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Engelbart's Keyboard Available For Touchscreens
An anonymous reader writes "Doug Engelbart should be known to everyone on Slashdot — he did invent the mouse after all, among many other inventions all of us rely on today. There was one more obscure device he came up with that never really took off, though. It was called the Chorded Keyboard, and consisted of a system that allowed you to type using just one hand. The key to this system was finger combinations, which allowed up to 32 different characters — more than enough for the alphabet. Now that one-handed keyboard has been ported to work with touchscreens, and it could end up being quite popular. The key benefit is the fact you can type anywhere on the screen and don't even need to see where you are typing. The only difficulty is learning all the key combos, but once you have them cold you may be able to type faster than with two hands on your smartphone or tablet." Bonus: being software-only and open-source, it's much cheaper than a Twiddler.
Wait, fellow poster! Please reconsider before you write that joke!
Just wait till the Emacs people come along... they're gonna have a gasm. Wait for all the keybindings in 3.... 2... 1....
C|N>K
I have two hands you insensitive clod!
-
There was an early 'palm' computer around '90/1/2 (in the UK) that was very similar to this. It had a keyboard of five keys mapped to the positions of the fingers on one hand, but could, in the right 'hand' be used quite efficiently as a one hand 'keyboard' input device. Fucked if I can remember what it was called, but I do remember someone being quite proficient with it. Any ideas what it was? It would have been around the time of the Atari Portfolio/Early Psion machines.
I type fine one handed, and faster than most with both hands.
Example is this post. You just have to learn to shift around more.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Unless my life depended on it, I doubt I could ever train myself to use 32+ memorized "chords" to type all of the letters and numbers. Plus, you have to be able to backspace, space, and other stuff too. And any single-finger "chord" could be easily mistaken for trying to select something on the screen, or moving a cursor, etc. Sounds like it would need lots of rules, timing limitations, etc... really complex.
I could be wrong, but in this case, I don't think I will ever know :)
Is it just me that never had that much trouble writing 1 handed? Just get a decent keyboard for your device and you're golden... Swiftkey's ability to predit "awsqhyhuqi" as "confort" is astounding (:
You mean like the Frogpad? http://www.frogpad.com/
I've been interested in this keyboard for years, but figured it'd be too hard to type on anything else afterwards.
It's always the learning curve that kills these things. Most people don't even bother to learn to type properly on the standard QWERTY keyboard let alone learn a whole new complex system of patterns. I use to work with a guy who was completely in love with Dvorak. The amusement of watching him changing keyboard layouts on every machine he went to and then changing back when he left just never got old. QWERTY may not be perfect, but we're all too invested to change now.
Stenotype, which is used for both court reporting and closed captioning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype can typically be operated at 300WPM.
It has the advantage that you can already take classes in it, and that there are tons of people already trained to use it.
I guess Paul Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wittgenstein might appreciate it.
-- Terry
Yes, I can see the learning curve is steep, I must be missing something, though, because lowercase letters (26), uppercase letters (26), digits (10), punctuation (26), and "meta" keys like Escape, Tab, Backspace, Delete, and enter (to name a few) exceeds the 32 chorded characters mentioned in TFA.
I've often wondered if Morse Code could be a viable option for data entry on a small screen. Admittedly, there are some punctuation and capitalization issues with this, as well. Yet, it WOULD permit one to text while not requiring one to keep their gaze on the screen.
I suppose one could split the screen in half (e.g. left/right) to distinguish lowercase from uppercase and to allow additional symbols to be defined. I doubt I'm the first to think of this, but I've not seen anything like this being available, I thought I'd toss it out for consideration and discussion.
I saw the FITALY keyboard years ago for one typing. Wouldn't it be a better choice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITALY
Aside?
On my computer, I type with two hands. On my phone or tablet, I type with two thumbs. Why the hell do I need to ever type with 1 hand?
Neither Gerry Dorsey nor the 19th century German composer were available for comment.
labs.teague.com/projects/ChordedKeyboard/
The question is really all I have. Multiple fingers rather than dots and lines.
Boy Scouts could easily learn this...
