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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."
if you can really get the advertized 50wpm, this would be a great for a latop. I hate these damn compact keyboards and touchpads. It would be alot eaiser then carrying around a real keyboard, and it has a mouse joystick to boot.
404
How can I type on something that is shaped like a tooth? Looks like the N-Gage engineers have worked their magic once again!
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
- a great design
- very clever shortcuts
- decent to great keying speed after training
- a real potential to help people with RSI
- a manual to teach the user to "key fast in less than xxx weeks without effort"
- an absolutely insane retail price
- zero chance to make any sort of dent in the entrenched PC-104-type keyboard market
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seems like it would be pretty nice if only I had three hands.
Now i'll be able to blast my way through level 7 in Word XP!
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
When I look at the pictures of that thing, I can't help but wonder how you're meant to grip it and type at the same time.
Similar to the problem I have with a mousewheel (I get a sore hand/finger from holding my finger above the wheel), I can imagine holding my fingers above the AlphaGrip's buttons while at the same time trying to grip the whole thing would be tendonitis city.
Anyone actually seen one of these in use and can confirm this for me?
gadgetophile.com
Also is anywone else reminded of an old product (maybe from 10 years ago?) called The Bat (at the bottom of that page)?
Rob
looked all over google- nothing listed anywhere...no images, no froogle, no weburls.. nada...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Some of us have large hands. Will someone please build a keyboard for us!
Or we will crush your puny heads! I'm crushing your head right now!
--
The makers of these keyboard replacements always act like learning an entirely new style of typing is so easy that we should be ashamed for even thinking for a moment that it'll be hard.
In reality, most of us have spent years and years learning to type on a standard keyboard. It's a specialized skill.
Moreover, as it DOES look like an X-Box controller, and as I know how ten hours of marathon gaming can kill my hands, I wonder how they can really be sure it's MORE comfortable. I mean, my keyboard may have little to reccomend it, but, worse comes to worse, I CAN type on it without having to grip anything (Mmmmm Carpal), which would be impossible with their keyboard.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That and don't forget us vi users. That looks like a nightmare to mode switching unless it has a button for escape and :
:)
Ironically enough, one reason I love the japanese keyboard layout, the colon is it's own key, no shift.
The shifted letters over the numbers really messes with you when you are used to your paren's to be at 9 and 0, not 0 and -. That threw me off for months.
This may be off topic but I ache for the day someone will make a crossplatform (console/computer) FPS so that I can finally prove to my disbeleiving pals (and myself) that a good computer FPS player will always dominate a great console FPS player (each using their respective platforms). Sure you could hook up a gamepad to a computer and just play PC halo but then the console guys always fall back to "it doesn't have the same feel as an Xbox."
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.
Iv'e been uisng a prtoypote of tihs for a wilhe now. I lkie it a lot. I can tpye sxity wrods a mintue wtih aobut one precnte acucrcay. Im' tihknnig aobut getitng rid of my QEWTRY kyebarod atlogehter.
This is why:
http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml
The claim that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down to avoid jamming typewriters is misleading.
What the QWERTY system tries to maximize is alternating keystrokes with the left hand and the right hand - most common words alternate between right and left hands when typing. This stopped most jamming because jams most frequently occured when there were repetitive keystrokes on one side/one row/one column of the typewriter's keys.
This actually increased typing speed - many people are capable of speeds in great excess of 50 wpm. Also, though a lot of people hunt and peck, almost everyone who uses a computer in their job (whether it be a programmer or not) does touchtype, from sheer necessity. The amount of time it would take a slow typist to learn how to type 50 wpm on this device could easily be spent increasing their current typing speed to well over that on a regular keyboard.
I already type over 50wpm on a QWERTY keyboard. Why would I want to switch? My desk is already equipped with an under-surface keyboard try to prevent RSI problems. For /. readers and techies, the best keyboard change would be returning the CONTROL key where it belongs: next to the A key. How many people use the CAPS LOCK key more than the CONTROL key? At least DEC got that right with the VT-100. I'm still using an old Keytronic keyboard because nobody manufactures keyboards with a DIP switch to swap the CAPS and CONTROL keys. It still drives people nuts when they use my keyboard.
signature pending slashdot approval
what? Typing of the Dead was the bomb!
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
And QWERTY was designed to slow people down!
No! QWERTY was designed to spread out the letters. Two letters close to each other typed at the same time could cause a jam, so they spread common letters out to reduce jamming.
QWERTY was designed to speed people up.
A tachometer for the computer would be cool... "You are now typing 70 words per minute!" How awesome would that be...
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
gtypist
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... a console controller for playing 'nethack'.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.