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)."

Comments

Adult Chat

[coren2000]

This has "Adult Chat" written all over it.

Well, along the sides I guess.

Re:Adult Chat

[Nullav]

IDK, my BFF Jill?

One finger keyboard

[dada21]

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.

Re:One finger keyboard

[MightyYar]

I, um, bite my nails.

Re:One finger keyboard

[GreggBz]

Freaky +1

Re:One finger keyboard

[monk.e.boy]

I worked with blind and partially sighted kids who use 5 finger keyboards. They use a 'chord' system, like a guitar or piano.

The chords kinda look like the letter you are spelling, so to create a J you would hold the keys that kinda make that shape, I forget the exact sequence, but it was pretty easy to use.

But, the 5 finger keyboard was used like a regular keyboard, it was placed on a desk. I dunno how this would work if you had to hold it at the same time. Much harder I'd imagine.

monk.e.boy

Re:One finger keyboard

[Ngarrang]

I grow my right hand thumbnail long, file it down so I have a bit of an edge leaning left

Dude. Seek help. No! This is brilliant! It is adaptation in action. The individual experienced the problem, analyzed solutions and adapted his body to use his computer more efficiently. I think the poster should create "The Thumb Typer" for people to wear that don't want to grow their finger nail.

Re:One finger keyboard

[twoboxen]

"I grow my right hand thumbnail long, file it down so I have a bit of an edge leaning left"... Gross. Move it to your pinky nail, and I'm sure the number of your "friends" with similar abnormalities will grow faster than you expect. I'll leave it to you to figure out why ;)

Re:One finger keyboard

[Cedric Tsui]

People who play the guitar do the same sort of thing.
You'll notice they have long nails on the right hand for strumming and picking, and shortened nails on the left so they don't get in the way.

Prototype?

[niceone]

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!

Transferable skills

[pzs]

As a side benefit, you become a proficient player of the penny whistle.

Peter

Twiddler.

[AltGrendel]

I prefer the Twiddler. After some practice, it's actually pretty easy to use.

IM-speak compression

[j00r0m4nc3r]

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.

Re:IM-speak compression

[grommit]

Who says morse coders don't use text compression of their own?

Re:IM-speak compression

[JrOldPhart]

Don't bet on that.

Some one used to even a straight key can tap out a 'u' in Morse much quicker than two clicks of, where was that, Oh yea, the '8' button. Then there are electronic keyers, only two touches.

Re:IM-speak compression

[everphilski]

we do :)

Q codes, internationally recognized 3 letter codes beginning with the letter Q. Used in the Ham community, but there are Q codes for aeronautical, nautical, etc. use as well. It is possible to hold a meaningful conversation with someone, regardless of what language you speak.

Re:IM-speak compression

[Hal_Porter]

I always liked the idea of YL=young lady and XYL=wife

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=xyl

1968: Engelbart shows chord keyboard

[chriss]

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.

Re:1968: Engelbart shows chord keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read this.* His approach to NLS and chorded keyboards was inspiring but it catered more to the "make it steep as possible" school of UI.

*"This is not a simple distinction to fathom, and that may be one reason Engelbart's project, unlike his mouse, never caught fire. Another reason, perhaps was his determination to stick to a pure version of his "augmentation" plan. Unlike later computer innovators who elevated the term "usability" to a mantra Engelbart didn't place a lot of faith in making tools simple to learn. The computer was to be a sort of prosthesis for human reason, and Engelbart wanted it to be powerful and versatile; he didn't want to cripple it just to ease the user's first few days or weeks in the harness. The typical office worker might be comfortable with the familiar typewriter keyboard, but Engelbart believed that the "chord keyset" he had built, which looked like five piano keys and allowed a skilled user to input text with one hand, gave users so much more power that it was worth the effort required to adapt to it.

His vision was of "coevolution" between man and machine. The machine would change its human user, improving his ability to work, even as the human user was constantly improving the machine. And, indeed, as the band of researchers clustered around his Stanford lab wove the NLS into their lives, something like that could be observed. According to Engelbart biographer Thierry Bardini, "Some astonished visitors reported that [Engelbart's team had developed] strange codes or habits, such as being able to communicate in a 'weird' sign language. Some staff members occasionally communicated across the distance of the room by showing the fingers position of a specific chord entry on the keyset."

You can glean a little of that sense of weirdness today in the picture of Engelbart we encounter in the 1968 video: With a headset over his ear, one hand moving the mouse, and the other tickling the chord keyset, he looks like an earth-bound astronaut leading a tour of inner space, confident that he is showing us a better future. From the apogee of the 1968 demo, though, his project fell into disarray. He wanted to keep improving the existing NLS, whereas many of his young engineers wanted to throw it away and start afresh with the newer, more powerful hardware that each...[OCR errors mine]"

Not news.

[tygerstripes]

This is just a blog, ffs. The idea of chorded typing - or even just improving the efficiency of text-entry - has been bandied around for so long that it makes this particular blogger sound like a 13-yr-old nerd who's just had his first Big Idea.

