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Apple Patents Keyboard That Knows What You'll Type
fysdt writes "Another day, another patent, this one from Apple for a very curious sort of keyboard that might be easier to type on because it'll know in advance which keys your fingertips want to hit. No, not a device built by Emmett 'Doc' Brown (as far as we know, anyway), or pulled back through time in a TARDIS—just a very special type of board with tiny inbuilt tactile sensors capable of detecting what your spider-formation fingers are about to tap before they actually do."
It detects fingers on keys before you press the key.
Thats like predicting which way a car will turn at a junction by looking at it's indicator lights.
epically inept word suggestions from my T9 phone, this will produce some awesomely funny posts.
I got here through a series of tubes
I hop it work breaded than predictive testing.
__
Sent from my iPhone
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
The poster bought one of these and I took it upon myself to go back in time and post this for him before he thought to type it.
You're welcome.
"The Red Ball" because it can predict murders.
Would you ever have to take your fingers off home row?
I tried pretending my work keyboard would do this. Just made minute movements with my fingers. It actually made me nauseous. Weird...
Does this mean that resting your fingers on the home row would be equivalent to mashing down on the keyboard?
http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/
... when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I prefer me knowing what I typed. Which is why I use a Man's keyboard An IBM type M. I might not always type, but when I do it is on a Model M.
And so you're going to tell us that this will revolutionize everything now, right? And what a visionary Steve Jobs is? And how Apple is the only company capable of being innovative these days? And the stock price... Got it. Thanks.
Cause if http://damnyouautocorrect.com/ is any indication....
Instead of Damn You Autocorrect, we will have a new site called Damn You Precognitive Keyboard!
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
Fight Spammers!
Apple to fanbois: "we know what yo want to do with your fingers"
What good is a keyboard that knows what typos I am going to make, but does nothing about ti?
I don't see how a little blast of air is going to help me type -- and having the key move by itself when I press it seems like it would remove the tactile feel that lets me know that I pressed it -- if I wanted an on-screen keyboard with no tactile feel, I'd use one. I use a real keyboard because my fingers like to know when they press a key.
Unless key prediction gets *much* better than what I've seen on my phone, it seems that I'd quickly learn to ignore any hints given by the keyboard since more times than not, it would be wrong.
Keyboards are electromechanical nightmares anyway, so there would have to be a BIG advantage to anything that made them more mechanically complex.
Consider that the failure modes on this would make individual keys have different sensitivity when typing.
Bleah. Count me out until they've had a few years in harsh environments.
BTW, here is another link to a similar story - the submission seems slashdotted as I type this.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
from any other predictive keyboard out there?
A: It has an apple on it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I want to know whether this can improve my typing speed. If I can do 110 wpm now, does this help?
Or is it another one of those things that helps the least proficient while hurting those who can already do it well?
Either way TFA provided no useful data *at all*.
And your text will be reviewed to determine its worthiness. Also, Apple keeps 30% of your words.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Oh, come ON! The last thing we need is my work PC doing the same kind of auto-correct nonsense that my iPhone does! You really need it on an iPhone where typing is cumbersome, however, I believe this would slow you DOWN on a PC. The reason is, typing becomes quick, intuitive and "muscle-memory" driven. To have to react to the computer (or keyboard) doing things for you as you are in the middle of typing a word would completely - not just slow you down - sort of throw a stumbling block in front of you. Granted, you could ignore it, or deal with it after the word is done - however, this wouldn't be any better than turning it off - or doing what spell-correction does today.
Register your new domain: damnyouautocorrectingkeyboard.com
I fail to see how where you fingers hover could have any correlation to what you might be about to type. If you're in a proper position for typing your fingers are always going to be resting on a set range of keys. Also, people routinely type too quickly for this to be effective.
I suppose the people at Apple might have simply been brainstorming and just patent any idea that shows the vaguest hint of potential.
What surprises me is that predictive text hasn't been coupled with full-size keyboards. I imagine it would work a lot like how input for a lot of Asian languages works. There's an app I've been using for some time on my Android phone called SwiftKey which I think is impressive. The suggestions are driven by a log the app builds of what you've typed. It's not perfect, but occasionally I can complete a sentence without typing a single word, by just going through the suggestions. When I first saw that headline this is the sort of thing I thought Apple got a patent on.
