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8pen Reinvents the Keyboard For Mobile Devices
An anonymous reader submitted linkage to a company called 8pen that has a new take on one-handed input. I've attached the video if you click the link below, but it's a strange idea using outward spreading swipes that somewhat mimics handwriting. It ships for Android tomorrow, but even if you don't want to try it out, it's an interesting idea for anyone who is tired of finger tapping on a tiny screen.
Those of us who have been on the Internet since puberty have already mastered the art of one-handed input with a standard keyboard and mouse. With the proper motivation we can easily adapt this skill to a regular on-screen keyboard.
Really? And it ships for android tomorrow? Fascinating. Almost a coincidence.
I hope he wasn't too anonymous, and that Slashdot is able to cash the check he sent along with his submission...
Calm down, I'm sure it was just a random Slashdotter submitting an innocent link.
Safari doesn't display anything. I see the problem. Same problem as their website.
Note: The tag is deprecated. There's articles as far back as 2006 saying to stop using the embed tag.
Try out the Epic 4g, I got one recently and the keyboard is great. Not perfect, some keys could be rearranged and god knows why they put a smiley key instead of a .com key, but it's good otherwise.
QWERTY. A typing arrangement that was meant to be slow.
That is a common misconception. The QWERTY arrangement was designed to put common "chords" at opposite sides of the keyboard, so that the hammers on a typewriter wouldn't catch on each other and jam. So while, theoretically, QWERTY is _slightly_ slower than other layouts, the reality is that the speed difference is never more than a couple wpm. The layout was designed because people were too fast for the hardware of the time, but it did not solve the problem by slowing typists down; rather it accommodated their speed.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Are those letter positions optimal? The scheme feels nice, but I'm not sure if the letter positions are as good as they could be.
as the video says, they're optimised for their frequency in the english language and so that common words, like 'you', can be done with a figure of eight, or some easily memorised swirl...
For anybody that hasn't tried swype, give it a shot. Very quick input. The tutorial takes 2 minutes and you'll be an expert in half a day. I love it.
It uses the same kind of gestures but with a different layout.
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=&q=quikwriting
Reminds me more of Quikwriting, actually... ...yup, 11 years old. Ken Perlin dabbled with input methods for a while there...
http://slashdot.org/hardware/99/04/29/1734246.shtml
http://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/
Based on the video this is the same idea as QuickWriting that I played around with on my PalmPilot a number of years ago. See: http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/ The Quikwriting site says it has a patent on the method. So are we in for another litigation in the handheld area? Or is this the same technology under a different name?
Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.
Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)