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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.
My parent's generation is still trying to figure out 3-3-3 for F, despite having an alpha-numeric keypad since the days of rotary phones. How are they supposed to learn this?
All these different types of keyboards for the android devices are making my head spin. Next it will be brain waves to text! I'll stick with SwipeIT, thank you very much....
You know, you could add a pen to the device, so you don't have to deal with, say, something that makes it hard to swipe your finger across the screen and reduce the grease in the screen.
Then, after that, you could make the movements more like handwritting, since people are used to that.
Then, maybe, to help people write things faster, put split areas for letters and numbers.
You know, I think I saw that somewhere else before....
Reminds me a bit of Swype though watching the video, it seems like it would be slower than Swype.
I'll probably try it out though. My anticipation is that I would need to learn the positions of all the letters to know how many sectors to cover for each. Counting them on the fly would really slow it down. And then there would be those words I'd hate because they involved lots of swirls. Like how we hated people with 9s in their phone numbers during the days of rotary phones.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
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.
“Intuitive”? Looks like a nightmare to learn.
This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.
It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.
To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.
Do the WebOS devices still have this capability?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The Android logo is a green robot...
The Chrome logo looks like Samus in morph ball mode.
Simon says blue-blue-red-green-yellow-green-yellow-blue-red.
We will go from qwerty to voice.
Hell if I'm going to be composing my text messages by voice in public; at that point, I would just.... you know... give the person a fucking call.
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
What....??? ....I .... Wait.... Are you saying that a Slashdot news story covered.... an innovative piece of software that isn't free??? Well I never! This will not stand! Slashdot, I hereby tender my resignation, effective immediately!
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...
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?
If someone comes up with a device that uses something like this - but with the input at the back of the device - I'm sold. Just make some dints and bumps so that my finger knows where it is.
It would be cool if you could program where the characters were along the different axises. That way people could customize it for their preferences.
Why would you have to memorize anything? In the video they have a very cool animation where the letters are magnified as the finger moves. Presumably the same kind of interface could be (or has been) developed to aid in memorizing the gestures. I absolutely cannot stand virtual touch keyboards on mobile devices--this on the other hand would actually make me consider a touch-screen device. (I currently have a e71x with a tiny little physical qwerty keyboard that I can almost tolerate.)
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...)
mspaint