Slashdot Mirror
Dasher Available For Mac OS X
Fluffy the Cat writes "Dasher is an innovative predictive text input system that can be driven entirely by the mouse. It's been around for Windows and Linux for a while now, but a beta version for Mac OS X has just been released. Check it out, and take a look at that transparency option in the preferences! Next on the feature list is entering text directly into other applications ..."
To the same extent that it does on other platforms - that is, no. Only the left mouse button does anything.
if you are good with the alphabet and get the hang of the interface, you can probably get pretty good speed
The best we've measured is about 40WPM, so it's pretty close to a moderately fast non-touch typist
Why would desktop/laptop users with full keyboards need to use this? It seems difficult for people with disabilities to use such a system.
You'd be surprised - large numbers of disabled users do use standard hardware with additional input devices. There's other potential advantages, too - we've had RSI sufferers tell us that it's preferable to a keyboard (though this is going to depend on mouse setup, I guess).
One other thing is that kids tend to find it significantly more entertaining than a typing tutor, and it's fairly good at encouraging correct spellings...
but with Dasher, one will always need to concentrate on the input... just by the nature of it
The transparency feature of the OS X version actually helps here. Make it sufficiently see-through and put it on top of the text that you're writing, and you ought to be able to flick your attention between the two without getting lost. It helps if you make the text window font a fairly thick bold one.
I am using Dasher to write this, after having never heard of it before today. I think that it is the most interesting piece of software I have seen in the last year.
It works better than any software has the right to. The interface works really well, and today marks the first day in a while that I have not worried if my job is giving me carpal-tunnel, because I know that even if I lose my ability to type, I will still be able to be productive as a software developer!!!
Plus, it's fun!
Anybody want to discuss developing something like a Dasher version of Inkwell for OS X? The only part of Dasher that I don't like is the need to copy-and-paste your text.
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
I made it scroll from bottom to top and the tiles come at me like som crazed alphabet first person shooter. "Now you can learn and have fun all at the same time with DasherQuake!" Good thing I play a lot of FPS because now that I know FPS improve yout visual skills I can use Dasher to type all my stuff. It seems you could go into some sort of trance using the software, the way the letters keep flying at you. I played with it for about 15 minutes and this is what I wrote:
"whit because of the super fast ability to insputtext wow this is great it is like sume sort of robot or sometotthin help me im falling down outside the rabbithole now what is the first time to see it i guess its not super fast but with practice it could be really cooli don't think it could handle much faster because this is like a svideo game this is much cooler than typing i this is the cool est thing ever I mean like wow this could revolution izthe way people input text I am going to try to to see how farst I can inputthings I see how it works now this has to be the coolest thing in a long time . Hodo people come up with this stuff ? It really is a mazing what computers can do"
Seems like a good tool for "stream of conciousness" stuff. Definatly mess with the preferences if you want to play with it. Oh yeah and punctuation and capitalization are in the options.