New Standard Keyboard

An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."

Comments

What is this, PR-Newswire-Blog?

[SuperBanana]

Why does the "Tech-Blog" have no author and read exactly like a corporate press release, trying to cram down my throat why I NEED this keyboard?

It's probably some of the most blatant advertising copy I've read in quite a while. At least have some subtlety to get your product "reviewed" by one of the tech magazines or something...

No thanks

[Skidge]

From the article: After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up.

Alphabetizing the keys and giving it a garish Fisher-Price color scheme does not make a keyboard grown up. One of the benefits of a QWERTY keyboard is that a good deal of typing is done with keystrokes alternating between the hands, speeding things up quite a bit. Alphabetical keys may make it easier for "hunt and peck typists as well as senior citizens who have never had a computer because they are challenged by the difficult basic keyboard," but it is far from becoming a standard, since the layout is very inefficient for a touch typist.

This article really reads like a marketing press release.

Re:No thanks

[jdreed1024]

This article really reads like a marketing press release.

And a stupid one, at that. Particularly the bit about senior citizens. I've worked with quite a few senior citizens - getting them to "learn computers" (ie: word processing). The hardest part is familiarizing them with the mouse (particularly double-clicking, right-clicking, and dragging), and with concepts such as cutting and pasting. The keyboard was the easiest part, since it was the most familiar to them -- aside from some extra keys, it was basically a typewriter.

Keyboard layout not slowing me down.

[shitdrummer]

I find it's not the keyboard layout that slows me down, but rather the speed of my fingers. I can type pretty fast, but until someone comes up with a keyboard layout that includes multiple letter keys (e.g. qu, the, to etc) then I can't see how I would be able to type any faster.

Even number entry is very quick and easy. I just can't see how a new keyboard layout would change typing speed dramatically.

Shitdrummer.

Dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never used a 10-key calculator...

The Dvorak Layout

[Sirex]

Regarding the content of the post, dvorak is far from a standard. I say this primarily from my own experience of having been denied a data entry job because I used the dvorak layout and they didn't want to accommodate me. Even in the modern day, qwerty is the accepted standard in America. I suspect that being able to use any other keymap will be difficult for a while since: 1. The majority of computers that one would use while not at home are probably windows. 2. If I recall correctly, all windows platforms, with exception of XP, require the install disc to be present to change to a keymap that the system hasn't loaded. 3. Even in XP, if you are at a terminal that is not yours, the computer that you are using may very well have restricted access to keyboard settings. About dvorak itself, I've found it to be more fluid than qwerty (certainly less gangly). I never bothered taking typing tests with it but I feel confident that my speed was improved. Unfortunately, my denial of a job and other factors have made me reluctantly switch back to qwerty.

This submission is why...

[gkuz]

we should be able to mod articles as well as comments. Start with a half-true myth about QWERTY, then lead right into a naked press release. Puh-leez. What a piece of crap, just like the stupid keyboard that "anonymous" (no wonder) is shilling for.

Re:Horrible, just horrible

[quacking duck]

But for some unfathomable reason the AT keyboard standard has transposed the top and bottom rows...

Unfathomable? Take one look at a calculator and it instantly becomes obvious. I can't say for certain since it predates my time, but I'll bet tape calculators used by accountants existed for some time before the numeric keypad was standard on keyboards.

Once that happened, it was far more logical to model the keypad after the calculator pad, since you're more likely to be punching in numbers in a spreadsheet, than punching in phone numbers into the computer.

Re: The QWERTY Rumor

[pHatidic]

Yes the submitter definetly fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. Not only is what what he said about QWERTY wrong, but he gives no reason for why to use the new keyboard over Dvorak. I have been using Dvorak for years now and would never go back, let alone try some shitty patented keyboard designed for hunt-n-peck folks.

wrong

[bani]

studies show neither dvorak nor qwerty have an advantage. in fact they show almost any random arrangement of keys appears to work equally well.

Re:wrong

[EnderWigginsXenocide]

I beg to differ, ever try using shortcuts on anything other than a QWERTY? A BIG problem with switching to Dvorak is most common keyboard shortcuts aren't convenient. Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Cmd-C Cmd-V for those folks using MACs). Most shortcuts are not remapable and were coded with QWERTY in mind. They would not make sense on a keyboard layout that is radically different from QWERTY.

