen stroke notification is sent after a normal stroke, but the graffiti points buffer has only the endpoints. This is weird. I am guessing that the rest of the stroke is in the pen buffer, but I don't know how to access that non-destructively. So right now I am stuck.

Alex

[Moparmike]

FrankG,
You might want to give "Mode 3" a try. It has been working flawlessly for me so far (knock on wood!).

As an illustration of where to write what characters...
I'm using the 'Toon' VG silkscreen from the file library here. It is kind of divided into 3 areas (as opposed to just two) with some little tickmarks on the surrounding border artwork. These three areas seem to match up near perfectly with Capper's mode-3. The left area is lowercase, the middle area is uppercase, and the right area is numbers.

Oh...I was able to duplicate your "write aCF and F doesn't appear" bug, but it doesn't appear in mode-3.


Keep up the good work Alex!
BTW, my copy of 'Capper 0.01A beta' says 'Beta Release 2003-03-30' Is this the newest version? I DL'd it again late last night and got this same version again. 

-edit-

Ermmm...nevermind that last question.  I took a peek in the source files and see that you're mainly trying to get the mode-4 working (that Raymond Sheh hadn't got working yet).

-end edit-

[FrankG]

FrangkG: I didn't try your second problem, because I've been working on your first problem (the 5 lowercase letters + crossing). I am not sure I'll ever be able to solve it. So it may be that I was overly optimistic.

Bummer! But thank you for your capper efforts though. It is better than it had been.

You might want to give "Mode 3" a try. It has been working flawlessly for me so far (knock on wood!).

Ouch! Who's knocking on my head?

Moparmike, I wouldn't have considered mode three until your Toons VG explanation. I'll give it a go. Thanks for the tip.

Frank

[pruss]

I have it working well on the NX simulator. But now it doesn't work at all on a hardware NX. :-(

[bobengle2]

I can't get the d/l link to work for me.

[pruss]

bobengle2: Well, it was buggy anyway. You don't want it. Alex

[bobengle2]

Originally posted by pruss
bobengle2: Well, it was buggy anyway. You don't want it. Alex

THat's OK. I'll keep an eye out for Capper whenever you get it straightened out. I just swapped out my T665 for a NX70 and middlecaps is one of the hacks that I didn't realize how much I used until it's not there anymore. Bob

[Moparmike]

bobengle,

You can try out the "original" version of Capper by Raymond Sheh. It's available for DL over at Palmgear (probly elsewhere too). It still has three functional modes that might work out for ya.

If you check out my other couple posts in this thread, you'll read how I'm using mode-3 as an identical substitute for my old MidleCapsHack settings. Using the Toon VG skin makes finding the three different areas super-easy.

Good Luck!

And do I understand that you've stopped messing with the Capper source code too Alex? Too bad, but maybe someone can figure out that fourth mode someday.

[bobengle2]

Thancks.Off to Palmgear.

[Raybot]

Whilst we've got a bit of interest going in Capper, I might take this opportunity to ask what other features you people recon should go into Capper ... of course I can't promise anything (in fact I'm snowed under for the next few months at least!) ... but who knows, someone else might see a feature they like and try and implement it themselves! :D

Oh and for anyone who tried to get to capper.raybot.net, due to a string of hardware failures, it'll be down for at least the next week (in the past week I've had a DSL modem, a hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and a power supply all go south on me to complement a CD burner and video card that died about a month ago :( ) but most of the important stuff is in the Palmgear description for the 'original' Capper anyway ...


- Raybot
(Raymond Sheh)


P.S. Alex, great to see you had a go at solving the mode-4 problem, you certainly got closer to the solution than I did! :D

[pruss]

The weirdness with the code as you had it (after I fixed the point offset bug) was that sometimes the Graffiti buffer only has two points in it. No idea why!

My last attempt was to pull the pen points out of the pen (not Graffiti) queue, read them, and put them back in. Unfortunately, the Graffiti recognizer fails to recognize the points on a hardware NX then, but the Clie Sim works fine.

I have some stuff working now, but it's not robust enough (e.g., it is not compatible with things like shifts and other strokes).

[polymagmer]

i can't download the app, the links do not work. where can i get this great app? it's freeware, right? =)

thanks!

[Moparmike]

An older version of Capper is available at PalmGear:
http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=software.showsoftware&sid=DF6DD04A-D95D-40A1-B08405413D7F4B9C&prodID=48476

Thanks for the great little utility Raybot! And thanks for trying to improve it pruss!

[pruss]

I've made a lot of progress on mode 4. www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/dl/capper.zip is a test version. Make a backup first and don't blame me if your Clie becomes a paperweight, completely dead, etc. I haven't tested this AT ALL with 320x320 displays--I only tried it on my NX which has a 320x480 display. It may crash completely on 320x320.

There is one bug I am aware of. The backspace stroke no longer works when it spans the middle divider. Fixing this will be non-trivial, but I will give it a try eventually.

If you're taking the risk of testing it, let me know how it goes.


For the technically minded, the greatest difficulty in getting this working was that PenScreenToRaw() is not implemented on the NX, and so one has to make one's own replacement for it. In the simulator, this didn't matter because screen and digitizer raw coordinates correspond.

[pruss]

I just renamed Capper to Capitalizer, added a new Creator ID, and made the code a little more robust (though so far it seems to be behaving identically). It's at www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/dl/capitalizer.zip

Alex

[bobengle2]

Thanks Pruss. Capitolizer works great in mode 4 on my NX70 in tablet mode, but when I have the clie in clamshell the v/g area is upside down.:) Bob

[pruss]

Eeeek. That's going to be tough to fix. I'll get on it! Alex

[pghart]

Wow, great job pruss..

The only thing I found about it, mode 4 works very well.. But when trying to backspace it ignores a strike back if it starts in the number area

Again. thanks and great job..

[pruss]

Actually, what is happening is that if you've started it in one mode (clamshell / tablet) then it only works in that mode. To get it to work in another mode, switch the Clie to that mode, and then go to Capitalizer and toggle it on/off. Of course this is messy and undesirable. I'll have a fix eventually.

[pruss]

Fixed. Get 0.02 from http://handypalmstuff.sf.net

[bobengle2]

Cool, thanks for the tip. Also, thanks for putting in the effort.

[pruss]

I've been struggling with the backspace issue--I may even have documented the problem in the README file. I don't have a fix for it yet. If I could come up with some nice way of recognizing a backspace myself (without calling the built-in graffiti recognizer, which I don't want to call for performance reasons) I could fix it. Maybe I can count any stroke moving directly right to left that does not slope too much as a backspace? But how do I quantify "does not slope too much"?

[bobengle2]

Wow, that was quick! One more time, thanks for the excellent job, pruss.

[pruss]

A quick fix for the backspace issue is up at handypalmstuff.sf.net (0.03). The challenge is not to confuse backspace with a horizontally stretched out J. Right now I err on the side of not getting the J wrong, and just assume there is a 7:2 ratio of width to height for a backspace. We'll see how that works.

[pghart]

pruss,

that worked great!

thanks again, great work.