Really codes for a 5-button chordpad were 32 - 2 (all off not possible, all on means erase- chording toucho). The original cordpad use the five on the pad plus the three on the mouse to produce 256 - 2 possibilities. Yeah I saw them and wanted one.
Unfortunately highly trained typists and highly trained chord-mouse typists were a lot closer to an eve race than initial guesses had us believing.
I find your lack of capital letters disturbing.
Ha! With my typing system, I needn't use more than just one finger!
PS: any advice on getting first post? It seems impossible.
(or what joke were you referring to?)
There's these things which look thoroughly uncomfortable and are WAY overpriced... not for me. Some minidisc recorders have spinny-clicky things, I have a couple and got pretty handy with that, although doing anything more than tracklisting would become an invitation for carpal tunnel treatment (IMO). I always figured that a single-handed five button job would be pretty easy to pick up; I figured this to be a logical progression from Braille, which uses six dots (ohreali?) and it doesn't take a blind person long to pick /that/ up. Let's see these hit mainstream, eh? And at slightly more sensible pricing than the Maltron...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
GKOS is another open-source chorded keyboard, originally for homemade hardware devices but more recently ported to touchscreens.
http://gkos.com/gkos/index-gkos-com.html
I read "Twiddler" and it makes me think The Batman has been reduced from stalking Master Criminals to now pursuing Masturbaters...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
That is a horrible idea unless you want to input data at a rate of a character every second - if you really really really practiced at it you might get up to 1.3 or 1.4 characters a second. Try this on for size - see how fast you can type cq on your keyboard, then try to tap out dah dit dah dit, dah dah dit dah.
Yes, I actually know morse code.
You, sir, have failed to catch GP joke
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So you can drive with the other?
Have gnu, will travel.
I may be missing something here, but wasn't the original idea to use one hand for keystrokes, so the other is free to use the mouse? The advantage is that you would never have to take your hand off the mouse in order to type, so input and navigation would be quicker. What is the advantage on a touch screen, over just using both hands for input and navigation?
There are morse characters for punctuation. I don't know most of them, just the common ones. There are also language-specific characters for Cyrillic, and some oriental languages as well. So coming up with codes isn't the issue. The data rate isn't outstanding. Experts go 30 to 35 word per minute or so. I knew one old cigar-chomping sparks who first went to sea in a WW II Liberty Ship, who claimed "49 1/2" words per minute. I watched him operate, too, with a WW II era bug, beer and ash-tray handy -- he could move the traffic, though. I think chording is always going to beat keying if implemented correctly.
BTW -- a bit off topic, but if there are any other CW ops out there that haven't read this piece by Hans Brokab, do it. Put down your drinks to protect your keyboards. You have been warned. http://mikea.ath.cx/QRQ-QRV.html
Baudot is a 5 bit code most familiar from the old news wire printers and early teletypes. It's also the code used for TTD calls for the deaf. Ham radio still uses it for RTTY on HF.
It got around having only 32 unique characters by having a shift and unshift code, also known as letters and figures, to access a total of 62 characters.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
The code was entered on a keyboard which had just five piano type keys, operated with two fingers of the left hand and three fingers of the right hand. Once the keys had been pressed they were locked down until mechanical contacts in a distributor unit passed over the sector connected to that particular keyboard, when the keyboard was unlocked ready for the next character to be entered, with an audible click (known as the "cadence signal") to warn the operator. Operators had to maintain a steady rhythm, and the usual speed of operation was 30 words per minute.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I've been expecting Morse code to make a comeback for text messages, because you could send and receive texts entirely by touch (if the phone vibrates in Morse code for incoming texts). Not terribly efficient perhaps but great for texting on the sly (e.g. kids in classrooms).
Morse code would not be optimal by a long shot, however it could be optimized for touch screen input by using 3 finger input. One finger would be dit, another dah, and the third indicates end of letter, so that no pausing is required. To calibrate and begin input, the user would place all 3 fingers on the screen at once so the software would know which area is which.
