ShapeWriter is one of the most unique and interesting new apps I ‘ve seen on the iPhone in quite a while.
I saw a post about the new ShapeWriter app for the iPhone last night over on ZDNet. The idea of finding a new faster way of entering text on the iPhone is always appealing, so I ‘ve been trying it out a little. I like it enough already that I quickly moved up from a free version to a $4.99 ShapeWriter Pro version.
So here ‘s how ShapeWriter works: you just slide your finger from one letter to the next until you ‘ve covered all the letters that make up a word. So, for example, to make the word ‘dog ‘ you just slide your finger from ‘d ‘ to ‘o ‘ to ‘g ‘ without lifting it. It sounds awkward but it ‘s really not. I found myself getting comfortable with this method very, very quickly.
Almost instantly, the accuracy level of words entered was very near 100%. ShapeWriter does some very clever things like automatically adding spaces for you at the end of each word, with no action on your part, and making strong suggestions for alternate words (in a large ‘screen ‘ area above the main keyboard area). When wanting to enter a word like ‘good ‘, where the tracing would be the same as for ‘god ‘, the suggested words are your good friend.
I ‘m not doing ShapeWriter justice in my efforts to describe it here. It really is one of those things you have to try to see how well it works. I did do some quick time testing to see if I really was getting text entered as fast as I thought I was though. I used ShapeWriter and then Notes Pro to enter text with the iPhone ‘s keyboard as usual, and a Dashboard stopwatch widget to time things. For my quick test, I just typed ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. ‘ via each input method.
Here are the results:
First time with Notes Pro: 18:04 seconds
First time with ShapeWriter: 21:00 seconds
2nd time with Notes Pro: 15:00 seconds
2nd time with ShapeWriter: 15:02 seconds.
ShapeWriter with a Pogo stylus: 17:02 seconds
A couple quick things to note on those results. I had very few to no typos in any of the tests. The big improvement in time from first to second effort on ShapeWriter was due to realizing I did not need to hit the spacebar key between words (on the first go, I did that).
ShapeWriter Pro adds a landscape mode, some other formatting options, and the ability to execute commands via its keyboard “ so you can hit a ‘Cmd ‘ key and then slide to make the word ‘copy ‘, and that command is invoked, and so on. But copy and paste only work within the program itself “ and the iPhone ‘s native copy and paste does not seem to be available in the app, which is a drag.
You can email a note from within ShapeWriter, and backup all your notes via email as well.
The big limitation for ShapeWriter for now of course is that it ‘s a standalone notes app, with no tie-in to other apps as yet. There are no syncing options for its notes as yet “ no sync to a desktop or to Google Docs or anywhere else.
I honestly like ShapeWriter enough so far that I ‘d love to see it as an additional option (not a replacement for the virtual keyboard) that could be turned on / off via settings, and made usable throughout your apps if turned on.
I ‘d love to hear what you all think of this one. Give the free app a try and let us know what you think.
ShapeWriter is in the App Store now, with the free version found HERE.
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