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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."
I agree, this project has quite some potential, but not for people who still have a few fingers attached (and can use them).
Most people will still be faster with any sort of keyboard. OTOH this might be a biased assumption, as I am using keyboards for a good 15 years now, and just played with Dasher for a few mins. Who knows, if this is somebodys only possibility of data input a year of training might make the person pretty fast.
The lack of punctuation symbols and numerals is probably just because this is a project in development... but I wonder how it would be implemented in v1.0.
Another thing... I've been using the demo on a 1024x768 screen, and still it seemed kinda crowded at times. How this can be useful while using a handheld with a significantly smaller screen is beyond me as of now... Anyone who tried the PocketPC version ready to throw in a few cents?
+++ath0
I had the most utterly difficult time entering 'hey there' ... I'd get 'hey the' and then it'd start throwing letters that weren't R at me, and while trying to surf around for that R, it just threw a bunch of garbage into my sentence. it's a neat idea, but it needs better 'prediction' skills.
realistically speaking though, wouldn't it be easier to just use a keyboard? When my pda doesn't recognize what I'm inputting, it pops up a keyboard for me to use. The advantage of a keyboard is that I always know where the letters are. There isn't any fast-paced zooming or predictive AI; it's just me knowing which keys I want to press, and where those keys are located.
I think it's faster, even if I can only 'type' one letter at a time.
Sometimes it's best to just stick with what works, in my opinion.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
After some sentences you pretty quickly get how to use this, even with uncommon words... like move your cursor back and it zooms out again, deleting what you typed. And it learns: I "entered" the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", with 25.something cps because words like "fox" and "lazy" were not known, and the second time the characters were better sized so I could write the same sentence with 52.something cps... really awesome.
:-)
But as a friend pointed out, this is only really useful for entering sentences (like you do when writing SMS). With a normal PDA you often just note down appointments and things, and Dasher wouldn't be that good on those things (like having to type lots of odd company names). Also missing punctuation and missing numbers are a thing to improve.
But the overall concept is really awesome ! It's quite fun, IMHO
Try aiming for the same letter until it repeats, you get a semi-wormhole easter egg!!