Some letters, like 'A' could be entered incredibly fast. Say your index finger is dit, middle finger is dah, and ring finger is end letter. You would roll your fingers "1-2-3" and A would be keyed. That particular letter could be entered nearly as fast as a single keypress. Letter H would be worst-case, as you would have to tab your index finger 4 times then your ring finger once. Continuous Dits or Dahs in a sequence would be the slowest method of input, and unfortunately S is three dits, so it would be somewhat slow and is a frequently used letter.
Unfortunately Morse code was not optimized for paddle keyers originally, so we see repetition of dits or dahs for some frequently used letters.
Better known as 318230.
This has been solved by a more practical one handed typing keyboard: swype. I routinely do 50wpm with just my thumb and one hand.
Since it is very common to hold a tablet with one hand, it would be interesting if someone would build a tablet with pressure senors on the back and side (for your thumb) so that the hand holding the tablet could type just be squeezing. Make the entire back of the tablet pressure sensitive so you don't have to worry about lining your fingers up, just let the software figure out which finger is which based on the relative location of each press/squeeze.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It exists, for Android, at least.
I would think both would be exactly the same. Both are learning a series of taps. One is location based where the other is audio based. Learning would be up to which skill the individual was stronger at. Personally, I think drawing a character is the easiest. A hybrid gesture / character recognition software couldn't be any more difficult to write than either of the other two. In all reality though, voice recognition is going to beat all of them... considering it is already available.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Damn it! I only get 16 combinations.
I remember looking into InfoGrip's BAT Keyboard as an input device for CAD commands many years ago. It DID work with chorded input (it had to, being a product for the disabled), but I lost interest and have no idea where my BAT keyboard is now.
Perhaps I am too old for this technology, as I also have a 3D mouse for navigation through models and never use it. It's just too easy to use the keyboard.
I'm trying to find the original source instead of blog posts, but several years ago now morse code beat out texting by a decent amount: Here
This was before smartphones, most qwerty keyboards, and things like swype but it's certainly viable.
I worked for Doug Engelbart at SRI International at the beginning of my career and used these daily. We called them chorded keysets. They were used together with a 3-button mouse, also invented by Doug. The mouse buttons could be used in any combination as shifts, so together with the 5 keyset tabs, there were 8 bits and anything could be typed. The keyset encoding was simply binary: 'a' was the rightmost tab, 'b' was the 2nd rightmost tab, 'c' was rightmost and 2nd rightmost together, etc. Mouse buttons shifted to caps, numbers, punctuation, etc.
It was used both for giving commands to the system and typing in literals. The most common commands required only 1 letter and those were learned quickly. You could type a character you didn't know by thinking of a nearby one you did know and using binary extrapolation.
How well did it work? It's still the best interactive system I've ever used. It took me about a week to get used to the keyset; after two weeks it felt like I couldn't work effectively without it. For interaction, one hand on the mouse and one on the keyset couldn't be beat. My breakeven point was about one word: for that or less, I'd used the keyset. It was still slower than a typical keyboard for typing large numbers of characters. For more than a word, I'd move to the keyboard which was always present.
I worked for Doug Engelbart at SRI International at the beginning of my career and used these daily. We called them chorded keysets. They were used together with a 3-button mouse, also invented by Doug. The mouse buttons could be used in any combination as shifts, so together with the 5 keyset tabs, there were 8 bits and anything could be typed. The keyset encoding was simply binary: 'a' was the rightmost tab, 'b' was the 2nd rightmost tab, 'c' was rightmost and 2nd rightmost together, etc. Mouse buttons shifted to caps, numbers, punctuation, etc.
It was used both for giving commands to the system and typing in literals. The most common commands required only 1 letter and those were learned quickly. You could type a character you didn't know by thinking of a nearby one you did know and using binary extrapolation.
How well did it work? It's still the best interactive system I've ever used. It took me about a week to get used to the keyset; after two weeks it felt like I couldn't work effectively without it. It was still slower than a typical keyboard for typing large numbers of characters. My breakeven point was about one word: for that or less, I'd use the keyset. For more than a word, I'd move to the keyboard which was always present.