This part threw me off: 'The second method involves a pneumatic (that would be "air-related") system' So they expect people who can understand the diagram and are willing to read up on a recently patented device to not know what "pneumatic" means. I'd be very interested to know what their target audience is.
Quoting the immortal words of Montgomery "Scotty" Scott: "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
A keyboard should be just that, a keyboard. All other stuff in this patent is just overthinking the plumbing.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Good going Apple! SO now your keyboard will be all "You were gonna press 'X' so I put an 'X' on the screen"
And I'll be all "Oh there's an 'X' there. Now I don't have to press it!"
And the universe will implode
I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY
...a keyboard that blows?
In Silence in the Library set many years in the future.
Wouldn't this method require everyone to be a practiced touch-typist? I mean, in order for the keyboard to predict where your fingers are going, wouldn't YOU have to know where your fingers are going? Too many people these days hunt and peck. Obviously there are people who scrape the letters off their Dvorak Simplified keyboards just to screw with others, but I imagine people interested in Apple products might not be so disciplined. Especially if those same people have gotten used to typing on an iPhone or iPad.
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
Realistically, it'll never make it into a product. All they're doing, then, is patenting new ways to make drains that stop up. This is good for society, since no one will ever design such a drain, much less try to sell it, if Apple's already patented it. Think of the patent system as a giant mop, in this case.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
But it doesn't know what you are going to type in advance, just when your finger tips are close to the keys you want to physically depress. It then sends back air pressure as a tactile response. There, did that sound as confusing as the original post?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Yep, the keyboards we have now are perfect, and there's no reason to incrementally improve them. Why, when it comes time to use something better, it'll be okay that it's completely different because we'll all just jump to that en-masse. I mean, what, is some totally new input system going to have unforeseen consequences? Hah! That'll be the day!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Great, but it will probably predict it will probably be programmed to predict what the typical Apple user will type: "Let's hit up The Levee for PBRs" "OMG that guy totally almost hit my Vespa" "Dude we should hit up that Animal Collective show next Saturday" "Dad, I really need that $2000 for rent as soon as possible" "Of course I have a career, I'm an unpaid intern at an indie music label"
damnyouautokeyboard.com
This is Apple, remember. They're trying to deprecate your hands entirely, as they're not elegant and stylish enough and have too many points of contact. I'm certain a Genius will be happy to liberate your inferior hands as well as the keyboard they are clutching, from your arms and replace them with iStubs. They might even get them in white next year!
This keyboard cannot write the words "PC", "windows" or Linux....
This kind of thing has been out there since, well for years now in desktop apps. So why the patent now, isn't it obvious, or are they going to try and go after google/android and all the other web sites and applications that use this feature.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Now if that keyboard attain self awareness, it would start up the notepad (well, OSX equivalent anyways) and key in "you're jerking me around. stop it, you jerk."
It's like the old "build-a-better-mouse-trap" analogy. Sure, you can make it re-usable. You can make it more humane. You can make it with blinkin-lights. But, all we want is something cheap that we can throw peanut butter on, kills the mouse, and we can throw away w/o getting our hands dirty. About the only improvements for keyboards are making the keys softer/quieter, more comfortable, or rearranging them. Does my chair need to react when my bum's about to land?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
APPL getting more and more like MS everyday
II''mm uussiinngg iitt nnooww..
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
OMG I meant 'j', not 'k'!
I was trying to write a brilliantly thoughtful and original paper, but my keyboard wouldn't let me....
...the Decabet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRtyBBiyYhI . 10 characters = fewer keys = fewer keystroke errors.
Actually we could make it simpler and enter things in binary, so we'd only need two keys: 0 and 1.
Or maybe cycle through a conventional alphabet with two keys: "Next Character" and "Yeah, That One"....
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I just patented a keyboard that types what you mean.