Re:wrong

[BobPaul]

yes, that's easy to reach. Undo? Why that's simply Ctrl-Shift-minus. Oddly however, once you get used to using the modifier keys these shortcuts seem natural rather than hard to reach. Any keyboard layout is good if you get used to it.

That's great. So EMacs has different shortcuts than other programs, and that's fine. I can deal with that, cause the association is gone. But I am a touch typist. When I see a webbrowser, or an e-mail client or etc on the screen and want to copy something, I don't think "Ctrl+C" I think pinky here and index there.

If I were able to switch to dvorak and the keyboard driver in the OS was able to also remap shortcuts for me somehow so I could use Ctrl+J instead of Ctrl+C I would switch instantly (since those keys are in the same physical location and copy would feel the same in my head). I've tried switching numerous times and it's always been nice (but slow, cause I'm always just starting out.. again) but as the grandparent states, the shortcut issue can really hold on back.

Sure, I could learn the new shortcut keys--or rather, the new possitions of the old shortcut keys--but this is many many years of habbit and is strangely more difficult than learning an entirely new typing layout.

Re:wrong

[cL0h]

The same methodology would not but if you wanted to achieve top speeds on a formula one track it would. All tennis players serve overhand because it's the best way to play tennis but it's not the best way to serve in raquetball.

Re:wrong

[jonadab]

The problem with Dvorak is that it makes the same mistakes as QWERTY.

Fundamentally, how you arrange the letters -- assuming you use some logical
arrangement that makes a bit of sense -- is not the only thing that matters.
QWERTY (in order to keep typewriters from jamming) arranges them so that it's
statistically less likely for adjascent letters to occur on the same finger
and more likely for them to occur on opposite hands. This does speed up
typing somewhat over, say, an alphabetical layout (once you are comfortably
familiar with the layout you are using, of course). Dvorak instead goes out
of its way to put the letters that are most frequently used in English on
the keys that are easiest to hit. This too speeds up typing somewhat over
an alphabetical layout.

But they both have serious flaws, and it's not in how they lay out the letters.
It's in how they handle the other keys, which they do virtually the same way.
The numbers across the top are okay, and the spacebar is okay -- well, the
spacebar would be okay if it didn't waste one whole thumb. The thumb is
unique among the hand's fingers in that it can easily operate independently
from the other fingers. This makes it ideal for the spacebar, because space
is statistically more likely than any other character to be typed right
before or right after any other character. However, the thumb is *also*
ideal for a bucky key, the most important being shift, for a similar reason:
you can hold a key down with the thumb, and all your other fingers can still
hit any key they could hit before. Try that with the shift key where it is
now: it doesn't work, which is the main reason we have two shift keys,
which is wasteful and makes the layout larger than it needs to be. A second
thumb bar for shift would be much more efficient, in terms of typing speed,
and as an added bonus it reduces by one the number of keys needed. *Plus*,
it substantially reduces the frequency with which you hyperextend your pinky.
If your pinkies hurt after a long bout of typing, this is the answer.

There are other mistakes both layouts make. Ctrl is similarly poorly
positioned and should definitely be put where it's easier to hit. On the
other hand, the window key is in a bad place. It's effect is much more
drastic than ctrl, in that it takes keyboard focus completely away from the
application or window that had it and thoroughly disrupts whatever was being
done, so it should be out of the way more. Where the traditional layouts
have put it, it gets hit mostly by mistake and becomes an annoyance -- quite
needlessly, because there are plenty of out of the way places where it could
be put such that it would not be hit by mistake while the user is typing.
Right next to Print Screen, for example, would be a great place for it.

I could go on and on, but basically it comes down to this: QWERTY and Dvorak
both took great care when arranging the letters, and it shows: they're both
pretty decent arrangements for that (for different reasons). But they appear
to have put no thought whatsoever into the arrangment of the other keys
(except the spacebar), and that shows too: the arrangement of the other
keys *sucks* on these layouts. That is where the next round of improvements
needs to be made.

I'd start by putting shift and ctrl below the spacebar, where they can be
hit or held with the left and right thumb, respectively, with no impact on
where the other fingers can be. (This makes *one* combination hard --
Shift-Ctrl-Space -- but that's a rather unusual combination, and it makes
every other shift and ctrl combination much faster and easier. Care would
have to be taken so that normal hitting of the spacebar with either thumb
would not hit these keys by mistake, but that's easily possible if a gap
the size of a single key is left between them and the spacebar.) Then I'd
proceed by putting as much thought into the placement of every other key
as was put into the placement of the letters.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[GreyWolf3000]

Much of the arguments about dvorak versus qwerty have to do with typing speed--as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.

Crap!

[erikharrison]

I can't get to the article, but an alphabetic keyboard is just plain dumb.

1) The QWERTY keyboard is established tech
2) I see no empirical evidence that alphabetic is easier to learn or use
3) Alphabetic keyboards overwork one area of the keyboard
4) It would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange keys to allow alternating of hands, which speeds typing.

Can anyone list any real reason that this is better? Other than the reduced number of keys, of course.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[PaulBu]

There are many studies comparing wpm speeds of people proficient in both Qwerty and Dvorak that show the clear advantage of the latter.

Sorry, did not have time to read through all three linked articles, but did read the Reason one (due to the fact that I do trust the sourse) and one of its main punches was the UN-SCIENTIFIC ways those studies were conducted. And, unfortunately, in your comment you do show the same attitude of referencing "numerous studies" without considering what could go wrong with them.

Think about it in programmer's terms: ok, there is
this language called, say, "BigBigSea" which noone spends proper time to learn, but most everyone knows a bit and can handle (some can get really good at it). And then there is this new language called "Tea", and you did learn it, one of the early adopters... Would not you swear that since you've learned it your productivity increased 10-fold? Even when people would try to put a bit of a study together, you would sub-consciously give your old skill a disadvantage to provide advantage to your new skill, which can move you up in the food chain?

Paul B.

Patented,huh?

[Trogre]

This monstrosity had better not become a standard, what with the patent and all.

Ergonomic Reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest thing I noticed when I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak was that it was more comfortable, I was moving my fingers less and therefore my fingers weren't getting nearly as tired. This is also the testimony of everyone that I know that uses Dvorak.

With regards to speed, I think it made no difference. My QWERTY speed was 60 wpm. My Dvorak speed eventually reached 70wpm, but I did a lot of typing exercises when I switched to Dvorak, if I had done the same practive in QWERTY I'm sure I would have lifted my typing speed comparably.

Another thing that I noticed is that my accuracy improved slightly, I was getting over 97% accuracy the first time in gtypist, it often took me a few times in QWERTY previously.

Finally, it gave me an opportunity to unlearn all the bad habits I'd developed when using QWERTY, because I was concentrating on typing so much, I could also concentrate on using the correct shift keys (left when the letter is in the right hand and vice versa), and other things like using the correct fingers, I used to use the wrong fingers for . and , and all the symbols and numbers.

What about people who don't speak English?

[boky]

> So let's use a keyboard designed for people, not machines, shall we?

Funny, haven't seen a Dvorak keyboard yet designed for non-English speaking people (read: no international characters!)

Re:Difficulty of change

[This Is Ridiculous]

I've tried using speech-recognition programs. They worked adequately after I went through training, and performed well on my computer, but I found that I could type a lot faster than I could speak.

Besides, a lot of what I type is Perl code. Could you imagine speaking that? "dollar-sign e-mail space equals tilde space S slash carrot left-square-bracket backslash W dot plus minus right-square-bracket plus at-sign left-square-bracket backslash W dot minus right-square-bracket dollar-sign slash space or space die space double-quote capital invalid space e dash mail space address double-quote semicolon..."

anything based on "I heard stories" is suspicious

[Moraelin]

Sorry, I'll call bull on any "proof" based on

(A) scare stories ("but it'll kill your wrists!"), and

(B) unverifiable "halelujah! The new Lord/Layout/Whatever healed me!" bullshit

I _am_ willing to accept that a layout causes more strain than the other, once I see an actual scientific study. But disparate "I heard stories about someone who knew someone who got divinely healed once they believed in the Holy Dvorak" are at best a crap cult, nothing more.

The fact remains that:

1. Last I've heard, RSI had _nothing_ to do with the distance travelled by your fingers, but with the position of your wrists on the table. Which is the same for any keyboard layout.

Here's a bit of a fun fact: the actual mechanical typewriter typists are the _least_ likely to get RSI problems in their wrists, even at actually higher finger movement. Because their wrists aren't touching the table.

So basically saying that DVORAK heals RSI is like saying that a new hat healed your knee. More of a question of belief than any scientific cause-effect link. It's also why you don't hear that someone's pain got worse: because it really has nothing to do with keyboard layout.

2. People believe in all sorts of miraculous healing all the time, because they want to. They want to see results, they want to be right, they want to feel good about having done/chosen the right thing.

So the selective confirmation kicks in. The brains automatically discards any data which would hurt your beliefs, and retains the one which seems to fit your dogma.

It doesn't even have anything to do with keyboards as such. Anything you really want to believe in will have the same effect. _Anything_ can be "proved" via selective confirmation.

For example a racist person who really wants to believe that RaceX is inferior, will remember all the times they've seen someone of that race do something stupid, or all the cases they've seen one accused of a crime on the news, but systematically not register anything good about that race. Or someone who wants to believe, say, that praying to the Lord makes their car go faster, will remember every single time where they got a good speed (down hill and with wind from the back), but conveniently forget every single time the prayer didn't help.

3. There's this fun medical fact that most diseases and injuries heal by themselves, given enough time. Even modern medicine most of the time doesn't outright kill the bacteria or viruses inside you (no medicine kills viruses), but just weakens them a bit so your own immune system has an edge.

That's what makes "faith healing" or "alternative healing" seem to work. At least 80% of their patients would have healed anyway. So, hey, you just need to pray to the Great Holy Banana too and you too have that probability to be healed! And the rest, hey, they probably didn't have enough faith in the Great Holy Banana.

And humans find ways to deal with harm. E.g., someone may eventually learn to position their arms so they hurt their wrists less. Or they might get a different desk and chair, so the wrist position is different. Etc.

There are a _lot_ of factors which can make or break that kind of an injury. Or any other kind of a injury. So I'd wait for a study that scientifically rules those out, before ascribing the miracle to the all-powerful cult of Dvorak.

Well, that's nice...

[skrolle2]

...and the 26 color-coded keys for the letters of the English alphabet are all nice and green and such, but how would you internationalize the product? The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters, where would you fit those three extra keys? I know there are other alphabets that have something inbetween or more. How would you make those?

I, for one, do not welcome our new narrowminded keyboard overlords.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[bergwitz]

...which they were saying "The market always chooses the best option."

Right on track you are. That's the real issue: does markets always choose the best tech? Or does tech-development follow paths which are chosen more or less accidentaly. There are stronger cases for this than the qwerty-story with a simple example's beeing the best.

Take a hypothetical story of a 10 year-old trying to deceide whether he should buy a X-BOX or a PS2. They're at approx the same price in the shop he visits and for some reason he chooses XBOX (he likes the green X). Then his friend is also to buy a game console. If the friend buys an XBOX he could borrow games from the first buyer whereas with a PS2 he has to buy all his games himself. What kind of console will these guys' classmates probably buy? The whole class is quite soon in a lock-in on XBOX. Does this make XBOX better than PS2?

Transfer this scenario into companies deceiding which console they should produce games for and you have a theory of economic behaviour. There are of course many more factors at work, but still there is some truth in this theory.

Slashdotter's may also notice that Liebowitz and Margolis has some interesting claims:"The pair also take aim at the VHS-Beta story. VHS won that battle, they say, because it could tape for twice as long, something consumers clearly wanted. Similarly, they note that DOS computers caught on because they were markedly less expensive than Apple's."(from the WSJ link above)
The availability of more videos (and porn) on the VHS format didn't affect VHS's market victory? Microsoft's market tactics had no effect on the lock-in on DOS and later Windows?

They also argue: "What's more, while today's personal computers can easily be reprogrammed to the Dvorak layout, few people do."

I wonder why? You may also use Firefox instead of IE, use a mail program which doesn't spread viruses as default behaviour, etc.

So which serious objective tests between the two keyboards have there been?
Not objective, but at least to be taken seriously.
Anti-Dvorak Crusaders
Keytime

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[nanoakron]

Just the proof that Letterman is a turd.

-Nano.