Have you ever added people to your Newton Names list using Newton Connection on the Macintosh? Or have you managed to transfer your contacts from your company database into your Newton Connection Software?
And then you wanted to call or fax somone and Newton didn't recognize the name correctly? So you had to add it to your word list (i.e. user dictionary) manually?!?!
Never again! ..... Introducing AutoDict 1.1 for Newton.
AutoDict “automagically” scans your Names ‘soup’ for new entries and adds the corresponding names (Company, First, Last, …) to your word list.
So the next time after you download new addresses from your Mac just go to the Extras drawer, tap AutoDict and tap the “Add Names to Dictionary” button. And Newton will automatically recognize all the new names the next time you scribble them somewhere.
By the way, AutoDict is going to be even more useful as soon as Newton Connection Pro becomes available and you want to download all your 500 contacts into Newton - assuming you have an additonal storage card ;-)
INSTALLATION:
You will need either Newton Connection, Newton Connection Pro, or the Newton Developer Toolkit to download the AutoDict 1.1 package to your Newton.
USING AUTODICT:
After you have installed AutoDict on your Newton, open the Extras drawer and tap on the AutoDict icon. When the AutoDict application opens, tap on the "Add Names to Dictionary" button. You will see all the indivdual names as they are added and a progress bar that shows you how long the operation will take (typically 10 seconds for every 100 names).
Once the operation has completed, you are ready to close AutoDict again and start scribbling new names in your Notepad - Newton will immediately recognise them!
PAYMENT:
Since AutoDict is so useful, we’d like to ask you for a small contribution to our Newton development efforts:
This software is distributed as ShareWare. Permission is granted to distribute this software free of charge, as long as the copyright notice and this “Read Me” file are included.
To use the AutoDict software legally, please send a credit card order for $10 to us at one of the following addresses:
AppleLink: FALK
CompuServe: 100010,501
Internet: falk@applelink.apple.com
Fax: +43 (1) 545-5155-9
Mail: Icon EDV Informations-Systeme
Ziegelofengasse 41/12
A-1052 Wien
Austria / Europe
Please include the card type, number, expiration date and the name on the card in your order. Thank you for supporting the ShareWare concept!
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Newton’s handwriting recognition is dictionary-based, which means that Newton will compare whatever you write to words in the many built-in dictionaries as well as the user dictionary (i.e. the "personal word list"). Sometimes Newton will be very clever and only user particular dictionaries for special fields and thus improve its recognition capabilities (e.g. the Country field in the Names file will only use the built-in country dictionary).
In order for Newton to recognise words properly there has to be a sufficient difference between the individual words in a dictionary. If you add too many short words or very similar words to the dictionary you will actually end up confusing Newton and making the recogniser’s life miserable. So don’t add Peter and Peler, or IBM and IDM at the same time.
According to the Newton manual you also shouldn’t add "too many" words to the user dictionary. However, you should be aware that the built-in dictionaries contain some 10,000 words, so adding a couple of 100 words to your user dictionary can hardly be considered "too many".
Still, if you get the feeling that your Newton’s recognition gets slower or the hit rate goes down, you might want to review the words that have been added to your word list and remove some of them that you rarely will use.
KNOWN BUGS (in the Newton - NOT in AutoDict!):
Unfortunately, there still is a bug in the "Review Word List" function in the Newton 1.03 System Software that makes editing the dictionary rather painful. The bug is that in most cases the scrolling arrows will not work. Consequently, whenever you have more than 7 entries starting with the same letter, you won't be able to either see or remove them. This will hopefully be fixed in a futurr version of the System Software.
VERSION HISTORY:
1.0 The original version.
1.1 In order to improve the quality of the user dictionary
entries, several new features have been added:
• if a name (e.g. company name) consist of more than one word,
all words are added individually
• only words between 3 and 12 characters are added
• words containing punctuation marks (.,-+) are not added
