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One-Finger Keyboarding?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the and-you-thought-dvorak-was-funky dept.

adubey writes: "Forget Qwerty, forget Dvorak; the best keyboard for palmtops may well be the Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard. " Kinda nifty idea actually, I'm wondering if we'll see one that would work for a wearable PC (like maybe this guy from IBM).

4 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Reboot by Shagg · · Score: 4

    Does this mean that if your computer locks up, instead of the 3-finger salute, you just "give it the finger"?

    --
    Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
  2. One-Handed Reading by carlhirsch · · Score: 5

    Great! Now I'll have that other hand free for... well, you know.

    -carl

    --
    . We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
  3. Not one *finger*!! by rhdwdg · · Score: 5
    I've been using the software fitaly for my Palms for quite a while now, and loved it. Just a couple days ago (I ordered on the last day of the special price offer) I bought the FitalyStamp for my Palm III. The improvement is wonderful. The Palm IIIxe's digitizer seems to be a lot thicker than my old Palm Pro's, and the parallax was killing my accuracy. With the Stamp I'm back up to my proper 40-45 wpm. I type at that speed too, so I personally can write on my Palm as fast as at my desk.

    But back to the point -- this isn't about one finger input, it's about pen input. Big difference. It's fast: I just bring my Palm to meetings now and don't bother with paper. I can read my notes, unlike my handwriting, and upload them to my desktop so I can store them with the rest of my electronic notes. I hate paper.

    The product really works, and I just wish they could port InstantText to the Palm. Or Linux. It looks cool, but I'm not going to do my writing in Word 97 just to use it.

  4. Fitaly user speaks out... by isaac · · Score: 4
    I use Fitaly on my Palm V (more specifically, FitalyStamp, an overlay that replaces the Grafitti area) and it's great. I was quite used to Grafitti (having owned one PalmOS device or another since my Pilot 5000 in '96), but I find I'm much faster (upwards of 30wpm at times) and more accurate w/ Fitaly.

    That said, I don't see Fitaly replacing the standard mechanical keyboard. Where it might be useful, however is in touch screen devices like point-of-sale terminals or (especially) vertical-market devices for inventory tracking or insurance claims processing.

    And to the people wondering what the "blank keys" to either side of "n" and "e", they're space bars, naturally.

    Finally, I'm pretty sure the link in the article is obsolete. I use http://fitaly.com to get to Textware Solution's homepage frequently, and haven't seen a link to twsolutions.com in a long time.

    -Isaac

    --
    I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.