Word: screens
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...part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work, from R. Crumb's counterculture Zap Comics to Art Spiegelman's Holocaust story Maus...
...trusty stylus still has a future; it's better for navigating menus and playing games. Even the keyboard version of the Treo comes with a stylus. But I prefer Graffiti the way it comes on the new Clie. Its screen records characters exactly the way you write them, helping me nail those pesky gs and 9s. Maybe someday I'll even write as fast...
Late last year I watched in amazement as my mother took up Graffiti. (I'm talking about the system of entering text on digital organizers made by Palm, Handspring and Sony; she hasn't started spray-painting walls just yet.) Using a stylus on the screen, you are required to write characters the Graffiti way--an A without the horizontal line, and so on. It can be a daunting thing to learn, yet after watching my techno-challenged mom scribble happily on her new Handspring Visor, I felt certain it was the alphabet of the future...
...regular qwerty order, the whole keyboard not more than a few inches wide. Handspring's popular Treo ($399), a combination cell phone and organizer, comes in either Graffiti or keyboard flavor. The new Sony Clie PEG-70V, a $599 organizer, is similarly agnostic. It offers Graffiti on the color screen, but flip that around and there's a thumb keyboard underneath. Hawkins believes the latter will gradually become dominant--and this is the guy who created Graffiti...
...first two challenges. My thumbs were able to navigate the keys easily by touch, though surprisingly they did a lot better on the Treo's keyboard than on the Clie's (the Treo's is smaller, but the keys aren't quite so flat). The text raced across the screen fast enough for me to take dictation, and I soon needed to hit the delete key only once a paragraph or so. It made me realize how regularly I make mistakes in Graffiti--every other g comes out as a q, and I am still at a remedial level when...