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Is It Time To End Our Love Affair With the QWERTY Keyboard?
Master Moose writes "Brisbane-based entrepreneur John Lambie currently has in beta an alternative to what he calls the 'dysfunctional' QWERTY keyboard. Given the way the world is abandoning their keyboards for smartphones he sees now as the perfect time to introduce a new layout. He calls his new keyboard Dextr and believes it is the natural progression from using a number pad to enter text — This is especially so in developing countries where users have not grown up with QWERTYs on thier phones. While he is not the first to ever propose an alternate or alphabetical keyboard — Are we locked into QWERTY for familiarity's sake, or as we shift to smaller, more mobile and new devices, is Mr. Lambie's project coming at the right time?"
No. That is all.
For the love of all that is holy, stop wasting time trying to 'fix' something that is not broken!
It's not like there already are better keyboard options out there. Dvorak, I weep for your absence in everyday life.
Thanks Dextr!
No.
You can have my query when you take it from my cold dead hands!
It didn't change at the transition to the PC from typewriters and it's not going to change now (in any significant way).
I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to "plug in" any text input widget you choose with a decently designed device. It would make supporting languages other than English a hell of a lot easier, and it would let people opt for things like stylus/printing interfaces instead of virtual keyboards.
Frankly I'd be shocked if the Qwerty soft keyboards were hard coded -- companies would be locking themselves out of non-English markets, and that's not good global thinking or marketing.
Myself, I hate virtual keyboards of all kinds. I'd much rather use a stylus with handwriting recognition.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I switched between QWERTY US International, QWERTY UK, QWERTZ (German) and AZERTY Belgian several times. Every time it will take me like 2 to 5 days to get used to it, it takes about the same time to get used to the layout of your phone. So, who cares about the next big new keyboard layout?
Just because qwerty may not be the best fit for a phone, does not automatically imply it's terrible for all tasks.
Make sure the unity/gnomeshell devs don't hear about this or were all doomed.
Looks like an exercise in OCD, not in design.
Getting the vowels to line up has little use in written language, but it might make an OCD a touch less stressed.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Android has been a literal playground for new keyboard designs. QWERTY is winning so far, but there's no reason to push one standard over another because we aren't tied to a physical keyboard anymore. I have 8 keyboards installed on my phone. Most QWERTY, but some, like 8pen, are radically different and focus on actual typing speed.
The keyboard in the article is
1) not made for speed
2) fucking ugly
3) takes up a crazy amount of screen real-estate
as more robust, built-in voice-to-text is disseminating so rapidly now on phones and tablets, and Dextr appears to target those devices. For those of us who already type quickly, I can't see why we'd want to learn a new format. For those just learning to type, I could see wanting to do something better than QWERTY (Dvorak).
I don't know about iPhone, but on Android it's trivial to install a new input method and there are lots available, many which don't resemble keyboards at all.
He will follow in the footsteps of Dvorak, colemak (oh how I wish this was used everywhere), and the the many other layouts into either oblivion or a small number of dedicated users who cannot understand why everyone else doesn't want to switch to their layout.
Isn't this just an advertisment?
Yes.
Am I missing the point of this post.
No. It's just a slashvertisement.
This sort of keyboard is change for the sake of change. Any improvements in keyboard technology ... for me, anyways ... must improve, not merely change.
chorded keyboard that allow sight-free touchscreen typing? That's an improvement. Changing the keyboard layout to something better? That's called Dvorak.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
I, fir one, don"f cee whad thi fuss es apout.
I'n abendonned QWERTY wonks ago amd I'n doung jist fane.
Even if you do find a better way to type on a keyboard, do you think 99.999999% of the people in the world are going to follow you? Any job that requires typing skill is not going to ask if you know how to use a Dvork or Dextr keyboard. The keyboard will change when we no longer need them, after A.I. provides us a better means of communicating with computers.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
iPhone does not allow you to replace the system keyboard, which was one of the neat features that impressed me when I moved to Android.
Wrong wrong... usual argument, layout is for type writers, blah blah. That someone yet again has come out with a new keyboard layout, qwerty is dead.. blah blah.
Why do smart phones have qwerty layout? There is still no real proof that other keyboard layouts are better.
Bored, move along.
There are also people using AZERTY!
Not everyone uses their computers to watch Youtube videos and dick about with friends.
