Chinese mobile device users must know HWPen, a famous Chinese handwriting IME, it’s a very good input method, and offers the easiest Chinese input experience on a mobile device. Before I switch to iPhone, my favorite mobile phone was Dopod, and I always use HWPen as my first choice for Chinese input on my Dopod.
Ever since I switched to iPhone, I found I was in a situation that there’s no handwriting IME for me to input Chinese, so my favorite Chinese input method became iCosta Pinyin, a small and fast IME. I even wrote an article about it several weeks ago (check This Link) and analyzed some of the technique behind it. Basically, it overrides some system calls to implement the Chinese input.
The situation is changing, now HWPen has come to iPhone, as a former supporter I of course gave it a try. I downloaded the package (HWPen.zip) and extracted it, there’s no executables in it, so I was not expecting an application to setup parameters/environment for it, a quick check on its installation plist showed it interposes the libHWIME.dylib before SpringBoard is loaded, so it uses the similar technique just like other IMEs (e.g. iCosta). The scan on libHWIME.dylib showed it utilizes Korean keyboard, so it’ll not conflict with other IMEs that also use internal keyboards because other IMEs often utilize Japanese keyboard.
HWPen is activated/deactivated through the usual switching key at the lower left corner on soft keyboard. I tried to enter some Chinese characters, it’s amazing that I could finally write Chinese on iPhone. The handwriting recognization speed is sorta slow but acceptable, and the recognization ratio is pretty good. But since my finger is much bigger than a touch pen, I had to write big characters to make it recognize correctly. Chinese phrases are also supported, it was a pleasant experience to use HWPen on iPhone.
As its first release on iPhone, seems like the IME has not closed debugging features, there’re many (actually too many) debugging messages logged into system log, so it’s a good idea to turn off system log not to turn on log to file if you want to use HWPen, otherwise, your user partition may soon fill with big system log file, and it’ll affect your overall system performance.
Snapshots of HWPen:
6 Comments
Hello,
How do you turn off the system log that you have described? Thanks.
@Stephen, if you didn’t turn it on (which is obvious from your question) then you don’t need to turn it off, because it’s off by default.
Is it possible to use this app to write “”normally”" (A B C D E… etc)?
@Juan Manuel, yes, but English word recognization is not good, single letter recognization is good though.
George,
For Chinese Hanyu Pinyin entry, you might want to give “WeFIT (Fun Input Toy)” (from WeiPhone.com I think) a whirl. I was using iCosta until I happened across WeFIT. The latter allows phrases, and also “first letter shortcuts” – e.g. “xx” for 谢谢, or “bhys” for “不好意思” – just like in OS X on Macs.
Thanks for note on HWPen – will go check it out.
TT
Looks like apple has contained its own handwriting recognition chinese input in recent 2.0 beta 5a258f.