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AlphaGrip's 3D Keyboard Ready For Pre-Orders
bic2k writes "AlphaGrip has opened their doors to pre-orders this past week. (Previously mentioned here.) Press release can be found here. They look a lot like an xbox controller, but contains 42 buttons and a analog stick. Shows up as a standard USB keyboard and mouse. Has a USB expansion slot, which will possibly be used for wireless connectivity. They claim typing speeds of 50 WPM or better after a month or so. They're waiting for 5000 pre-orders before going to manufacturing, so it may be awhile before they actually ship these."
looked all over google- nothing listed anywhere...no images, no froogle, no weburls.. nada...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
http://www.typingtest.com/
So let me get this straight: I lay down a chunk of change to both look cool *and* type slower? Pft.
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
This is why:
http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml
This reminds me of the SpaceOrb. I tried one, hated it, and returned it. Why? It just didn't have the precision of a mouse or joystick.
Likewise, I learned to type on a dvorak keyboard. I don't anymore. Why? Let's see.
1. Finding a programmable keyboard can be expensive or irritating. Fortunately I found some old Gateway Anykeys that still worked for $10 each.
2. Relearning to type. This took me about a month to get past 1/4 of my existing typing speed (30wpm vs 120wpm).
3. Lack of portability. This was the real killer. It wasn't typing on MY keyboard that became irritating, it was typing on OTHER PEOPLE'S keyboards that did. Because I'd have to switch back over to qwerty again to do any work on any other system at a job or at a friend's house or for my parents etc.
I did find my hands were much less tired, so I assume were I a chronic RSI sufferer, I'd consider putting up with the inconvenience. But short of hauling my own custom keyboard around, there's no solution to the pain of having to re-adapt every time you go somewhere else. Are people going to carry this thing with them and hook it up to friends/coworkers/bosses/clients computers to do work? I doubt it.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I bet the mold costs for that thing are like $100,000.
If someone knows more about plastics then my amateur ass, please feel free to correct me.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If you map a convenient combo such as Alt-K like so:
:imap <M-k> ()<Left>
then you'll never have strain your pinky reaching up for parentheses again, and you automatically stay balanced. I've done that for many of the obvious quotes and brackets (If you do this, helps to imap something like Ctl-L to <Right> and Alt-L to <End>). It saves tons of typing on hard-to-reach keys.
I have personally witnessed a friend get 90 WPM, 100% accuracy, with a modified hunt and peck.
Yes. They do, in fact. We have several of them out on the floor at work.
It's been my experience that users actually hate this concept very much, and rather prefer a seperate mouse and keyboard.
Hence why they are on the floor.
Kensington makes a keyboard similar, but it's not DVORAK or Ergonomic.
Use a Kinesis-Ergo keyboard. The contoured ones are great for people with big hands.
gtypist
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Have you seen the touchstream by fingerworks? I got one of these right after I first saw it for that same reason. Expensive, but cool.
Have you ever tried Dvorak? This piece is a good counterargument to that Reason article. And the authors miss the point. I use Dvorak and true, I don't type any faster than with QWERTY. But that's not the point. No one can say the Dvorak doesn't have better ergonomics. People use it for comfort, not for speed.
And it actually makes a barrier for hi-speed typing - due to differential delays in neural system the text becomes nonerdabael, oops, nonreadable. There is about 6 msec delay when thoughts move between the hemispheres. Look for steno machines in order to avoid it.
Actually, while QWERTY wasn't designed to slow people down, it _is_ designed to avoid jams.
The thing is, the contraption consisted of (more or less) a semi-circle of thin levers, each with a little hammer with an embossed letter on it. All were aimed at the same position on the paper. You press a key, and purely mechanically the lever would swing the hammer at the paper. (Well, actually, at the ribbon.)
Also, because it was a purely mechanical contraption, the cheapest and most reliable way to build one was: keys that are close on the keyboard, would also activate levers which were close to each other.
Jams would happen when two close enough levers would be activated at the same time. Or close enough. The closer the levers were, the more likely you'd get a jam. (Again, purely coincidentally, this also meant "the closer two keys were".)
E.g., pressing "Q" and "P" at (almost) the same time would never jam. They swung from opposite directions, and it was pretty much guaranteed that one hammer would simply hit on top of the other. E.g., "A" and "S" at the same time (e.g., while typing "ASSASSIN") would pretty much always jam.
So basically, QWERTY:
1. was just supposed to prevent jams. (Which cost more in typing speed than a couple ms worth of more finger movement.)
2. was not designed to do anything to typing speed as such. Neither maximize it, nor minimize it. Whatever typing speed difference it produced, it was "side effect", rather than "goal". (And, again, a lot of it came from jam prevention rather than anything else.)
3. the _only_ typing speed consideration it received at all, was a rigged tech demo. Ever wondered why the "QWERTYUIOP" row? Because the rigged tech demo was basically "Look! I can type 'TYPEWRITER' quickly! It must be an optimal layout!" Hence all the letters in the word TYPEWRITER had to be on a single row.
(Hardly a scientific study, but PHBs bought it anyway.)
Furthermore, I'd point out that:
A. It did a piss-poor job even at spacing common letter combinations apart. E.g., even in their tech-demo "TYPEWRITER" they have letters which are near each other: "TY", "EW", "ER", and thus prone to jamming. "W" and "R" aren't that far apart to be jam-proof either.
B. if you've ever used one of those purely mechanical typewriters (no, some electronic thing doesn't count), you'll notice that typing was a different exercise on those. It involved keeping your hands above the keyboard and hitting the keys pretty hard. At the very least it's _not_ the same RSI prone position you'd use on a normal PC keyboard.
C. a PC keyboard doesn't jam.
D. Even if you do type the wrong letters on the PC, the cost of errors is next to nil. Correcting a mistake was a _very_ time consuming operation on a mechanical typewriter, since it involved physically erasing or covering printed stuff with white paint. By comparison, hitting backspace on the keyboard costs a small fraction of a second.
Etc.
So basically I'm saying that the considerations from which QWERTY was born, not only were imperfect to start with, they bear exactly _zero_ relevance to a computer keyboard. That QWERTY still works well, is more of a testimony to the fact that people can learn _any_ keyboard layout well enough, than some inherent advantage.
QWERTY, Dvorak, even alphabetical order, IMHO you probably just type faster on whatever you have more exercise. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The majority of the ones we have are by a company called CIRQUE. The model is a Wave keyboard (ergonomic, like the Microsoft Natural), and has a touchpad in the wristrest called a "Glidepoint." We have two models -- one has the Glidepoint in the centre of the wrist pad, and the other has it off to the right, under the directional arrows.
The two models are KXB340 and the GKB330. Actually, these both have it under the directional arrows, I can't seem to find one with it in the middle at the moment.
Allt he models have a single cable to the computer, which splits into a PS/2 for the keybaord, and a DB-9 as the Glidepoint is a serial mouse. You can either get a DB-9 to PS/2, or bite the bullet and join the 1980s.
The FCC-ID on both of those, if you care, is GYUR33SK.
We also have some Fellows keyboards that have a detachable rest, that features the Glidepoint as well. The wristrest/Glidepoint has a PS/2 connector running from the side. The keyboard model is KB-7903, with an FCC-ID of E8HKB-7903. The Touchpad model is KB99842, which appears to also be the part number for the keyboard.
Hope this helps.