Those who actually work - a surprising if dwindling proportion of the population - and those take one of many modern hobbies seriously need a full-size screen and keyboard. And a powerful local machine for processing, and possibly storage.
So, people who never really had a use for a computer in the first place can enjoy their iConsumables. That's fine and cool, and I'm not going to be a dick and say Apple are lame just because their shit doesn't suit me. But AOL failed to AOLify the Internet (indeed, as people got more Internet-savvy, AOL lost its edge), so why the hell do we think it would be a good idea for Apple to Applify the computer?
... wow. This new keyboard is so much faster than typing with swype. NOT.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Don't worry about changing the $5 disposable mush-board hardware. Worry about changing software. I would imagine cursor movement in VI or nethack is pretty agonizing on dvorak layout.
I've been hearing this stuff since I saw ads for dvorak replacement keyboards in 1982. Probably has been around longer. Nothing WRT this argument has really changed since then. Unimpressed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
you had the perfect oppurtonity to put all the vowels on the leftmost column but nooooooooo typing speed is irrelevant when you can use an indoctrinated sequence. Also, it won't scale well on horizontal layouts.
If there's one thing that deserves to make a comeback in this mobile world, it's chorded keyboards. QWERTY sucks on mobile devices because it takes up too much space, especially a physical board. On the other hand, you could probably put enough keys (say, three for each hand) on the back of a mobile device to make them practical physical keyboards without taking up valuable real estate that could be used for the screen.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Who's fingertip? a four year old girl's fingers or a my sausage sized fingers? Finger tip size varies a lot.
If the problem is the QWERTY keyboard isn't in alphabetical order, why not just change the order of the alphabet? Its purely arbitrary to begin with. He is right, there are currently two keyboards in general usage. I don't think we need a third one.
..imperial units in the US
..left sided driving in the UK
And what about the germans and their QWERTZ?
(That was a problem for me while visiting a german friend, as my password at the time had an Y in it)
Harald
Who wants to join the First United Church of the Fonz?
And so it is with new keyboard layouts. Fonzie be Praised.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
"Have you stopped beating your wife?"
We don't "love" qwerty. It's what we use. Little more than that. The learning curve is horrible, but once you got it, learning anything after that would be more painful than it would be worth.
Did anyone actually go look at the keyboard? Some idiot just took the alphabet. Put it in a grid, gave it a cute name and reaped profits. Swype is innovative. This is not.
I look at it the same way as american standard measurements. american should convert to metric, but we have a system that 'works'... so getting people to change from what they are used to will be tough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
The English language has all sorts of grammar, spelling, and pronunciation problems. It's a nasty difficult to learn mix of germanic and romance language pronounciation and word derivations. Take the word "Sure". Where is the "H" in "sure"? Speaking of "where", why is it not "ware"? And what the bleep is up with "cough", "dough", and "plough"? Ridiculous nonsense, horrible language with too many idiosyncratic oddities to learn.
And yet it remains an international standard for business. Why? History, that's why.
And that history locks the language in this role is the deciding factor, regardless of how much more intelligently designed, more easily learned, more easily understood, that Esperanto is.
And same applies to the QWERTY keyboard. I am certain there are more intelligent designs out there, like the dvorak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
And so why hasn't the dvorak caught on? And why won't this new keyboard catch on? Historical lock in, that's why.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dvorak has been around for years!
It goes A-Y except Z is randomly popped in the middle? why?????
Small bug in the software. If you mis-key something, you're immediately killed in a plastic-coated room lined with pictures of your misspelled words.
Will Get my QWERTY keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead Carpal Tunnel'ed hands.
No one needs QWERTY, outside of the US a lot of people regularly change their keyboard layout depending which language they like to use.
That's one reason every desktop environment has some sort of Keyboard Layout switching utility, often right there in the task bar.
The proposed layout is for tiny devices probably better than the present systems but on a full size appliance there are much better options like the Dvorak and Colemak.
It'll be very hard to make large players in the marked switch over, just read the outcries about Win8 going to lose the Start button.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Personally I would like to a see a good layout for one hand. Hold the device in one hand and type with the other. No more typing with thumbs. One thing this layout has going for it is more rows so each key is not squeezed together so tightly. I don't thing this app has any chance of growing to a standard. However if apple were to push a more natural layout for phones then I could see it overtaking qwerty. I could even see it make its way back to the PC where one hand could do the typing and the other could stay on the mouse. Such a change seems possible to me, although not necessarily likely.
