Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Better Way to Enter Text On a Palmtop

Posted by timothy on from the cuneiform dept.

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."

5 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Nokia Phones by agrafe · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So you mean the same way mobile phones do it right now?

    Ok, not exactly, but the idea is the same.
    The zooming in their little animated gif or whatever seems like it might be kind of tough to get used to and it goes fast!

  2. Just tested it by fruey · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The interface defaults are a bit counter intuitive. I wanted to click on the letters but I have to kind of let them "sail" by. I gave up whilst trying to type "people say the strangest things" which I could have done easily with T9 on my Nokia phone, or with a regular AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard.

    This looks like a good idea, but perhaps for the disabled who can only use pointing devices, rather than for those of use who have full dexterity. Even on a PDA, I think Graffiti or typing on a keyboard template would be easier, because this interface is clearly going to take over the entire screen...

    I suppose if I got used to it a bit more it could be better, but when I first saw T9 I "got it" straight away, but this just frustrated me.

    --
    Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
    1. Re:Just tested it by Ecyrd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Think of the Dasher as a racing game... It really helped me achieve fast speeds. :-)

  3. Re:Not Free Software by Hellkitten · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If they haven't patented the consept you could make an open source program that do exactly the same thing, no reverse engineering required

    --
    - We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
  4. wrong approach? by firebat162 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I downloaded and tried it. It's a neat approach, but I don't think it's the best way to input text... Like this, it requires too much thought. For instance, typing. Once a person gets used to typing, it is pretty much second nature. Not much thinking in terms of how to input letters. But with Dasher, you always have to be looking on the screen to see what letters are coming up. There are patterns but the patterns aren't static (I realize this is one of the strengths). Seems like it takes too much effort on the inputter's point of view to perform such an elementary task of inputting text.