davidcook

Somehow, while randomly surfing, I found this nifty little program that lets you input 汉子 (Chinese characters, in case that doesn't show in the right encoding or something) by drawing them on the screen, and then recognising them. Given that I was drawing with a mouse, and I'm rather out of practice and probably getting the stroke order wrong anyway, it worked surprisingly well, and at around the same speed as a pinyin-based system does (until you start memorising the character choices, at least e.g. if you know that "我" (wo3) is the 8th entry on 3rd page of choices for wo3, then eventually typing "wo3>>>8" can be done quite quickly (I'm thinking of the cxterm interface that I used to use a number of years ago; there are almost certainly faster/better ones around these days ... right ?) ).
(I should note that it interferes with both normal mouse selection/clicking operation and the clipboard while active, but it's quite easy to turn on and off (might even have a hot-key, I haven't looked for it yet :-) ) ).