A One-Handed Keyboard For $25

Bruce Perens writes "Slashdot has often featured attempts at improvement upon the QWERTY keyboard. Here's a one-handed USB keyboard that you can buy for $25 online, or a bit more at the CompUSA. There's one catch: someone will have to design a keying pattern and hack up software for it. It's a task just crying out for an Open Source project." Bruce has also included on the linked page code with which to read the output from the device.

Comments

Then you can't buy a one-handed keyboard for $25..

[Brento]

Saying that you can buy a one-handed keyboard for $25, but you have to roll your own software, means you're not buying a one-handed keyboard for $25. That's like saying you can buy your own crystal meth for $25 - sure, the ingredients are only $25, but you have to know the recipe and risk life and limb cooking the stuff.

Not that I'd know about those things. (And that applies to both coding my own keyboard drivers as well as cooking meth.)

DVORAK keyboard

[w.p.richardson]

Some would argue that a Dvorak keyboard is an improvement over QWERTY. Why hasn't it taken over? Simple - there is no real cry for an improvement.

This idea is akin to changing the steering wheel in a car to a joystick; possible, but why change something that is a functional standard?

Re:DVORAK keyboard

[the pickle]

Let me preface this with "I think a joystick is a horrible way to drive a car" and "Change for the sake of change is almost always bad." So in principle, I agree with the spirit of your comment.

A stick is ideal for a plane as you are banking the plane towards the left and to the right, in a car you are rotating the wheel and so a rotating control method works best.

Uh, what? This reasoning sounds awfully circular (honestly, no pun intended) to me. There are plenty of planes that use a wheel instead of a stick. The main reason for using a stick with an aircraft is that a wheel doesn't easily (or as conveniently, anyway) lend itself to motion in a third axis. Using a stick removes a lot of that awkwardness.

Also, to use a stick you would need control systems, fully powered hydraulic steering...

There are plenty of planes that don't have hydraulic systems associated with a control stick, and there are a lot more that have systems no more complicated than what's in a car. There's no reason a hydraulic-assist stick, much like today's power steering, couldn't be developed for use in a car.

I can almost guarantee you that helicopter (and maybe fighter) pilots would be the only people who would be able to drive such a system with any sort of precision, though. Your point about having to turn a steering wheel a very large distance to effect a fairly small change is a good one. Without some sort of serious speed sensitivity, the smaller range of control input inherent in a stick would make for VERY lively steering (read: easily overcontrolled).

Of course, if cars had *always* had a joystick-type steering mechanism (some early ones did, in fact), we'd be sitting here having this discussion from the opposite perspective. There's really nothing inherent in a steering wheel that makes it the perfect solution to steering a car. It's more a matter of "what's always been done."

To get this back on topic, there's really nothing inherently superior about a QWERTY keyboard, and many arguments can be made that there are inherently inferior aspects of it. The problem is, QWERTY layouts have been in use for so long that they're the de facto standard, no matter what other great technology comes along. QWERTY keyboards will rule the world until either voice recognition or direct brain control is perfected.

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