For interaction though, one hand on the mouse and one on the keyset couldn't be beat.
It was a chorded keyboard featured on the cover of Either Byte or PC Magazine back in 1978 or '79. I thought it was a totally cool device then, and I've kinda been experimenting with variations for the last 7 years.
I got envious of those teenagers texting 60 miles per hour, and so I've almost finished a 4-"plate" Morse Code pad for my Windows7 touchscreen Fujitsu tablet that I hope to get working on my Windows7 Samsung smartphone. One-finger operation, plates for dot, dash, space and erase; and I might be able to finally use my phone with some sort of speed.
I'm going to try this Englebart system because it would make it easier to use my convertible tablet. (I typically use Google Sketchup Pro, and being able to type in dimensions easily without reverting to the on-screen keyboard or converting to laptop configuration might be much easier.)
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
He knows about other alphabets, doesn't he?
Did you see the bit on Leno where they had two kids texting over phones, race to hams with radios using morse code? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfyf5Y5AHNc Morse code won easily and handily by a huge margin. I know one of the hams (Chip), he said it was clear during rehearsal that morse code was going to win by a mile. It's actually pretty easy to send morse code, and as you say easy to do in a clandestine fashion. Copying, though, requires practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a key skill in modern video games I don't see lots of kids learning the code.
I just happened to recall that the Behemoth bicycle had switches on the handlebar so that Steve could compute while cycling. http://microship.com/bike/behemoth/ It took two hands, though. He simply entered the ASCII codes directly. So he didn't find it so hard to learn 'chords'.
Wouldn't be even better to have similar buttons on the back of the phone, you know where you hold the thing, with the added benefit of not blocking the screen. I guess phones would follow if this did eventually take off though.
I deeply desire to have a Symbolics machine of my own some day—or at least a version of OpenGenera that boots properly.
You won't have one properly licensed, since the courts were unable to agree who owns the copyrights to Genera. On the other hand, that means you cannot be sued by the copyright holders, since nobody is quite sure who the copyright holders are.
You'll need:
Setting it up requires a little bit of work (you'll need to set up a local NFS server and to tweak your X server's modifier mappings), but I warmly recommend it -- it's complete enough to do some real work in Emacs, and the full sources and documentation are there for your greater enjoyment.
Woah, it even has the facebook Like button on the right! Really visioanry development for the time ...
Someone's apparently working on an open-source input method for stenotype (Plover):
http://lwn.net/Articles/475408/
http://c2.com/morse/wiki.cgi?MorseFasterThanTextMessaging
It may not be faster than a normal keyboard, but it's faster (with practice) than sending a text message...
There's also another idea that uses International Morse Code. It is very efficient with movements and, unlike almost every other scheme, doesn't require looking at the screen to type. Here's a description of how it might work:
Swipe to Type
Here’s an alternate text input technique for the iPhone and similar devices that might be faster and more accurate for many people. It uses a feature the iPhone already has, a multi-touch screen, rather than external hardware such as a collapsible Bluetooth keyboard. You not only don’t have to look at the screen, with a little practice you can enter text in the dark even while bouncing around in a car, bus or subway. And since the only requirements for text input are basic hand coordination and a sense of touch, it makes the iPhone much more usable for the visually impaired and those with limited hand-eye coordination.
What is it?
* It uses a well-established open source standard—International Morse Code. But instead of short and long key presses, dots are input by short swipes and dashes by long swipes.
* Speed of input doesn't matter. Unlike regular Morse, which assumes a pause in sending to be a break between letters, user input can be as slow or fast as the users wants without error. Letters are distinguished by alternating swiping right and left. A user-set delay inputs the last character, i.e. one not followed by a swipe in a different direction. Users can also set the ratio between long and short swipes.
* Swipe mode changes when the user rotates the screen.
* Because International Morse Code is already optimized for fast input in many languages, text can be entered very fast. The more often a letter is used, the shorter its Morse Code equivalent is. An e is a single short swipe and a T is a single long swipe. It couldn't be easier.
