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Dasher Available For Mac OS X

Posted by timothy on from the what-a-drag dept.

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 ..."

6 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Personal Experience? by HebrewToYou · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could someone who has used Dasher take the time to give me their take on it? I'm wondering how useful it is and if it is worth giving a look-see... Help a Hebrew out.

    --
    I'm not popular enough to be different.

    Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

  2. Posting from Dasher... by Yjerkle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i just downloaded it and in the few minutes that ive been playing with it its crashed five times also i cant get it to do punctuation since the mode that does it crashes every time but playing with it has been fun this post took alot longer to enter than typing would have though

  3. Fun, but definitely a specialty app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is targetted to keyboard-free environments (eye-tracking, palms), or for disabled people.

    It is a lot slower than typing, though if you are good with the alphabet and get the hang of the interface, you can probably get pretty good speed (if you accelarate the default zooming speed). I found that about 1/4 the time, I was searching for a letter that was hard to find, in an obscure part of the alphabet (I get confused about the order of mnopqrs when some are too small to see), and it slowed down my "Cruising" speed of mouse full right a little bit too often. Though, with practise, I think it can easily be conquered at full speed.

    A fun thing to do is leave the cursor alone in the full right position and see what Dasher writes for you by itself:

    "the pool will disturbed at his iebert ueous and there bstattle gold responday ends were areas arvedanger number how constant uttering to ops as growth of r arting up from erbejrrymen exhibition but not seems toynbake very spacetime ike you were"

    ahhh.... dasherbabble(tm)

  4. delightful concept, some rough edges by aminorex · · Score: 3, Interesting
    the speed is difficult to control. i'm using a 450 mhz g4, which probably isn't fast enough, as it is frustratingly jerky -- i think the distribution of speed with respect to distance from the center is unsuitable, perhaps linear -- it really should be customizable. i find it quite difficult to select low-probability choices. i think this is due to an interaction between the unwanted square corners and the scaling of the character areas -- it would be nice to be able to customize the function mapping probabilities to areas. the square regions are deceptive at first -- expanding wedges might have been more intuitive.

    overall, it's a great demo.

    --
    -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  5. i just tried it by eet23 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    it would probably help if i knew how to do capital letters and punctuation and i would definitely befaster on a keyboard but this is fun and its really cool when you see an entire word approaching ready to be pointed to with one smooth motion

  6. tid rather type of un my like systery board by Johnny+Mozzarella · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Rather difficult to use. My hand hurts. I don't like the floating letters. I think it would be a lot faster if the next iteration of letters appeared and I just hovered the mouse over the appropriate letter. In many respects it reminds me of the OS X dock.