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Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else
benz001 writes "In the run-up to everyone's favourite tablet, Phil Gyford goes back through his gadget collection and compares text entry speeds to see which one comes out on top. It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps, but the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second, just edging out the Treo — and all the keyboard solutions regardless of how small and fiddly beat real pen and paper. This probably matches most people's experience (when was the last time you had to handwrite more than a bullet point in a meeting?) and gels pretty well with Macworld's predictions but I'm still hoping for sub-vocal voice recognition. (Jump straight to the final results here)."
The chart looks to me as if Mr. Gyford is typing relatively slow on a full-sized keyboard, compared to the iPhone. Last I remembered, I could not use more than two fingers at once on that tiny screen. I'd be interested in how long it takes the average slashdotter to type his example text.
... would have compared more than those few mainstream input methods. Particularly interesting: Dvorak keyboards and Tikinotes, Swype and MessageEase for the iPhone.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I went to jury duty the other day, and the steno reporter... wasn't really using a steno machine. She was annotating the taping by speaking the non-verbal events into a little mouth-shield thingie.
So verbal dictation is possible- you'll just like more of a geek.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps
I of course have to mention the Dvorak layout. I encourage you to try it. Your hands might thank you (and fall in love), and if not you can always go back rather easily. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
Also, for some experimental geekery, trying to find out whether it's all the shit it's made out to be, see http://klausler.com/evolved.html
That's it. Thank you for listening. My hands thank me for listening way back when, too ;)
I used to be lightning fast with the original graffiti, very close to my speed on the iPhone. But Palm went and changed it (I know legal reasons etc) and it got slow and sucky. The best part of graffiti was that you could take notes without looking at the device. I would think the original graffiti would be much faster than it is on that table, or they got a newbie to do the graffiti writing.
The iPhone keyboard works amazingly well. I saw the preview demo of the phone in 2007and I thought that soft keyboard was full of fail (30+ touch points in the size of two postage stamps-c'mon), but there's enough heuristics behind it that it actually works really well. I'm way faster on the iPhone keyboard than I am on a crackberry keyboard.
Sheldon
Let me Google that for you - http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22comes+up+trumps%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Granted 38,500 is not an overwhelming number of results, but the phrase is certainly not unknown. Surprise, your idiom isn't somebody else's!
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Main Entry: 2trump
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of 1triumph
Date: 1529
1 a : a card of a suit any of whose cards will win over a card that is not of this suit --called also trump card b : the suit whose cards are trumps for a particular hand --often used in plural
2 : a decisive overriding factor or final resource --called also trump card
3 : a dependable and exemplary person
Imagine trying to use photoshop on a touch screen. All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that?
That's the very thing I really HATE about capacitive touch-screens. All this blah blah blah about how much precision it has. What the heck do I mind its precision when I don't know where I've put my finger, since I cannot see what's behind it? Not to speak of the problems using a screen of these when you're wearing gloves and such.
This things are really stupid. I can get far more accuracy in my old Palm TX since I can use a stylus as thin as I want, my fingernail or just the reverse side of the BIC pen I'm using to write down on paper.
A comment on one of the input methods the MacWorld article touched on: an on-screen virtual keyboard. Unless you have some tactile response, an on-screen virtual keyboard almost requires you to look at it to see what you are typing. However - and this is a point that the article author may not have fully grasped - being that it is a tablet and not a laptop, you're already going to be looking at the keyboard, because you are looking at the screen, because that's the usually the place you're looking at on a tablet computer.
This doesn't meant that I relish the notion of doing much writing on any tablet computer with a virtual keyboard. But, it isn't as bad as, say, a laptop with a touchscreen top and bottom.
This depends on the strings: you can handwrite many mathematical expressions more quickly than you can type them in most setups. This is especially true for things with a lot of super/sub scripts. It's *especially* true for symbols not in the character sets available to you.
Also, sometimes the same *content* can be recorded more quickly as handwritten math/logic than as typed strings.
Sometimes handwriting is faster, sometimes typing is faster.
