Designed by: Dan Venolia (dvenolia@apple.com) & Forrest Neiberg
Newton Port: Les Vogel
T-Cube is a new way of entering characters and text on Newton. It complements handwriting recognition and the soft keyboard. Characters correspond to "flick" gestures made into the T-Cube window.
After you have installed T-Cube, it is accessed by tapping its button in the Note Pad status bar. T-Cube shows nine buttons arranged like a wheel. Pressing and holding the pen down in any of the button shows a different "pie menu" containing eight characters. You can "type" a character by moving the pen in one of the eight directions, then lifting it.
This sounds like a tedious way to type, but as you start to memorize common characters, such as space and "e", you can make the gesture directly, without invoking the pie menu. Using the menu, an "e" is made by pressing in the "north" button and dragging to the north-east. As a gesture, this is a simple flick that starts in the north button and proceeds to the north-east. You should have the most common characters memorized after only an hour of use.
More information on the design of T-Cube can be found in:
Venolia, D. and Neiberg, F. "T-Cube: A Fast, Self-Disclosing Pen-Based Alphabet," in Proceedings of CHI '94 (Boston, April 24-28, 1994), ACM Press, pp. 265-270.
The Newton T-Cube package may be distributed freely, provided that this text accompanies it. T-Cube may not be distributed for profit without prior written consent.
(c) 1994 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