I imagine that would depend on the size of you and your ass... :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We don't need a newer, better kind of keyboard. We need an older, better kind of keyboard!
Circumcision is child abuse.
He actually RTFA!
Quoting the immortal words of Montgomery "Scotty" Scott:
"Keyboard... how quaint."
What I WANT to type, and what I SHOULD type, are two radically different things.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Seriously, what is the point of this? You don't WANT software responding to what it thinks you're going to do, you want it responding to what you actually do. I (and many others, I'm sure) tend to rest their fingers on the keys when not actively typing - if the keyboard were to detect that as input typing would become impossible.
And don't even think about applying it to gaming. First, there's the fact that if it mis-guesses, you're screwed on any sort of twitch shooter, platformer or fighting game. Second, if it DOES work properly, you've increased the already-massive gap between PC gamers and console gamers (multiplayer interplay between PC and consoles is extremely rare in no small part because gaming on a mouse/keyboard is so superior to using a gamepad - even with the console players having autoaim, it's still completely unfair).
This'll feet your be somehow use fill. It actuarily pickaxe the current word mast of the tines.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What Apple didn't say is it saves all those future keystrokes in a hidden database that syncs up with your iPhone.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
All I know is that I want one. Especially if it has 3G
I wonder what would the keyboard guess about me trying to type this:
for (int i = 0; i cellCount; i++) .............
{
ListViewNF lv = new ListViewNF();
lv.Font = new System.Drawing.Font("Microsoft Sans Serif", 7F, System.Drawing.FontStyle.Regular, System.Drawing.GraphicsUnit.Point, ((byte)(0)));
I know exactly what I'm going to type ... most of the time.
New patent.
"detecting position of hands" with "hands"
I propose something.
If a patent can be described in a single phrase, It is automatically canceled.
If a patent can be described in a single phrase, It is automatically canceled with the form X with Y. And CEO of the company is jailed 30 days.
-Woof woof woof!
just a very special type of board with tiny inbuilt tactile sensors capable of detecting what your spider-formation fingers are about to tap before they actually do
Because what could possibly be annoying about hardware-level autocompletion!
/* No Comment */
So... it's a steam punk keylogger. Great.
There's no reason to keep innovating. There is no "something better". Input systems are made to create a relationship between the end user and the interface as close to 1:1 as possible. Are keyboards a perfect answer to input? For many users, yes. For others, maybe not. This isn't a step in the right direction. People who use keyboards as a preferred input device probably use them as efficiently as possible already. This is just a $150 branded price tag on a $20 input device.
Also, if there's an input device that is "completely different": NO ONE WILL USE IT EN MASS. It isn't forced. These are products. The company will tank and the input device that is intuitive out of the box will win.
About the only improvements for keyboards are making the keys softer/quieter...
Talk about your misfeatures...
I've never understood the appeal of the Model M. Sure it's loud and clacky, but that seems to be a negative more than a positive.
After all, if you're in a cube farm, someone typing rapdily would sound like machinegun fire, making an already miserable work environment even worse.
And at home, well, using them at night discreetly is just as hard. Good perhaps for parents of kids to put on the kid's PC (and the shared one) so they can be alerted to stray typing, but still. Typing at night on a clacky keyboard slowed me down as I tried to type without waking everyone else up...
already does that :D
People who use keyboards as a preferred input device probably use them as efficiently as possible
Thank goodness you were here with your science, now we won't waste any time with new ideas doomed to failure.
It looks like the big thing going for the model M is durability.
If it really knew what I was going to type before I typed it, why even have a keyboard? My current home project is developing the TeaLeaf1000(TM) computer based upon the ESP42 processor. It won't come with a keyboard or mouse as it'll know what you want; just a monitor and printer so you can see the results. I've been working on this for years - as soon as I get the kinks worked out you'll be able to buy one. These things should sell like hot cakes, I'll make a fortune!
On second thought, once I get the prototype working I won't need to sell any computers to make a fortune. I'll just buy lottery tickets and stocks based on the computer output.
Apple keyboards already have this predictive typing. It would explain the Apple "fan" sites and compliments Apple gets on its products.To start my explanation, i want to say I'm on a Windows PC with non-mac keyboard so its pure WITIWIG (What i type is what i get).
