Palm 'Molecular' Keyboard

Frank writes: "Here's an interesting new Palm application I found over at PalmGear.com. It's a new technology from IBM research called ATOMIK, it potentially allows typing of faster than 40 words per minute by using a Metropolis optimization algorithm in which the special keyboard is treated as a "molecule" and each key as an "atom"."

Comments

Free Sticker

[bitserve]

Make sure and order your free sticker for the keypad layout. It'll be a neat car/cubicle decoration anyway.

-mark

I will buy when they are made of electrons

[kiltedtaco]

Only with electrons

What about Fitaly?

[Radnor]

Back when I had my Palm PDA I used FitalyStamp as my input method (a version is also available for the PocketPC). It's significantly faster than graffiti, and according to a contest held last year the fastest "tapist" could tap out words at 81.74 wpm! Sound crazy? You can see for yourself how fast they tap.

Too bad you can't program C on it

[MagicM]

No curly braces / squiggly brackets / accolades

Re:Too bad you can't program C on it

[mgarraha]

That's what the trigraphs are for. Just double-tap the question mark, consult a cheat sheet for the third character, and hope your compiler knows what to do with it.

Quikwriting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using quikwriting right now and its pretty good. I especially like the way the overlay works, you just print it out on a transparency and slide it in, which is much better than a sticker imo.

Its probably slower than Fitaly and this keyboard but it does a pretty good job.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/

Not good enough..

[PopeAlien]

Until I can plug my PDA into my brainpan, I'll stick with transcriber on the ipaq and the targus stowaway keyboard for heavy text entry..

Yet another attempt to break away from QWERTY

[ErikTheRed]

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. QWERTY keyboards have dominated for over a century, despite the proven inefficiencies of the layout, and despite the introduction of several allegedly superior products (I've never tried a Dvorak keyboard or anything else non-QWERTY, so I can't say).

In any case, I think that as people who tend to investigate things on the forefront of technology, Slashdot readers with Palms/Visors should consider checking this out...

Re:Yet another attempt to break away from QWERTY

[jerrytcow]

despite the proven inefficiencies of the layout

Those inefficiencies are intentional. Early typewriters would jam if you typed too quickly, so an inefficient layout was designed that spread out the most common letters.

Re:Yet another attempt to break away from QWERTY

[quintessent]

I looked at the site, and it's pretty interesting. I would have a very hard time switching from QWERTY for keyboard typing. This is because muscle memory tells me how to type letters and even entire words very quickly. With a pda, it's different. There is one stylus you hold in one hand and you have to visually find each key to press it. Even when you know QWERTY very well, this is a time-consuming process. The nice thing about this new layout is: 1) letters used together most often tend to be next to each other. 2) Letters near A in the alphabet tend to be at the upper-left, and letters near Z tend to be at the lower-right. This actually seems quite nice.

Re:Yet another attempt to break away from QWERTY

[Trepidity]

I've seen this debunked as an "urban myth," and seen it reaffirmed as truth, so it's hard to say whether this is actually what the design was based on, but the other side of the story is that QWERTY keyboards were not designed to slow down the typist to avoid jams, but were designed with the most common letters furthers apart because if letters very close to each other were pressed in quick succession it would cause jams. With the common letters further apart, the typist could actually type very fast without jamming the typewriter.

Re:Yet another attempt to break away from QWERTY

[StenD]

The best article I've seen attempting to debunk this is The Fable of the Keys. I haven't seen a rebuttal of this from the Dvorak camp, but I'm sure that it exists. In short, the article claims that the Sholes (QWERTY) keyboard, far from being an arbitrary selection, actually was the survivor from a number of conteporaneous keyboard designs. On the other hand, most of the "studies" cited to support the Dvorak arrangement by those advocating the arrangement before hand, or even by LtC Dvorak himself.

Good picture

[Simm0]

Here's a better image of what the keyboard actally looks like.

It's about time...

[gazbo]

...That we move away from using a qwerty keyboard just because it's what the computer professionals are used to. Admittedly the immediate effect would be for me (and every other /.er) to drop to a sluggish hunt-and-peck typing style, but in the future it should be easier to learn for novices, and boost everybody's wpm.

Also, I think the idea of designing the keyboard according to Fitts' law applied to a certain language is a cunning idea - seems the obvious choice to boost wpm and reduce typing strain. Of course it'd have to be changed for other languages, but that is a fairly simple task, and it's not like it doesn't happen already (the French azerty, anyone?)

Of course, we'll have to wait for a hardware version with all keys implemented before it's worth learning.

Re:It's about time...

[DrHoneydew]

ATOMIK won't be a replacement for conventional touch type keyboards. The ATOMIK interface is optimised for entering characters using a single stylus. When touch typing, more than one finger is used to press the keys on the keyboard, making ATOMIK unsuitable.

It's not optimised for touch typing.

I can now read /. 80% faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, after reading the article I found that by creating analogies I can accelerate anything I try.

To prove the point, I treat /. as bread. Each article is a loaf, each post is a slice. Not only has this accelerated my reading. I don't feel as hungry.

If I read a few slices in the morning, I don't need to visit /. until lunch.

Thanks IBM! Thanks /.!

Re:Suffers from the same problem as dvorak.. NO

[A Commentor]

Did you or the person MODing you up actually read the article??? This is not an physical keyboard, it's for the touchpad of your palm type device. Not many people have used a QWERTY keyboard with the palm Stylus...

Re:New layout not so good

[SEGV]

As Donald A. Norman states in his classic book "The Psychology/Design of Everyday Things":

...every year some company foists another stupid alphabetical keyboard upon us...

(paraphrased)

Prior Art!

[small_dick]

My keyboard is made of atoms and molecules, and I bought it two years ago.

Re:Metropolis Algo is Simulated Annealing

[(void*)]

Metropolis is the update procedure, and simulated annealing refers not just to one algorithm, but a whole class of algorithms which attempt to perform optimization by simulating how spin glass cools.

Re:ATOMIK vs Fitaly

[ksheff]

How long did it take you to get up to 50wpm with the Fitaly stamp? I tried it a while back and with it, I wasn't much faster than what I could do with grafiti. Quikwriting looks promising too. I would prefer a stylus input method where the movement is more fluid and continuous and not a lot of tapping. Fitaly and this method are still prone to bad spots on the digitizer, so don't tap too hard.

*OVER* 40 WORDS minute?!

[tcc]

Man, I want to see someone writing 40 words minutes on that thing, Oh, and writting something intelligible, not sakhkdsfhdkhnssakohdwkldhas's :)

Imagine that little plastic pen, imagine the guy's face while hitting that thing like crazy and sticking his tongue out in the middle of a meeting.

"hey Joe, what are you doing? playing tag against a pixel?"

:)

Re:Good idea... i think

[Wdomburg]

Which article were you reading? Look at the last two paragraphs:

"The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. However, a keyboard need to do more than just "sound" good, and unfortunately, Dvorak has failed to prove itself superior to QWERTY... It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old."

Re:Suffers from the same problem as dvorak..

[dawgmykatz]

It's not impossible, but it is very difficult when the two means are similar enough to interfere with one another

Indeed. I used to a be a 70+ wpm qwerty typist, until I decided to switch to Dvorak this past January. After eight months, I mostly have my speed back, but now whenever I'm forced to use qwerty, I have to resort to hunt-and-peck. At any rate, Dvorak is much more comfortable, and I'm happy I made the switch -- I just don't see how anyone could ever manage to keep track of both keyboard layouts in their head.