Additional Features
Morse input would also take advantage of a touch screen’s flexibility to add features that International Morse Code doesn’t have. Examples include:
* Lowercase letters are made by swiping left-to-right then right-to-left.
* Uppercase letters are made by swiping down-to-up and then up-to-down.
* Other gestures can be used. Common punctuation uses diagonal swipes, i.e. upper-left to lower-right for a space, lower-left to upper-right for a period or a period plus space. Diagonal swipes with two or three fingers could have other meanings.
* Circling CCW might delete the previous character for each circle. Circling CW might enter a Return. Alternately, a short shake of the iPhone deletes the previous letter, while a longer shake deletes the previous word.
* Because text input is always a swipe that doesn't need for anything to be displayed for it to work, the entire screen is free for other uses, either display or touching without swiping. It can be used to display the text being entered, to have buttons for commands, or to show a chart for those just learning Morse. This makes maximum use of scarce screen space.
* Certain easy-to-make touches could be used to make common commands easy to do. Touching the keyboard with another finger, perhaps the thumb in the lower-left corner for right-handed people, might signify something. For instance, it might bring up a scrolling list of long, user-set text strings (i.e. a phone number or address) from which the user could select. Inside applications, it could be used for something important. Inside an email program, for instance, it could send the just-entered email. Inside a writing program, it could be used to start a new paragraph.
* In learner mode, the screen would display the Morse alphabet and text input would be on a scrolling line. Letters or words could be spoken as typed to speed up learning and accuracy.
For those willing to learn Morse, which is far easier than most people think (especially for sending), it offers a fast, virtually error-free text interface for the iPhone, one that has tactile feedback built into the design. Most important of al
It should be 31 characters 2^5-1 (because 00000 means not pressing anything, which shouldn't type a character).
Step 1: Bend your wrist to type on tablet. Step 2: Move your fingers rapidly.
While your at it you can get yourself a neck injury too, just spend half the day staring down at your iPhone or iPad.
Dang. 138 comments so far and unless I missed it not a single Chordite reference.
I've noticed that everyone in the world has strong opinions on chording keyboards. It's obvious that chording is slow and difficult to learn. It's also obvious that chording is easy to learn and fast. It will never catch on and it's completely inevitable. Every chording scheme is superior to every other one. Everything is obvious. No actual data are required.
I think I'm going to need some tutorials on this application. But is this the one? The Blender3D conquerer?
Dying for an iOS app for this, so that I can say goodbye to autocorrect.
Jon Postel, who ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for many years, used Engelbart's NLS system to manage all of the information for IANA. He used a mouse and chord keyboard. I was interested at one time in user interface issues, and I'm located in L.A., so Jon kindly allowed me to interview him and watch him work (the Internet was a far smaller and more friendly place back then). NLS was designed to use these two devices in concert. The usage model was of a hypertext, with a mouse click on an item followed by a single-letter command. The command letters were typed in on the chord keyboard, at two chords per character. The scheme was to type in 8- or 9-bit characters as bits, five high bits followed by five low bits, or the other way around, I don't remember which. The effect was that to manipulate information, as opposed to entering it, you didn't have to move your hands back and forth to and from the keyboard. Just click-chunk-chunk, click-chunk-chunk.
At two chords per character, and with pretty clunky-chunky piano-type keys on the chord keyboard, entering more than a few characters via chord keyboard was slower and more painful than using a regular keyboard. I asked Jon how many characters he would type on the chord keyboard before switching to the regular keyboard, and his answer was, "About ten."
Jon was probably the last user of NLS aside from Doug & Friends. I believe ISI, where Jon worked, kept a PDP-10 running just to support his use of NLS in running IANA.
I thought NASA invented the mouse because going to the Moon is just so gosh-darned important? Wait... You mean computers are useful in and of themselves and people just invent these things because ... they want to?? Man, Space Nutters are gonna kick and scream!
Seems all the daily life products moving to be touch screen. The mobile phone, the oven, TV, Digital Camera...... It is time for you to see what is new and suitable for you. http://www.globalhk.net/Contact us now.
Frogpad is a one handed application with Multi touch IP. Available on iPad and Magic TrackPad.