You see, when an Apple user really wants to write:
"Apple sucks so much that I want to give Steve Jobs the finger, he sucks, all Apple products suck. ROT IN HELL APPLE!!!!!"
What actually shows up on the screen is:
"Apple is super so much that I want to give Steve Jobs my hand for marriage. He's super, all Apple users are super. All is swell with my Apple products! "
Because of the predictive typing keyboard, all Apple fanboy websites are created on a Mac. Without exception - they can't type the truth. That's why all these web sites are basically PR machines. If you try and get smart and use a different keyboard on your Mac, OS X has software to handle predictive typing too. The real, true and honest Apple feedback comes from users that are using something other than a Mac.
That, and the tactile/auditory feedback. When you've pressed a key, you KNOW you've pressed a key.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Unfortunately there's no Model M with an ergonomic configuration. I like the Model M's tactile response, but I just wish someone made one combining the Model M's tactile system with the split-key configuration. Any geeks here know of one and can point me in that direction?
I recently ditched my Model M in favor of the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard. Yes, I know it's M$, but I really can't live without the splitkey configuration. My wrist pain went away when I switched.
If only there was a keyboard that combined the best of both worlds.
I've never understood the appeal of the Model M.
Then you've never used one to perform many kilocharacters of data entry by touch typing... The keys' springiness and tactile feed back makes it a superior high-volume input for a speed typist.
And there is also the nostalgia, granted. But there really has been no other keyboard tech that provides the same clear, unmistakeable confirmation that yes, your key was pressed.
I can see the fnords!
Oh god, not this again.
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/keyboards.html
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
That's a good thing? I don't know how people don't go insane using those noisy things. Every time I've had to use one I get an irresistible urge to throw it on the floor and stomp on it.
It doesn't have to even make it to production. Its just another patent in Apples portfolio, for future exploitation and/or patent trolling and lawsuits.
Part No. 1391409
Id No 1670863
Date: 18AUG1989
In continuous use since 1993
Great condition, all keys, all letters clear and unworn (some tiny greying edges on some)
small mod: drainage holes carefully drilled in casing (it's one fault)
Never killed anyone with it, but good to know I could.
Hot grits, first post, goatse, in Soviet Russia, Linux runs you, all in 4 keystrokes!
Table-ized A.I.
mechanical.. I'll buy one in a second if they use cherry switches.
Since keyboard technology is in dire need of new advances, it's smart for Apple to patent such developments. However, ultimately it seems to me that it would make much more sense to ultimately incorporate keyboards into monitors; this would be a convenient space-saver.
I have a Compact Cherry Mechanical Switch Mac Keyboard (SMK-88). It has buckling springs with the same "sound and feel" as the old IBM keyboards (which were indeed my favorite for a long time). The narrow layout (without numeric keypad) allows you to put your mousepad or pen tablet more directly in front of you, reducing RSI. It's also good for fitting all the input devices into a narrow kneewell below and old-fashioned desk.
I was pretty happy with the Cherry keyboard for a year or two, but the loud clicks did put me on edge a bit during long typing sessions. When Apple came out with their narrow bluetooth keyboard, I switched to that and haven't looked back.
You can accomplish some of that through training. I hate external keyboards on laptops (just a personal preference - I prefer having the same environment wherever I am) but I have some wrist pain with traditional typing. I simply hold my hands at about a 30-35 degree angle, elbows out a bit, with a little rotation so that my thumbs are slightly higher than my pinkies.. My "home row", if you want to call it that, would be ... checking ... "qsdfjkl;" - pretty normal. It took a bit of retraining but I now touch-type just fine, on any random keyboard, with no issues. It might help that I have long fingers. On my MacBook, F6 is the only key that I actually have to move my wrists to reach.
An ideal ergonomic keyboard that maintained the current layout would be folded in half, with half the keys facing left and half facing right, on a triangular stand (blank face towards the typist. That just doesn't seem to be happening, so I'll stick with a reasonably versatile re-learning.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!