The problem is not so much QWERTY but the small inconveniences of existing keyboards as well as there overall horrible quality in comparison to the past. Start by swaping Ctrl and CapsLock, making the Shift keys and Enter large enough, and giving the keys a physical pressure point again as buckling spring and Cherry switches have.
Oh, and telephones ... use them to make telephone calls and you'll be fine!
Who in the hell is interupting me for bs like this? seriously...
If I had to bet on the replacement for the keyboard it would be something like the Leap Motion paired with sign language - perhaps a one handed version.
Is it time to end our love affair with the base 10 number system? I mean, there's LOTS of other numbers out there. Who says we have to use 10? In fact, given the way the world is abandoning their keyboards for smartphones, I propose it is time to implement base 0, which aligns perfectly with the number of physical keys on the majority of smartphones.
This Dextr keyboard looks like basically the abc layout with the Z over on the left.
I'm no human interface professional - but I can't imagine it being any more usable than an actual number pad, and maybe even less usable.
Certainly not revolutionary.
Why not put the most used letters near each other similar to the Dvorak keyboard layout. Most used letters could be placed in the center of the keypad with lesser used letters moving outward, maybe even in a circular pattern? Okay my mind is running and I'm probably not one to be suggesting a layout, but placing the most used letters near each other seems like a good idea.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I see what you did their...
You can't change the keyboard layout (e.g., from QWERTY to Dvorak), but you can switch between several languages and language-specific keyboards (e.g., US English QWERTY to French Canadian QWERTY).
This might work for smart phones and devices where your thumbs or one hand tend to be the mode of entry, but not for two-handed typing. Take your frequently used articles, pronouns and conjunctions and try typing them with two hands. I think you'd find that much of the effort remains on one hand. Just like our body is coordinated to march with our left and right legs, it's naturally faster to type in a marching order with our left and right hands taking turns pressing keys. And this Dextr layout fails at that. When I read "alphabetical order" I knew it was doomed. Then I read even further to discover other failed logic like designing it to assist those with cerebral palsy, an unfortunate disability that I don't have, and that qwerty was designed to slow you down, when in reality it was designed to speed up typewriters. Dvorak made a good effort in taking some kind of efficiency into consideration. There's no efficiency with alphabetical order. Ease of use is a layman's term. Anything is easy once you're used to it, so it's more important to consider speed and comfort. If you want to make a keyboard for cerebral palsy victims, great! But don't expect me to find it useful.
"We have put the keys in alphabetical order"
Yes, we all remember the good old alphabet: "...ghZij..." WTF?
If anything, his brilliantly named design is worse than QUERTY. The sole but imaginary problem it attempts to address is learning where the keys are -- it leverages the schoolchild's memorization of the sequence of English letters. It gives no consideration to human anatomy or letter frequency. What a joke.
Hello Mr/Ms/Dr/Rev AC, I think you miscomprehended the statement. The title of this article/page is "Is it Time to End Our Love Affair with the QWERTY Keyboard." The answer, "No. That is all" means NO, IT IS NOT TIME TO END OUR LOVE AFFAIR. It was modded insightful because many people can read and understand the sentiment that it is not time to end the QWERTY keyboard. You yourself seem to defend the QWERTY, too. Which means, in theory, you should agree with "No. That is all." Instead you question how it became insightful. Well, you can lead a Slashdotter to water...
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
I was only thinking on Dvorak-like remapping of the keyboard to improve Swype speeds and reduce incorrect word suggestions (i, o and u are next to each other, for example). Funny how the world works...
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
The idea of an alphabetic keyboard split over five rows is NOT NEW! The Symbol handheld barcode scanners we use at work have had them for 15 years or more. The whole idea of a QWERTY (or DVORAK) keyboard is optimization for two-handed typing speed, when you are typing with two fingers on a cell phone (or one finger on a hand scanner) then optimization doesn't matter that much. Since no one is going to be doing office transcription full time on their cell phones (at least for a while yet) I think that it's premature to say QWERTY is obsolete, at least for English speakers.
