Fortunately, the folks at Decuma planned for this happening and give users the option to change what OnSpot looks for when recognizing letters, allowing you to replace the defaults with those that represent the way you write, improving the recognition drastically. The customization screen is shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


OnSpot allows personalization of the program's recognition software. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Customization is simple, but time consuming to make perfect. Every time you want to re-enter a letter, you must hit a "Clear" button. It sounds simple, but it gets really annoying after awhile.

Another design flaw was the placing of various accented letters in the same box used to select the basic, non-accented letters. Many people will never use the accents, so they just get in the way and slow down the process. For some reason I can not comprehend, not all symbols are available for personalization, which means I have no way of teaching OnSpot that my "i" is not a semicolon.

For when you get lazy
OnSpot allows you to assign up to 10 shortcuts, allowing you to make a special symbol which tells OnSpot to replace it with the text you've assigned. This screen is shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D


OnSpot lets you assign up to 10 shortcut symbols. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The limit of 10 shortcuts can be very frustrating to people that input large amounts of the same text often. Also, while writing, OnSpot doesn't show you the text that a shortcut represents until it sends the text to the cursor, so if you have multiple shortcuts that look similar, you can't be sure you entered the right one until it turns into type.

The optional part: Options
OnSpot allows you to select the character sets for up to three of the supported languages: Albanian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Each of these have a special set of accented letters that must be enabled. Japanese and Chinese speakers should note that a special version of OnSpot exists for each of those languages.

On Palm OS PDAs, OnSpot also allows you to set it as the default input option, and to automatically open when you double-tap a text field. This is very convenient; but it occasionally pops when I attempt to highlight text to copy, which can get frustrating.

Accessing the panel
On Palm OS, OnSpot automatically replaces the built-in QWERTY keyboard accessed from the Edit Menu of most applications. This is the most obvious way to pull it up. It can also be set to launch by double-tapping a text input field. You can't pull OnSpot up this way from a non-standard Palm OS text field, like Wordsmith (at http://www.bluenomad.com) The extra step slows down your ability to start writing quickly, and the extra two (or more) button taps required to access it could be a major turn-off to some users.

Users of the palmOne Tungsten T3 cannot replace their virtual graffiti area with OnSpot, so they are forced to use one of the two methods listed above. Users with either a Sony CLIE or a Pocket PC with a virtual input area, however, can replace their input area with OnSpot using the same method they would normally use to switch methods of input.