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Triangular Buttons Make On-Screen Keyboards More Usable
As someone targeted for perpetual failure by the designers of most keyboards, I'm happy to read
The Register's report that "A British inventor has submitted a patent application for a wacky touchscreen keyboard design which, he claims, could spell the end for accidental key presses."
Illt maek wruting furst psost easzier
Is to get rid of the damned, usless, pain in the ass keycaps key.
As for the keyboard itself, seems I've seen that in some si-fi movie.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...based on the IP they acquired from FingerWorks. You can do really sophisticated error-correction if you're getting not only a stream of characters, but the exact location of the press, contact area, dwell time, and possibly more. So, with a virtual multi-touch keyboard, you can say "Okay, that looked like an R, but the contact was actually most of the way over toward E, and the previous two letters were T-H, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an E."
I know it'll rankle the manual-transmission crowd, but I've been using a FingerWorks keyboard for years, and most of the time, it's absolutely spooky how well the autocorrect works. (Just don't try high-intensity vi work.)
And you could put little springs under the bumps, so that you could feel them move when you pressed them hard enough!
It forces users to have better aim BUT if you do have shitty aim then you don't get a 'false positive?...' It won't type anything. Think of it as graceful failure.
No one presses a single point, the press an area. By putting the spaces there you are more likely to get the correct key as opposed to fat finger the next key by imstake becasue it got a larger area pressed.
It's pretty clever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For a physical keyboard, this seems reasonable - if you eliminate edges where the keys touch, each other, then you're less likely to accidentally press two keys at once. But for a virtual keyboard like on the iPod, it doesn't matter if you "touch" two keys at once with your finger - the software can determine which one you were actually closer to, and only register that.
While there are certainly drawbacks to a touchscreen, such as lack of tactile feedback, this is one area where they have an advantage - a larger percentage of usuable surface area, as touches that would be a multiple button mash on physical keyboards can be unambiguously mapped to a single key in software.
Is the area designated as a button always the same size as the graphic of the button ? .. why couldn't you do the same thing showing square buttons but sensing triangular or smaller circular areas ? .. You could also use color in the button graphic to target the hotspot, fading to the buttton edges.
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With all that space between the keys, there's room for even more buttons!
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.