For what it's worth, I once spent a good deal of time testing this hypothesis. I spent a lot of time researching optimized layouts, picked one, and used it for a solid year - parallel to the QWERTY layout that I was still using at work. After a year, I was equally proficient with both (I could touch-type either at will, same error-rate, etc.), and I ran a number of tests.
The results were quite consistent: about a 10% speed increase (from 60wpm to 66 wpm), no significant difference in the error rates. For what it's worth, at that point I decided for QWERTY. That's what most keyboards in the West are based on, and for a 10% gain in speed, you have the irritation of switching back-and-forth all the time. If you don't type a lot on both layouts, your speed-gain on one quickly becomes a massive speed-penalty on the other.
Note: there is a nice little open-source application out there that will let you take your personal keyboard layout with you whereever you go. Unfortunately, it currently only supports Windows.
For smart phones, the situation is obviously different. If you want to be able to type quickly, you pretty much need a predictive keyboard (something like SwiftKey, for example). Beyond that, it's simply a matter of being able to find the "keys" quickly. For anyone who also uses a normal keyboard, that means QWERTY.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
QWERTY is rubbish for one-handed typing, so I can see the advantage of a layout like Dextr (and for one-thumbed-typing, the 3-letters-per-key with predictive is perfect).
However, it *is* annoying as hell when a layout you know is messed around with (ever tried foreign keyboards..?) No compelling reason for QWERTY to be dropped from workstations and laptops.
What's wrong with knowing both? Different tools for different jobs.
Missed the first post, don't worry time to go back to QWERTY, its the best for racing to the first post!!
Subject should say DVORAK > QWERTY... stupid HTML...
Alphagrip was also going to replace keyboards. I use the controller on occasion, it does function nicely as a game controller/keyboard but just like most people I am sticking with my QWERTY keyboard.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
The next or next-next generation is who is going to determine what new keyboard wins out. As an old-school mouse fps player I first derided and now am simply amazed people can play fps with any accuracy on joystick, but it makes sense that with enough precision and enough training it would work for people.
The same with texting, I never got the number pad type "type with both thumbs" style, but kids caught on and learned all the key combinations and it got big, then they had contests to see how fast people could text on them. Then they rolled out smartphones and everyone went back to qwerty soft keyboards but still the idea was there that there was a new means of input.
I don't think there will be an invented "better input method' though. Usually this stuff catches on by accident, or by repeated incremental refinements until it's naturally integrated into peoples lives. Using the joystick example, imagine someone trying to play an FPS with an atari or NES controller. While the phone layout hasn't changed for ages, I can't really see people texting on the old analog cellphones from the 80's and 90's, the buttons were made not for tactile feedback but to be reliable and keep the dirt out, you would quickly get tired and be frustrated at how hard the button had to be pressed and the accuracy.
The day this becomes popular will be the day the US goes metric. Nuff sed.
Personally, I think that QWERTY is not broken.
Now, having said that I found myself incredibly annoyed when I shifted off of Palm and onto an Android device. With fat fingers I tried every single keyboard I could find and they all suck with regard to accuracy.
I discovered the 8pen typing app. At first look I quickly brushed it off but after trying yet another half-dozen available variants I gave it a try. Make no mistake - this is for small devices and is somewhat difficult to warm up to. It comes with a game. I played it until I got annoyed and then switched the device's input to it. It makes typing on this device fun. It has a quick 'out' in the form of a qwerty for panic situations but is otherwise the absolute very best option I've found.
It's not a "keyboard" by any measure and more closely resembles the act of writing in cursive with your eyes closed.
\r
Can we stab editors that put headlines in the form of questions?
Are we locked into QWERTY for familiarity's sake?
Wrong question. The question also assumes that qwerty is only there because of familiarity and nothing else.
We are "locked into" QWERTY because it does a pretty good job of dividing the labour of typing between both hands. There's this urban myth that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists. Nothing could be further from the truth, because in the old days, there used to be typing contests among different vendors of typewriters. QWERTY typists outdid other typists. It's that simple.
Through Darwinian selection and market forces, we have one now that is pretty darn good. Some may say DVORAK may be better or another layout may be better and that the division of labour may be better, but the only advantage that DVORAK and others seem to have is speeding up learning for those who have never touched a keyboard, c.f., the Navy study on DVORAK. That's not much of a victory over a keyboard that is ubiquitous that you can use immediately anywhere once you've learned it. Yes QWERTY is familiar, but QWERTY became common because of other reasons than familiarity.
