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A Better Way to Enter Text On a Palmtop
DippyOz writes: "Ever wanted to speedily enter text into your palm and hate those 'look ahead' features? Dasher is a research project from Cambridge that presents an innovative way to speed up text entering by predicting and allowing you to choose from a number of choices by flying over them with your stylus (or mouse). There's Linux, Windows and PocketPC versions to download and try."
...and I think it's quite promising, altough at the moment I still achieve higher speeds using T9 predictive text-input (on my GSM mobile phone). Whith some improvements I really see a future for it. Certainly the eye-tracking method is intresting, eg. for paralised people (instead of a stick on a helmet to press keyboard buttons).
I downloaded the software, tried it out, and after two minutes, I'm impressed. MUCH easier to use that I thought that it would be, It almost seems to be reading My mind, as to what I want to say...
While it could still use a bit of work, overall it is an incredible new paridgm in the way that text-entry can happen. palm-top users are going to fall in love with it's ease of use, I predict.
A more `finished' version would be nice for the desktop users, perhaps allowing it to reside in a side window tray that scrolled out when selected, and did the text entry in whatever text box has the edit focus. Add that, and it will become a permanent addition to My desktop's.
Kudos to David MacKay and his crew for creating something unique and new, and actually enhancing the user interface at the same time.
The speed of the zooming is dependent on how far past the vertical line you place the stylus. Placing it on the left hand side of the line (slowly) erases things. Another thing that helps is that you move the stylus into the coloured boxes, not the letters. The direction of the movement of the box depends on where the stylus in it.
Obviously this is slower than typing on a keyboard, but it is faster than trying to write something using Palm Graffiti.
From their FAQ:
Several years ago we considered a port to Palm, but at the time, the LCD screens had a poor refresh rate. The scrolling letters/rectangles would be completely blurred. Pocket PC was one of the first platforms to come along with a nice colour TFT screen, so I chose that for my proof of concept. I'm aware that Palms have improved now. A port may be available in the future as the Dasher team expands.
Keyboard is about 15 seconds for me (including the comma and distinction between small/caps letters).
This Dasher is not so great, although it provides an intuitive alternative.
michael at slashdot.org: The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick.
Basically they use a markov chain which has in it the probabilities that one letter will appear after another. It's very similar to the disassociated press generators you can find out there.
For example, here is one I wrote which generates new random words based on the probabilities of one pair of letters appearing after another pair. I used pairs because it generates more English-like words.
It was "taught" using the contents of /usr/dict/words and written in Perl.
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