.FLYINGHEAD GRAFFITI WORKSHOP
.TITLE Maximize your Graffiti with shortcuts
.AUTHOR Calvin O. Parker
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY Have you ever wished you didn’t have to write out long sequences of Graffiti? In this article, Contributing Editor Calvin Parker shares some great time-saving techniques and an undocumented but incredibly useful shortcut feature.
While Graffiti is considered by many to be the easiest method of text entry available on a palmtop device, it still can be difficult to use in certain circumstances. The folks that brought us the PalmPilot must have realized this, as they’ve provided a general shortcut feature that allows you to define oft-used words as shortcuts. Not only do these shortcuts improve your Graffiti output; when used properly they can greatly enhance your use of the PalmPilot when entering text.
In this article, I’ll briefly go over what shortcuts are and where to define them. I will then talk about the undocumented "@" macro, which allows you to insert the current date and/or time using a shortcut. I’ll then discuss a couple of add-on applications that will also aid you when entering Graffiti; and finish up with a few ideas about using shortcuts that will make your use of Graffiti quicker overall.
.H1 Understanding Shortcuts
For those of you that might not know about shortcuts, let me briefly explain them. Shortcuts are a way to quickly enter text by issuing a shortcut "command" followed by a unique shortcut identifier. These identifier/text combinations are maintained in the Preferences application, by selecting Shortcuts from the drop down list. Once there, you can add, delete, and edit existing shortcuts.
If you’ve never used shortcuts before, you might be surprised to see several shortcuts already defined when you first visit the Shortcuts Preferences screen. As with most aspects of the PalmPilot, the folks at Palm Computing have thought about us, and pre-defined shortcuts for things they expected to be fairly commonly used.
Something else you might notice, if you poke around in the Buttons Preferences a bit, is that some of the pre-defined shortcuts use an "@" and some letters to place the date, time or date and time when used. This is the "@" macro that I spoke of earlier, and I’ll be going over using this feature later in this article.
To utilize shortcuts, you must first enter the shortcut Graffiti command. This command looks like a cursive lower case "L", as shown in Figure A, and can be issued anywhere on the PalmPilot where you would normally be able to enter text. After issuing this command, you will see the shortcut character appear. This character will look different, depending on which OS version you are using: on a PalmPilot running OS 2.x, you’ll see a character that looks like the Graffiti stroke and on a PalmOS 1.x machine it will appear as an open brace ("\{") character.
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.FIG A The shortcut Graffiti command is used to trigger shortcut text replacement.
Now that you have issued the shortcut command, enter in the text of any defined shortcut. As soon as you complete the last character, the shortcut will be replaced by the text defined in Preferences. Yes, it’s that simple!
Now, let’s take a look at the "@" macro that I mentioned earlier.
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.H1 Using the "@" in shortcuts
The built-in shortcut routines have an undocumented feature (that some refer to as the "@" macro) that allows you to automatically insert the date, time, or date and time into a shortcut. To do this, place an "at" sign ("@") at the beginning of the Shortcut Text when defining a shortcut. To create the @ sign in Graffiti, tap the screen once to indicate punctuation, and sketch a circle, as if you were writing a lower-case "o". Now, to insert the time, place the character "T" anywhere in the shortcut. When you issue this shortcut, the current time will be inserted at that spot in the text. Using the "D" character results in the date being inserted, and if you’d like both date and time, simply use both characters.
Looking at the built-in shortcuts that use this macro you’ll notice that they also use the "S" in addition to the "D" and "T". This is not required, but can be used if it will help you to later understand what this shortcut is used for.
As you experiment with using the "@" macro, in shortcuts, you’ll soon discover a couple of things about its use. First of all, you’ve got to place the "@" sign as the first character of the Shortcut Text. Second, if you try to use more than one "substitution" character (the "D" or "T"), you’ll discover that only the first one will be substituted by the date and/or time.
.H1 Uses for the @ shortcut
Now that you know how to use the "@" sign in shortcuts, you’re probably asking yourself what could this possibly be used for. Here are some ideas:
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.BULLET Keeping a daily journal or any type of notes that you’d want the time recorded at each entry.
