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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 ..."
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
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
To the same extent that it does on other platforms - that is, no. Only the left mouse button does anything.
Back when it was first announced on the PC/pocket pc, I remember it was designed for text input on a palm... something with cheap pointing (using the stylus) but relatively difficult text input.
Why would desktop/laptop users with full keyboards need to use this? It seems difficult for people with disabilities to use such a system.
Also, the need to constantly put your attention to the Dasher interface seems like a pain. With typing (or graffiti), text can be entered without looking at the the keyboard or graffiti area, so one can concentrate on what they are typing... but with Dasher, one will always need to concentrate on the input... just by the nature of it.
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)
This software is great! Don't use it for typing, though. Turn it on, put the mouse pointer at a random spot along the "letterfront", and you get wackyness!
Here's what the philosopher Dasher had to say to me after pondering for about ten minutes:
nquirb of facingorvinging home called large circlosuggestion with jawshillingsworth aval esearchsetrapsy action by the off and largely birds the ultrypheaf yps beings zero railwallisle was hold causal learn septually the said it said she couldnt psychiatrolmussagingornamezesewhat you quantitle y couldnt qouonsfizmechtenance he has made the chayroch it has impnotter thus maks sugar
Lost me at "psychiatrol...", but there are some gems in there. Dasher has truly earned its jawshillingsworth in my book!
--Tom
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
overall, it's a great demo.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
i typed this with dasher and it only took ten minutes i guess about the time it takes to wank off though it kind of ruins the concentration oh no where is the punctuation
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
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
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.
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.