The Dextr keyboard is in alphabetical order
Oh god no. Kill it with fire then nuke it from orbit.
I have used keyboards like this, and I have to say from personal experience that alphabetical keyboards SUCK all around. Alphabetical keyboards are only good for calculators using a portrait oriented keyboard and at that point, you're using the letters for variable storage and hexadecimal.
--
BMO
It snoops the data on your device including contacts and unspecified other data and transmits it to whomever will pay for it. Basically it's spyware. I don't care whether it works or not if that's the price.
A while ago someone discovered the "ideal" layout for a keyboard and it was 4% faster. Wow, 4%. I can type 98WPM. What application is that not good enough for again? Courtroom transcriptionist? Closed captioning? Yeah, I work in IT so he can take his keyboard and shove it up his ass. Change for the sake of change is a very annoying, expensive pain in the ass and we have universal standards for a reason...like for example preventing something exactly like this.
On your handheld of choice add a regional keyboard you are not familiar with. Say if you are American, use a French or German keyboard. If European vice versa.
Type an e-mail or note. Note how you have no problem finding the keys unlike on a full size keyboard where you keep having to searching for the right keys.
Apparently at the touch screen handheld size, the keyboard is small enough to fit in your entire field of vision so that the actual placement of the keys is not critical.
It is possible that a physical keyboard layout at that size is important but for touch screens it seems to be irrelevant.
Lots and lots of plastic wrap. Plus all of the coders are named Harry.
They need to combine this with the Crocodile Keyboard to minimize mistaps. The patent might get in the way, though.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
On Android the keyboard is just an app that extends InputMethodService and you can create an entirely new keyboard app as a replacement, and when the user sets it as their default keyboard it just becomes the keyboard for every input box everywhere. There's even example code in the SDK. Swype and Swiftkey are two popular third-party keyboard apps.
...Did we ever convert to the metric system? I rest my case.
This is the right view. For hardware keyboard there is one main option (on i.e. phones with keypad ), but for software ones should be the ones you want, including, why not, this one. The only requisites is to find easily the key you want, to be able to be handled with just the thumb, one finger, or one hand, or 2, depends on the device (phone/tablet, touchscreen or hw keyboard), so should not be full, exclusive "winner", but to give options to people to choose with which ones be more comfortable. I don't think that will be the end of QWERTY keyboard,
Even if we were to change layouts, it would NOT be to this one. They put all the vowels in a column highlighted with a different color. WTF? While they are common letters, so are a lot of others. In fact while txtng ppl tend 2 not use m. Disrupting the otherwise alphabetical order just for this seems like a poor choice. The other major problem I see is there are no numbers on this thing so it's not alpha-numeric, just alpha. I see no compelling features of this layout, but there are some stupid things about it.
This has already been done. Dvorak is an optimized keyboard layout (for English).
The QWERTY layout was chosen because typists could type so fast with the standard ABCD layout that typewriters would jam, hence QWERTY was introduced to slow them down. What these guys have done is taken the old layout and re-introduced it. Top google link:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question458.htm
Let's make all the Aussies to move their steering wheels to the correct side of the car and drive on the correct side of the road.
When the going gets tough, the tough change the order of the alphabet. I've got 50,000 hours invested in the Qwerty layout (minus 50 hours when I strayed into Dvorak in the last 1970s in a text processor I wrote myself). All I've got invested in alphabetical order is a couple of weeks when I was four years old, and scattered painful minutes with printed dictionaries and phonebooks I'd really like to forget.
But no, I jest. It really would suck going to my favorite DVD rental outlet (with 10,000 titles in the back catalog) if they scrambled the drama shelves into Qwertical order. Us old farts just can't be pleased. Hell, why don't be just blow it all up and instigate ETAOIN SHRDLU? (I've been carrying around half of a different Romanji collation since Winograd without hardly knowing it.) This would have the added benefit of making any young person who ever walked into a physical DVD rental outlet familiar with power law distributions, and that can't be overrated as a cognitive boon.
etaoin shrdlu gvymp bjfxck qwz
There, I think I can remember that after a half hour. I was going to sort the back half into Qwghlmian order, not wanting to invent something arbitrary, but I can't find the full 16 on the internet. It's a sad day for geekhood.