Therefore, the fastest setup is one where you can switch between handwriting and typing seamlessly, such as on a tablet PC on some sort of stand situated like an easel with an external keyboard at elbow height, or at a desktop with a keyboard and graphics tabletin which case, for the monitor position, you don't have to compromise between what's good for your hands/arms and what's good for your eyes/neck/back.
A while ago, I saw a keyboard that was more projector/sensor than physical keyboard. The projector would idsplay a keyboard on a flat(hopefully) surface, and then you would type by pressing the "keys" (key displayed on flat surface). So, instead of having to carry around a full keyboard, you would just need the projector/sensor. I would probably go with this as the "I need something to be able to type my novel on" type of device, but also have the touch screen to use for less demanding typing jobs, such as an occasional URL. I know, it's probably patented by someone else, which would be an obstactle for Apple to work out, but the aim here is to have something that can be effective, while not needing a .
If you want to use Photoshop, buy yourself a stylus.
On the other hand, perhaps you've seen artists doing charcoal sketches? You know, where they use that giant stick of charcoal (that obscures where they're working), and then they smudge it with, gasp, their fingers?
The finger isn't great for everything, but it certainly works fine for a lot of tasks.
I have a Palm Treo 755p which has a full QWERTY keypad on it. The buttons are tiny but they are shaped just right for quick entry. My friends with iPhones agree that the real keypad on my phone is certainly quicker than typing on their touch screens. With a bit more practice, I bet the author would agree.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I've had the "pleasure" of using this for about a year now. It's a terrible interface.
It takes an appreciable amount of time for each keypress to be acknowledged by the system.
And if you try to type quickly, without waiting for the device to catch up, you'll very soon be touch typing and hoping like hell you haven't made a mistake or run out the memory buffer.
And god help you if haven't disabled to the autocorrect feature, which has suggested some truly astonishing word replacements in the last 12 months.
The tests were done using a 221 word long paragraph in English. How fast would any of these methods be at entering something like the Schrödinger Equation? Sure, you could type "i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi" on a keyboard just about as easily as "I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain", but realizing that you've made a mistake and fixing it would be difficult.
Some things are easier with a keyboard and some things that are just easier to do with a pen and paper, be they real or virtual.
Yes, I know it's a dying art, but he put speeds up for the Palm Graffiti didn't he?!
I'm currently learning Teeline shorthand which I'm told gets speeds of around 120 words per minutes if you know what you're doing. Pitman on the other hand can reach a paper burning 300 words per minute, although you trade your sanity in for learning that.
Would completely change the results and put pen and paper up top.
the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second... This probably matches most people's experience
Not at all. There is no way the iPhone keyboard can possibly be as fast to use as a physical qwerty keypad. I can only imagine that there's something sub-optimal about the Treo keyboard (having never tried it myself). Alternatively, perhaps the author hasn't used his Treo for a while, whereas he's well-practised on the iPhone at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I think virtual keyboards on touch screens are a wonderful innovation, and I personally would never buy a device with a physical keyboard, due to the extra bulk and weight it engenders in the device. At the end of the day, I read stuff on my phone a lot more often than I enter data, so I want the device optimised for viewing and portability rather than speed of text entry.
But that doesn't change the fact that a tactile keyboard is quicker than a virtual one. Perhaps the "swipe" style virtual keyboards that are now appearing will turn this around.
I'm sorry, but is the submitter fscking insane? I rely heavily on handwritten notes all the time. So does every college student and scientist that I know. Note that I'm talking about extremely tech-savvy people here, who often DO own an iPhone... but they are fundamentally useless for taking notes.
Taking notes, of course, is not the only writing one does, but it's a pretty important thing. Writing serves a a communication medium to others, but equally serves as expansion of short- and long-term memory for ourselves. I have yet to meet any GUI interface that has the flexibility of a pad of paper:
- Effortless data entry.
- Figures, mathematics or other non-ASCII input are faster than any other technique (and likely to remain so)
- No learning curve (for people past 6th grade)
- Bookmarking, fast page finding.
