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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?
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.
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
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....
I think that I hope my boss doesn't see me posting on slashdot brain waves wow that girl from HR walked by, look at her tits to text is the Jesus how much coffee did that moron bob put in this cup? way of the future What else should i write. Uhm ... I guess thats it
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...