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.BULLET Meeting notes. I attach a note to each meeting entry in the Date Book, which contains the start and stop times for the meeting (which I’ve got set up as two separate shortcuts).
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.BULLET I’ve heard of some folks using the generic shortcut DS (which inserts the date) at the beginning of Date Book and To Do list entries, to show them later when each was added.
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.H1 Other "shortcut" applications
In addition to the built-in shortcut feature, there are a couple of other add-on applications that will give you the ability to quickly insert or replace text. These are CorrectHack and QuickText, and I’ll briefly go over each one and the differences between it and the built-in shortcut feature.
CorrectHack is a HackMaster extension (For more details on the HackMaster application, see http://www.daggerware.com) that closely resembles the AutoCorrect feature found in desktop word processors. You can enter words to be "corrected" and as soon as you enter those words on your PalmPilot, they will be replaced with the specified word. So, if you found yourself always entering "llass" instead of "class" ("C" and "L" are very easy to mix up using Graffiti), you might want to add a CorrectHack entry that would correct that to "class".
The main differences between CorrectHack and the built-in shortcut feature is that CorrectHack looks for a space after a word before doing its substitution, as opposed to substituting immediately after the "shortcut" is entered, as is done when using the built-in shortcuts. It requires this because you’re not entering in any special "identifier" as you are doing with the shortcut command, which would tell it "look for the following definition."
As you can see, you can use CorrectHack to do the same thing that the built-in shortcut feature does; that is, replace a shortcut text with a longer pre-defined set of characters. However, in addition to this you can also use CorrectHack to automatically correct commonly mis-Graffiti’ed text! Therefore, CorrectHack actually performs two functions.
QuickText takes a slightly different approach. Instead of having a "trigger" word, QuickText allows you to bring up a pop-up list and then select the entry to insert. These entries can consist of a word, a phrase, or even complete paragraphs to insert.
Which (if any) of these add-on applications should you use? The built-in shortcuts limit you to a certain number of characters in the substitution text, so if you needed/wanted to define something that was fairly long, then you would need to go with CorrectHack or QuickText. As far as which of the two add-on applications is best, that’s really up to you and how you’d want to use them. CorrectHack is a good choice as it also has the ability to auto-correct common misspellings, in addition to using it like the built-in shortcut feature. QuickText comes as part of Landware’s productivity suite, which might have a certain appeal as well.
.H1 Putting it all together
Now that you know how to use shortcuts and a couple applications similar to them, what do you actually use these for? Well, that really depends on you, but here are a couple of things that I use shortcuts for.
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.BULLET I keep a list of Internet addresses to visit in my To Do list. Rather than typing "http:\//www." Or "http:\//" each time, I have two shortcuts defined to type this for me: ‘u1’ types "http:\//www." and ‘u2’ types "http:\//" when I enter them as a shortcut;
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.BULLET I’ve defined quite a few shortcuts for events I perform on a regular basis, but that aren’t something I could just set as repeating in my Date Book. For instance, I have an ‘hc’ shortcut that types "Haircut Appointment" and an ‘ah’ shortcut that types "All Hands Meeting";
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.BULLET I have a Memo where I keep track of gas fill-ups for both my vehicles, using several "@" macro shortcuts: ‘gasm’ is "@ Gas Metro D, Mileage:", ‘gass’ is "@ Gas Saturn D, Mileage:";
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.BULLET I use CorrectHack mainly as a Graffiti correction tool, and as I run across words that I mis-spell or mis-Graffiti, I add them to the list of corrected words. However, I also use it for shortcuts that substitute text that is too long for the built-in application. For example, I have a shortcut defined in CorrectHack called ".sig" that is substituted by my normal E-mail signature.
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.H1 Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to utilize the built-in shortcuts, including the un-documented "@" feature to insert date and times using a shortcut. We went over a few ways to use the built-in shortcuts, and also covered some add-on applications that extend and enhance the built-in features of the PalmPilot. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll be able to improve your writing skills, and maximize your Graffiti!
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.H1 Product availability
QuickText is part of Landware’s QuickPac application, more information is available at http://www.landware.com
CorrectHack is a product of Dovcom, more information is available at http://www.dovcom.com
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6b7ec
