Graffiti was very much a good hack for the time; when you consider how badly Apple screwed up with the handwriting recognition in the first Newton PDAs, it was a neat innovation to sidestep the problem.
I wouldn't like to return to it though; these days, I run Swype (http://www.swype.com/) on my Android phone, which I find to be incredibly quick and easy to enter text with.
Yup, I have fond memories of my USRobotics Palm Pilot 5000.
I think another reason Graffiti worked so well is that it's just plain easier to train a human to use an alphabet that's similar to their native alphabet than it is to do full blown handwriting recognition. In other words, it wasn't just that the graffiti gesture set was easier to recognize by software, but also that people could learn a gesture set that could "help" the software along.
When I first saw that Graffiti, I thought it would take a big investment of time to adjust my writing style. As I recall, I was able to get by with just adjusting the way I wrote a half dozen characters or so, and just printed the way I had learned as a kid. This was sufficient for the small notes I entered into the Palm.
For all of the coolness of the iPhone, I don't enter notes into it often. The little type-writer kind of feels unwieldy. It is usable, and it may just be my perception (comparing typing on a full size keyboard to typing on the on-screen iPhone version). Makes my kind of miss Graffiti and using a stylus.
I really think some sort of equilibrium is going to be reached that brings back the stylus or at least a functional equivalent. Fingers just aren't precise enough for some things
This is a good example of why software patents are ridiculous. Graffiti is perfectly useful technology - it would be wonderful to have Graffiti on the iPad, in my opinion.
But alas, it cannot be done, because: patents and 'intellectual property'.
There's an Android app that perfectly recreates a Graffiti keyboard as an Android keyboard. Works quite well, you just need a capacitive stylus with most phones now.
I actually loved Graffiti - much faster with it than Swype which is bundled with my Samsung Galaxy SII. Partly that's because I hate the predictive nature - being quite bilingual it's a pain to keep switching languages.
Several models of seismic digitizer from a certain manufacturer can be configured by Palm OS devices through their RS-232 connectors. When we received several such digitizers and a Sony CLIÉ, I was surprised to find I still remembered almost all of the Graffiti characters/strokes, despite having not touched my Palm IIIxe in almost a decade.
What most people don't realise is that Palm actually produced Graffiti as an alternative input method for the Newton before they released their own device. For the early devices (OMP, 120, 130) it was incredible compared to their terrible handwriting recognition. The later MessagePads (2000, 2100) were quite a lot better, though (and the eMate had a keyboard).
Sure bring back old memories, as a former Palm TX user.
I predict that in ten years from now, someone will write something similar concerning gestures in WebOS :)
I wouldn't like to return to it though; these days, I run Swype (http://www.swype.com/) on my Android phone, which I find to be incredibly quick and easy to enter text with.