It's not just the layout that can be replaced on android, you can use wildly different text input choices. Swiftkey has insanely good error correction and word prediction by a combination of an analysis of what you've written into your phone before and a heat map that invisibly adjusts the key position to be more consistent with where you actually hit it (if you always hit the area between 'e' and 'r' when you mean to hit 'e' it will begin register that area as 'e'). Swipe works by dragging from one letter to the next. Various voice recognition apps (including Google's) works through the same interface. And those are just the relatively obvious keyboard styles, there are other text input choices that are really trying new things. This is wildly out of date but still provide a glimpse of the kinds of things you can try out on Android.
This "dextr" thing looks horrible. We have a vertical-layout "abcdefg" keyboard on a couple of labelmakers here that looks just like this app, & I want to throw the damn things across the room each time I have to use one (so much so that we replaced them with qwerty units, not that I actually smashed one to get that to happen or anything...).
It takes me twice as long to bang out a label on one. If the letters were all in a line then it would be easy to find the one you're looking for, as humans are accustomed to alphabetical order. But this is a grid of letters that happens to start with A & end with Z that is not indexed with anything people are familiar with, and it has more than three rows so it's even harder to find the letter you're looking for than on a qwerty, even for someone unfamiliar with qwerty. Hell, I bet I could create a message by selecting individual letters with the iPod's "album" scroll wheel interface faster than with this damn thing.
Intelligent virtual keyboard solutions like Swype are the answer to the occasionally-needed keyboard on a touchscreen device. This is certainly not.
The ideal smartphone layout would move letters that have similar placements in words as far apart from one another as possible.
Bat
Bet
Bit
Bot
But
That's a pretty trivial example, but it takes no effort to come up with examples where letters get confused for one another and a predictive text system has no way of knowing whether you meant to do that or not. I type 'of' or 'if' each in place of the other about a dozen times a day. It makes me nuts.
The whole keyboard is trivially reachable, so I don't think that it's worth worrying about letter frequency and how fast you can move your fingers to type. We should be trying to make the keyboard properly enhance and support predictive text systems. The faster you can type out--without errors--the first recognisable part of a word, the faster the autocorrect system can make a guess for you. Don't fight it, USE it.
Autocorrect is only makes ridiculous mistakes right now because of the way that we've got our letters grouped together. We end up sending it confusing cues, so of course it picks strange words.
This 'dextr' layout looks terrible. Not only is it huge, it doesn't actually solve the problem. The vowels are cleverly stacked on top of one another, which is probably going to lead to just as many accidental vowel replacements as before, just different kinds. Letters that can often replace one another in words are still right next to each other.
I believe there could be a better texting keyboard than qwerty, but this sure isn't it.
I'm hooked on Swype myself, but if you're looking for alternate layouts try the Hacker's Keyboard. You can switch between a whole list of layouts (mostly for different languages) but QWERTY and DVORAK are among the options. It's great for working a CLI too, since most Android keyboards don't have easily accessible escape, tab, ctrl keys.
This makes me sick inside.
It's a wonder that people with genuinely useful innovations ever prevail, considering the background noise of useless tweakery they have to contend with. Infomercial fortunes are built on ideas like these.
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qwerty is to keyboard what windows almost to the desktop
The others all failed, but I bet this one is just so awesome that everyone will migrate to it. It is THE QWERTY KILLER.
I propose a new rule that in order to be taken seriously when proposing a newly invented layout, the inventor first has to be familiar with every single layout invented in the past century and provide evidence in which ways the new one is superior.
I had a business in 2000 that connected to T9 enabled phones to Exchange. IT Managers were excited about the idea because it was much lower cost than two way Blackberrys. I found T9 easy to use because the predictive text feature worked 99% of the time. The professionals hated it. Not because it didn't work, but because there was a learning curve.
5 years later, teenagers and college students were expert at T9 for texting. My 30 year old niece tells me that she was just as fast at using T9 as the touch QWERY keyboard on her iPad.
I think this is an interesting idea that will be obsolete before it catches on.
The only change in keyboard I will accept is a transition from keyboard to devices simply reading your mid.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Nobody mentioned this abortion yet?
For smart phones you can just install another keyboard and use it, and switch keyboards easily. If this entrepreneurial jacky wants to put his hand in then by all means. The market will decide..
