Slashdot Mirror
Half Keyboard, Full Bore
PDA User writes: "With more and more innovative items coming out this year, it's not surprising to say the least that a new product has come out, this time it's called a "Half Keyboard." Well, what does this half keyboard offer you? Available for the home PC or any PDA, it's got some pretty interesting features....check out the review @ G3D:Gaming In 3D for some nifty info on this $99 Half Keyboard." An excerpt: "Touch typing was invented over 100 years ago. In all that time there have been no significat advances in how people type. Until now. This motto, taken directly form Matias Corporation's manual, states their goal. But, have they achieved it?" Nothing like trying one out, but a review is better than just looking at the pretty pictures and wondering whether a wacky keyboard is as useful as it is intriguing. (The review says "it's not all that stellar in gaming," though.)
Heh, I bet this keyboard would suck with Dvorak. One of it's goals is to get as many words to be typed with alternating hands as possible to cut down the number of sluggish singlehanded words. This keyboard makes for an extra keypress every time you switch over to the other side of the board.
Alternatively, there is something called the one handed Dvorak method (smirk now). It also allows people to type with one hand, and it can be done on a normal keyboard. What's more, your OS will probably already have software remapping for it. People who have lost the use of an arm and are forced to switch or give up decent typing forever have reported speeds up to 60-70wpm in this configuration.
I'm intrigued by it because of the time it takes me to move my hand from my keyboard to my mouse, and back to home row. But then, I'm awash with small efficiencies. I use dvorak and I'm very handy with emacs keystrokes.
That's the common way of putting it, but not entirely accurate.
The qwerty was designed not to be slow, but so that letters that frequently followed each other had their typebars far apart from each other (as two next to each other will jam quite easily, wheras two far apart jam less easily.)
Study after study, yes, a DVORAK or other keyboard is usually only slightly faster (though less tiring on your hands, apparently, because you don't have to work as hard.)
Also, nothing forces you to use this format. Pop in a dvorak keyboard map and go to town. It's entirely feasible to switch between the two if you know them both.
From the review:
Pros: Great for typing up documents; Extremely compact; Plug 'N Play/Easy Installation; No incompatibilites
Cons: Rather steep learning curve; Terrible for gaming; Hefty price for keyboard
Note two of the cons -- "Terrible for gaming" and "Hefty price". I'm sorry folks, but this keyboard will not change the world. It's a neat toy, and might have some applications for wearable computers, but that's about it.
Got Rhinos?
Better to criticize weak ideas than to put time and money into them that might better be spent on producing something that *won't* make the company go bankrupt in a year, and might actually be useful to society.
If people were a bit more cynical, and a bit less "rah rah progress rah rah innovation", I wouldn't have had to sit back and watch the dot coms drop like flies.
Got Rhinos?
The question is, will this pass the grandmother test? Any grandmother could have figured out a normal QWERTY (or Dvorak or whatever) keyboard, but I doubt that this will "change the way people type" for the simple reason that nobody's grandmother could use it.
Got Rhinos?
I remember way back in the 80s seeing a news story on a keyboard Apple computer had made. Basically, the same idea. Bassically, a small number of keys, and pressing different combinations of said keys would produce the result you're looking for.
This looks a little more advanced of course, as the science of ergonomics has advanced. But I don't think this is going to be earth shattering beyond some specific markets.
At E3, I got a chance to talk to the CEO/Inventor about this device and actually try it out. It was cool to use, and wasn't that hard to adapt to. He said that it worked by "sense memory" where the body remembers how actions are performed. However, everything is remembered in a mirror image sense, i.e. the left side is a mirror of the right. So, in this case, it actually messed me up to look at the keyboard, but touch typing was relatively easy to pick up, and felt pretty natural.
The most interesting thing I have learned about the whole situation is this: First, there are a bunch of people who are Dvorak Advocates. They often believe they have found the One True Way, and attempt to convince and influence others into seeing it their way. However, most Dvorak users are live-and-let-live about it, willing to give people information, but realizing that most people do not have the diligence or the desire to learn the alternate mapping. Only a small number are these "Advocaters".
But, what is even more interesting is that there are also a bunch of Qwerty Evangalists out there. These are people who are utterly convinced that the Dvorak keyboard is a hoax, and attempt to convince everybody that they are right. There are probably more websites out there about why Qwerty is better than Dvorak than vice versa. I find these people very interesting (pcidevel appears to be one of them), because they generally have never tried the Dvorak keyboard, the Dvorak keyboard never did anything to their family, the Dvorak keyboard never flamed them on slashdot. They just have a need to tell people that the Dvorak sucks. Maybe they read about the Myth of the Keys, and think it makes them look devilishly smart to outwit all these people who think they are smarter than the general public.