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.

I have done absolutely no searches to find out if any of the ideas described in this article have been patented or not.

Yeah, no kidding.

Re:AKA chording keyboard

[phil reed]

I remember reading about chording keyboards as far back as early Byte magazines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The idea is not new. There's a reason they haven't caught on, and it's the same reason that Dvorak keyboards haven't -- it's very hard to learn unless you're relatively young.

It would also help if there was a standard for chorded data entry.

Re:Prototype - Microwriter

[DaveCar]

Old news. I remember reading about this back in the early 80s when I had my ZX Spectrum.

As endorsed by Douglas Adams.

Here's an old example

[MythMoth]

The Sharp Agenda had its "microwriter" chording keyboard.

http://www.geoff.org.uk/museum/microwriter.htm

Circa 1989, so patent worries should be minimal!

Will there be a discount on this?

[erroneus]

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. :)

Middle finger alone is enough ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

... for almost all communications on the road. Why bother with five finger salutes?

BAT keyboard

[BlueF]

We've been using these for years:

http://www.infogrip.com/product_view.asp?RecordNum ber=12

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.

Morse-to-text keyboard driver?

[BobMcD]

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...

Why the Qwerty exists

[CaptainPatent]

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.

Chords are used all the time for subtitling

[pfft]

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.

Re:Chords are used all the time for subtitling

[LWATCDR]

For closed captioning it is called a stenomachine.

Did you read the article?

[godfra]

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.

Guitar Hero

[boris111]

5 buttons huh. Where's the strummer and the whammy bar?

Add that and we'll talk.

Pardon me, but do you have 6 fingers?

[fortiguy]

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...

Re:emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean: Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift

Re:If you want to press four keys...

[John_3000]

You are quite right. It's hard to type with fingers that must grip the keyboard at the same time. Stiff keys make it worse but the difficulty doesn't vanish even as the key force goes to zero. It's much better to use braces or straps of some sort to free the typing fingers from grip duty. That's why guitars, saxophones, etc. have neck straps, thumb hooks, etc.

And while I'm up here on my soapbox: it's just NOT that hard to learn to chord. Some people declare confidently that the learning curve is the barrier to widespread adoption of chording but it's not. Learning to chord, at least on my prototypes, was way easier than learning to touch type on a qwerty --- at which latter I never succeeded. You don't need such complex schemes as the blogger writes about.

The real barrier, IMHO, has been the lack of motivation. Why learn ANY efficient new way to type unless you are sufficiently rewarded? The reward is (or will be) mobility. Not just mobility for exchanging cryptic little text messages but mobility for the full range of desktop functionality.

Five finger Keyboards

[iminplaya]

Do I get a discount?

Re:AKA chording keyboard

[CastrTroy]

The reason that Dvorak hasn't caught on is because out of all the computer users, there's only X% who are even interested in typing speed. Then out of them, there's only Y% who have heard of Dvorak. Then out of them, there's only Z% who feel it's worth the effort to learn another layout just to add 10% to their typing speed. So, X% * Y% * Z% is a very small number. Add to that the fact that you can' just forsake QWERTY because you'll probably use other people's computers, and carrying around an extra keyboard or changing their keyboard layout isn't really the most convenient thing to do. So, with all that, it's no wonder that most people don't want to switch. Qwerty is fast enough for most people who are even interested in speed, and the trouble of switching to Dvorak an maintaining 2 key layouts in your brain is just too much trouble.

Re:I'm left handed

[AvitarX]

Funny, I am right handed and I would like 4 buttons on the left side for 54 possible combinations. I could hold the phone towards me with my hand behind it.

65 combos will get enough to send emails and text, and would be very easy to manage, if the thumb gets thrown into it, it is harder to squeeze the finger buttons.

Evidence that learning/benefit ratio is too low

[dpbsmith]

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.

sevent fingered hands

[tyme]

How, I wonder, does he intend to hold this mobile device if all five fingers are involved in pressing the buttons? He also doesn't seems to think that you can combine a coding pattern space with the inactive state of the buttons (when none are being pressed). I'd say he hasn't put any thought at all into this mechanism (just as he hasn't done any research for prior work: e.g. chording keyboards). He clearly hasn't build even a non-working mechanical prototype to see if any of this is usable (take a pack of cards, draw some buttons on the box and try using the resulting chording device. For extra credit, do it with just the deck of cards without the box).

Here are some of the the problems:

1. You need to be able to hold the device, which robs the thumb and at least one finger from being able to operate the keys.
   
2. You can't encode a symbol on the keys when none are active, so that takes away one code point.
   
3. You need to allow for delay between synchronized keypresses (not all fingers will depress the keys simultaneously) so this will limit your typing speed.
   
4. You need to learn the damn chords, which most people are pretty bad at (heck, they're usually pretty bad at learning to type non-chorded as well).
   

Re:the famous telegrapher's text

[Ogive17]

wow that turned out horrible :(

It's suppose to be "pwned nub".. guess I pwned myself. I'm leaving now...