Good luck taking on Swype though..
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
One thing I wonder - if one was an Emacs user, would a DVORAK keyboard help get over the Emacs Pinky problem, where people use their pinky fingers @ times to hit the control or alt keys?
They are all stuck with 789 at the top row. I would prefer a phone-style keypad, not just with 123 as top row, but also have the abc-def etc.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
His layout is dumb -- here's why: QWERTY is a designed layout, with common keys in the middle, rare keys on the edges, and each vowel has its own finger. Dvorak layout is supposedly even more efficient.
This layour is just alphabetical. Someone should produce an optimized layout. Yes, you'll have to train but you're gonna have to train to the new layout of his anyway. It's silly to trade off long-term speed for a few days of marginally easier typing before you learn the positions automatically anyway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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New keyboard-free laptop introduced by Apple
The keyboard of the future is the microphone. A new layout is too little too late.
I used to think Dextr was the best, but for the past year I've switched to BrknBad and wouldn't go back. I've never even seen Qwerty, sounds Swedish to me.
That amazingly adaptable, (and quirky), organ, the brain, will map our fingers to the letters, no matter their arrangement. That takes care of familiarity, which leaves standardization as the crux question.
The QWERTY layout became a standard because of dictation. The highest speeds for typing are generally achieved in transcription. Typing while composing just takes longer. QWERTY popularity became a standard in large part because it allowed professional typists to move between work environments and still have familiar tools.
With the flexibility of modern key-mapping, we can all have our own, personalized keyboards, but what purpose would it serve? The circular argument, "QWERTY is a standard because QWERTY is a standard," is inescapable in its logic. It is arbitrary, but success dictates standards and it is generally beneficial to embrace successful standards. Most of the world drives on the right side of the road, those who don't pay a premium for the difference.
Just like every other retarded rhetorical question just like this about any topic.
Helpdesk/desktop support: I -could- go to another keyboard, but then when I had to visit a different desk what then? Oh, and dextr, alphabetically sorted? really? (actually mostly alphabetically sorted so the vowels line up..) The part I hate about my iPod keyboard is that I have to switch to get to numbers or special chars. passwords become extra painful.
If the layout changed I couldn't type typewriter with only the top row of my keyboard.
And if I couldn't do that there would be no reason whatsoever to use a computer, I'd start living in the woods hunting bear for food.
Nobody has a "love affair" with the QWERTY keyboard. It's just the de facto standard since it's been used for ages. Dumb headline.
I always liked the FITALY keyboard on the old Palm Pilots for single finger/stylus entry. Letters were arranged the common letters in the middle (e, n) and they get progressively less common as you move out. It minimizes the amount of travel of the input device.
Every few years this comes up, people assuming that Alphabetical Order is somehow better for typing. The order of the alphabet is largely arbitrary, while QWERTY was carefully planned to balanced out the keys that are used, to ensure you alternate between left and right hand on most strokes, maximizing typing speed and minimizing errors.
That said, that seems like a good idea for phones, but is certainly in no way going to replace QWERTY. At this stage in the game, for something to actually replace QWERTY would have to be mindblowingly better to justify the trillions of collective hours it will take to retrain everyone.
Help me!, Norman Coordinate! Beep beeeb beep beeeeeeeeee....
My design has only one key. You press it while yelling the letter you want it to type."H!"..."E!"..."L!"..."L!"..."O!"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
No
"Is Microsoft (er Apple? Google?) Evil?" ooh look, I made a new verb.
"What people don't realise is there is already a second keyboard out there that is already way more popular than QWERTY that requires no lessons, that people pick up straight away, and it's the same keyboard that kick started the mobile revolution.
Do you know what keyboard I am talking about? The one you have on your phone, the number pad."
Too bad the smartphone world has already jumped to QWERTY. My phone's flip-out keyboard is QWERTY. My Android device's touch-keyboard is QWERTY. He's trying to fill a niche that doesn't exist.
As we now have digital displays, so the downside of not seeing your writing is no longer present.
you should have just said:
"i'm an esperanto speaking dvorak keyboard user, you insensitive clod!"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The goal with qwerty was to spread the typewriter arms so they don't jam while maintaining typing speed. You can't just claim it was to slow typists down. I'd like to see a study comparing alphabetical keyboards to querty, if one was possible, as exposure bias would be massive. There is no reason why alphabetical order is the best, except for finding the order in a way it was first taught (which could be changed as well).
