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 ..."

Comments

Fun, but definitely a specialty app

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

delightful concept, some rough edges

[aminorex]

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.