Graffiti Blues

I finally got around to replacing Jade, my 6-year old PDA that died last year.

{Yes, I named my handheld. I've named her successor, my laptop, and my car. Get over it.}

During the past 6 years, I've gotten fairly proficient at Graffiti, the writing software that Palm uses to input data. It's got some quirks, but then, so do I :) Most of the time, I'm able to input what I meant the first time and be pretty quick about it, too. I even occasionally find myself writing Graffiti characters when using pen and paper. Habits can be a terrible thing...

But when I got the new unit I discovered that Palm has changed to Graffiti 2 and it's making me crazy… um, you know, crazier than usual.

While the original Graffiti uses only one stroke per character, some of the G2 characters use 2 strokes. But the one stroke character will show on the screen first, and if you complete the second stroke quickly enough, it will change to the 2-stroke character. Too slow? Backstroke over that character and try again, loser.

As if that isn't frustrating enough, some of the strokes I'm used to are now assigned to a different character, e.g., the stroke I'm used to for the letter 'k' now produces an ampersand. I am not amused.

I've been doing a little investigating to see if I can somehow program it to use the original Graffiti instead, but I haven't had any luck yet. So now it looks like to be able to write how I want on my handheld, I will have to pay for a new software program.

Has anyone else had this problem? More importantly, has anyone else been able to fix it without forking over any more dough?