- No limit to page-space viewable at one time
-Needs no recharging, syncing
- Not a target for theft
- Light and comfortable in the hand
- Cheap, reliable components
- Easily backed up by photocopier or scanner
The only downside, for me, is it's a little slow for pure-text entry, and it's sometimes hard to read by own sloppy writing. But that's just user skill, not the fault of the technology.
All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that?
It makes you wonder how Michaelangelo managed to paint so well, what with his brush covering up the painting all the time...
Well, he used a stylus when needed (a fine-tipped paintbrush). There might be a reason why the most famous artworks aren't fingerpainted...
I'm surprised that Palm Graffiti came in last place, especially by that big of a margin. I used a Palm Pilot extensively for several years, and I could "write" on my Palm Pilot much faster than I could write on pen and paper.
It took a few weeks to get used to it, but after you learned Graffiti well enough, you could actually "write" pretty fast with it. The test behind TFA apparently used a novice to test Palm's Graffiti. A Palm Pilot veteran would have been able to write in Graffiti at speeds nearer to actual writing, and maybe faster.
I have a bad feeling about this...
So track down a stylus that works with capacitive screens (they do exist).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
He wrote at 65 words per minute on the QWERTY keyboard. IMHO that is quite slow, someone who known touch would easily beat the iPhone.
I really want to know how much this changes on a per person basis...
At work, I use a tablet PC exclusively. Now, I'm able to dock the (once pretty nice, but now piece of shit, thanks to dating hardware and loads of paranoid IT apps monitoring every single thing we do) thing, but the majority of my input on it is handwriting. Now, the fact that I get to use a point and click interface for it does alter it. However, I have to catch a lot of information in one paragraph, and the goal is to complete that and all of the extra pointing and clicking (often including handwriting as the point and click doesn't have everything, and I'm forced to use an "Other" entry box) within a very short time. This can be as long as 5-10 minutes, but is usually under that. This also includes correcting the handwriting recognition's text, which I have to do a hell of a lot, as I'm doing this in a medical setting, using a lot of medical terminology, without a medical dictionary installed to the handwriting recognition (it exists, but getting IT to replace batteries and styli that are long overdue for replacement is a pain in the ass enough money-wise).
What I'm getting at: my handwriting in these circumstances has gotten ridiculously fast--and I don't use any kind of shorthand or even abbreviations. To the point that, if I didn't type over 100 wpm, it would probably be faster for me to handwrite than type in QWERTY. It certainly destroys my typing speed on my Droid, which I've gotten pretty damn good at (specifically the on screen keyboard, because I got well faster at that than I am at the hardware keyboard). So, really, this is interesting, but I really think it's going to vary by just who you test it on. I could see the majority matching these results, but I think it would be stupid to say it's a catch-all...
Agg
Seriously? Keep your notes in a book or some other time-ordered form. Pretty fast to flip through, find things before and after the stuff in question. Basic indexing (putting a two-letter abbreviation at the top of each page by topic) makes it even easier.
The human eye is remarkably good at picking out visual subject material. If I've read a pure-text book, I can usually flip to a section I remember faster than using the index. Pure computer-based searches are useful mainly in contexts where you _haven't_ read the source material before, but that's not the application we're discussing here.
Yes, shorthand is very useful. I can write shorthand about as quickly as I can type. The advantage of shorthand over typing is that you can do it with low-tech implements (pen and paper). The disadvantage is that, for me at least, it's harder to read. Shorthand speeds up the writing (input) speed at the expense of slowing down the reading (output) speed, where input and output are from the point of view of the piece of paper as a storage medium.
So if someone is speaking and I only have my Treo (which has that tiny keyboard for thumbs), I won't be able to keep up on the Treo, so I write shorthand instead. However, afterward I have to spend time transcribing it.
It took me about a week to learn enough to start using. I started replacing some words in my handwritten notes with shorthand notation, and kept adding more shorthand words to my vocabulary. After a month I was at about 50% shorthand mixed with 50% conventional words, and at 2 months I was basically doing all shorthand. I used Gregg shorthand rather than Pitman because you don't need to write on lined paper and you don't need to tell between thicker and thinner pen strokes (which you can easily do with a pen but not with a pencil).
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]