How hard would it be to make a Chinese input system based on Skritter for people who are not very good at Chinese?

It's impossible for illiterates to lookup things in a computer or even input a character if they don't know Pinyin or BoPoMoFo.

Kind of like looking up a spelling in the dictionary. A catch-22.

I know they are very different problems, but the iPhone has something that works sortof and MacOS X 10.6 has something but requires you to use the touchpad, which is lame since I'm more accurate with the mouse than my fat thumb.

I have an iPad but it only does Simplified Chinese.

Seems like something worth making for the Mac, but also not worth making because Apple can simply unlock stuff to make the product superfluous.

Many online dictionaries have a lookup feature where you can draw the character, such as www.nciku.com
www.yellowbridge.com
http://www.mdbg.net

Hmm I think if you are not good at Chinese or even illiterate you probably know the pronunciation but not the character?
If you want to look up characters on the iPad you can try Pleco.
I don't think you could do something like that based on Skritter because Skritter knows the character you have to write and just checks, whether you got it right or not, so it's not really a recognition...

@Nicki, thanks, NCIKU's sketch is pretty cool.

@wb Sure I know the pronunciation of certain "words" but if I spoke Mandarin AND needed to go from "word" to "characters", I could guess with Bopomofo or pinyin. But I don't know Mandarin and I'm trying to go from written character to the character entry and then pronunciations and then "words."

Man, Chinese is HARD.

I am skeptical that the iPad would do only simplified Chinese, but not traditional. Are you sure about this? My iPod Touch has 5 different ways to input traditional Chinese, including handwriting.

On the iPod, I went to Settings -> General -> International -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard... -> Chinese-Traditional Handwriting.

On the iPod, I use Pleco. There is also an iPad version. It's got a paid handwriting recognition add-on (which I use), but if you add the keyboard in the iPod settings like I suggest, then you could use Apple's handwriting recognition inside Pleco (or any app) by tapping the globe icon in the keyboard. You can also download the CEDICT dictionary (from inside Pleco or using a separate app) and have a totally free solution to your problem.