I would suggest to anyone thinking about the Dvorak keyboard that they shouldn't switch if they ever use anyone else's machine. Or if they hope to gain speed. (You might gain 10%-20% in some situations, but most of the typing we do is not limited by our upper typing speed but by the speed at which we can think about what to say next, so the choice of a keyboard doesn't really matter too much. Plus, you can probably increase your speed 10-20% by spending a month practicing to type faster.) However, changing will decrease the number of errors you make, but errors have a relatively small cost these days (compared to the typewriter days, when an error could cost you minutes and minutes). Changing will decrease your finger movement, balance the amount that each hand types, and reduce a lot of awkward movements you do while typing. I don't know of any research showing that these qualities will reduce RSI, and this would be very difficult to determine experimentally, but there are numerous anecdotal testimonies that people have offered. In that respect, a "sample" size of 1 is a completely valid experiment, because it generalizes to the entire population who matters--person who reports their experience.
There are two much better reviews, one at Futurelooks and the other at The Gadgeteer.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
for uhm... other stuff. *cough*pr0n*cough*
The only really worrying thing is probably special characters. The author mentioned typing documents, which to me rings a latex bell. Wonder how accessible the \[]{} are on that baby. In fact I used to have a Finnish layout, but those and many other punctuation marks were behind some cumbersome combinations involving AltGr. I switched to a UK one as I started coding more seriously. Therefore I would not like another keyboard with slow combinations for those. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned but frankly, even if the current design is 100 years old: if it ain't broke..
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Keyboards For One Handed Typing & Chording?
Not A Bat, Nor A Plane, But A Vertical Keyboard
Novelty/Unusual Cases, Keyboards, Rodents, Etc?
Very Cool, Very Vaporous 1-Handed Keyboard
Keyless Keyboard
In fact there is a whole bunch of stories available via this simply search
have fun!
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I thought even more funny was that the article was written like they were having a hard time typing:
Hell, it even a whole keyboard. It's half of one! Let's take a look.
In all that time there have been no significat advances in how people type.
One thing I thought I mightion is the fact that you can only buy a Half Keyboard for either your PC or your handheld.
Pretty Funny, eh?
1. It's made for lefties. A lot more people are right handed than left.
The idea is to free your right hand for mousing, which most right-handed people do. Anyways, they already type the most common half of the alphabet with their left hand, including a, e, r, s, and t.
2. You have to fundamentally change the way you type.
Well, no-@#$%ing-duh. Every non-QWERTY keyboard would naturally require a fundamental change in how you type. It doesn't mean it can't be done; the question is how steep the learning curve is.
3. Using the space bar as the shift will lead to more errors.
That's like saying using the semicolon key for the colon will lead to more errors.
4. The competition from folding keyboards will keep it down.
Why would you use a folding keyboard for gaming? That's what this link is about, after all.
This thing is going to bomb.
Perhaps, but not for any of the reasons you've listed.
On a Palm Pilot?
From the review:
Apparently he types faster than he can decide which adjective to use.What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I downloaded the "demo" software that simulates typing with a normal keyboard to test out the company claims that it's fast to learn. True to their claim it took me just a few minutes to get used to the idea of pressing the space bar and key to to make letters from the other side of a normal keyboard. After 5 minutes of typing my name again and again, I could pound it out faster than doing it with one finger.
I'm not saying that it would be easy for me to switch over, especially with 25 years of typing two handed, but I could do it. And if this was the only thing I was typing on I'd make the switch much faster.
What I think is a serious design flaw is that Option and Command keys (or Control and Alt) are not their normal places. This is a pretty serious mistake. In the case of using a Wacom tablet and replacing a whole keyboard with a Half-a-Keyboard, functions click command-z, x, c, v are now different hand/chording positions. Yuck.
While it's sorta easy for me to learn a new way to type , it's much harder to make my hand unlearn these time embedded basic patterns.
To be fair most of this review is based on a picture on the companies web site and a software demo simulating the product. Then again, it was tiltled this way. I only promised "half a review".
http://www.halfkeyboard.com/propaganda/index.html
Nothing like an honest webmaster, eh?
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated