Slashdot Mirror
New Keyboard Has Just 53 Keys
Enigma5O writes to tell us The Tech Zone is reporting on a new style of keyboard with just 53 keys. Departing from the normal QWERTY keyboard setup the 'New Standard Keyboard' designed by John Parkinson measures just 12.5 inches wide x 5 inches deep x 1 inch thick and is arranged in alphabetical order. The keyboard has been designed with ergonomics in mind keeping all keys within easy reach of the home position. The only question is, will everyone be willing to relearn how to type?
They seem to have forgotten the space key?
Any keyboard without a big bar that either thumb can use to space will never take off in my book. But maybe the PDA market will like it
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Um, is the "ergonomic rule" about putting commonly used keys under strong fingers only one of these "everybody knows it's true" and not a real truth? 'Cause this sucker has 4 vowels under pinkies (a, e, i under the left pinky at that). Wouldn't that be bad ergonomic design, if the finger-strength rule is real?
80-20 rule: not all of those 146 different values you could send are used that often. A good keyboard design would be based on an analysis of what letters and keys are pressed most often (assuming we want to keep the principle of one key per letter, one key for Enter and so on) and have a kind of Huffman coding so that the most commonly used characters are quickest to type.
;-).
Programmers type characters like { } $ ( ) = + more often than the general population. It would be an awesome geek-toy to have a keyboard which promoted these characters to their own keys and relegated those useless squiggles like vowels to Shift-Ctrl combinations
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Another way to provide a medium would be to say that each letter is composed of exactly two keys pressed at the same time. That is, if you press just one key, nothing happens. This relieves you from having to press all keys at exactly the same time, and gives you n(n-1)/2 values for n keys. So for your 146 values, you'd need 18 keys (17 keys would only provide 136 values, 18 keys provide 153 values). With a keyboard of 3 rows of 6 keys each, I could even imagine that to be useable for one-handed typing. Or maybe a 4x4 pad with two larger keys below. Of course the disadvantage of that approach is that there's no easy way to label the keys, so if you don't remember a certain key combination, you cannot just look at the keyboard to find it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Someone calls a 53-key ABCD keyboard a "new standard keyboard" and suddenly people start to think that it will replace keyboards? ABCD keyboards have been around for a while and aren't any good for typing. As far as layout goes ABCD is as bad as QWERTY in terms of random placement of the keys. The theory that it will "help kids learns" is bull. It might help grandma learn, but a normal kid will pickup any keyboard layout. This might as well be the DVORAK layout then, it's truly much better in terms of key placement.
Yea, I think we're stuck with the keyboards we have, rather than the keyboards everyone thinks we should want. And just from my own perspective, 53 keys isn't anywhere near enough...I get the shakes if I don't have a number pad at least.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ok the article appears to be slashdotted. Perhaps later I can get a look at this keyboard.
I would welcome a trend to smaller keyboards with fewer keys. The growth of specialized keys on keyboards has really gotten out of hand in my opinion. What reason is there for 100+ keys on the keyboard?
How about a new survey question of "How many keys does your keyboard have that you have NEVER used?"
Think Deeply.
Reforming keyboard design is like trying to reform orthography: noble, logical, and in the words of one of my professors, "Quixotic." QWERTY is at least as stupid and weird in its configuration as words like "through," which has almost twice the letters that it needs, vowels that can have any number of actual sounds (A: ash, calm, able). But as long as we keep writing like this, even though I, a Californian, only understand people in Yorkshire half the time (and that's if they want me to), can read the menus and signs, and I can read texts from 500 years ago even though the language has changed quite a bit. Likewise, I can type on any keyboard without feeling like a boob because it's ABC or Dvorak. Like with Windows and X86, it's all about backwards compatibility and portability.