I had fun writing that, but you know what's so pathetic about the mere existence of this discussion thread it makes me puke? The fucking elephant in the GUI circus tent? It's that I don't carry around some digital fob declaring my PERSONAL investments in digital skills which I've acquired through hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of hours of diligence and rote. Not my favorite fucking colour or background wallpaper. The fact that before the IBM PC arrived I had mastered the CTRL key positioned beside the A key as god intended. What's the Caps Lock key for, huh? To express anger (if you're an idiot) or TO BECOME ANGRY if you're not an idiot and you strike it by accident. No Caps Lock key was depressed in the previous sentence. It hardly slowed me down AT FUCKING ALL. The buggering of the CTRL key was my first experience with a level of outrage surpassed in intensity only by the despair and agony of the hard landing that followed my first hopelessly naive love affair. Both of these were major life lessons in learned helplessness. In my relationships with women, after much work, I managed to restore balance to the force. In my relationship with technology the situation is as bleak as ever. I'm composing this abortion from the void on Ubuntu fucking 10.10, the fat multimonitor GUI of which has absorbed some minor chunk of thousands (thankfully not yet tens of thousands) of hours of my life and energy. I've thrown away more, so many times I've lost count. Yet still something inside me protests. I've not yet met my personal Room 101. I still dare to dream. Dare to dream that I will someday sit down in front of a system that queries first MY FUCKING INVESTMENTS before flaunting Steve's superior personal aesthetic.
What else do I convey with my GUI fob? That arrays are ZERO ORIGIN as god intended (fucking up the integers is the work of man). Any computer language I sit down to use which supports ZERO ORIGIN had better switch it on, automatically, if the option exists. How many times do I need to repeat myself with every goddam console I approach?
And how about hidden file extensions in file browsers? Inside my fob of personal decree, written in blood letters of eternal wrath, DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN if you value your digital signals.
This is why after a hard day on the keyboard we sit around watching the Sopranos. People don't mess with Tony (or his counterparts in New York) without counting their gunships. Pretty much every human being in a David Chase universe is a loathsome creature, but we have such a hideous subjugated lust for something to take us seriously that we sit around and lap it up.
My electrogadgets have uniformly trained me to be too terrified to care. I take what I need, form no attachments by choice, and end up regretting any attachment I can't help though baseline Pavlovian reflex. Thank you, Canonical, for driving the final stake through my heart. I can die now, leaving nothing behind.
Section (3) (a) reads in part: "Users acknowledge that certain details may be provided to third parties ... provision of such information is necessary for IP owner to operate its business" and (3) (b) reads in part: " Users acknowledge that information about them may be transmitted between countries to other entities that IP owner has commercial contracts with" Sounds legit - what could possibly go wrong?
bash: rtfm: command not found
Does Dextr come in metric?
--
still fond of feet, inches and fortnights
Regarding a mobile phone keyboard (touchscreen based) there are some points to take in mind:
1. You don't touch type using a mobile phone, you always type looking at the keyboard.
2. There is no tactil feel so you have to see or hear the key pressed.
Using an ABC...Z layout can make sence for somebody who have never used a keyboard before, but is really annoying after some time.
There are many layouts out there for mobile phones and since there is no hardware keyboard you can use a program like android's alternate keyboard to create your own layout, fixed problem.
I use the colemak layout, i found it very pleasent to type on a mechanical keyboard but when it comes to a touchscreen phone, i see no diference, probably because colemak is mostly designed to alternate fingers on the same hand as opposed to dvorak which is designed to alternate between hands, so in colemak usually the most common silabes have the letter nears each other so i think dvorak could be a better choise, or something like the carplax research with some rules applied to define a new layout to a smartphone will be the best way to type in such keyboard. to a smartphone http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/ .
And for those who are interested in a new computer keyboard i am working on a libre design keyboard, the keyboard is known as the 'key64' our motto is: 'No more keys than you can type on' and the website is located at http://www.key64.org/ the key64 is a Libre * Design, Minimalist, Ergonomic, Splittable, Symmetric, Compact 64 Keys, Eco-Friendly, Durable, Native Colemak Keyboard, Embedded Mouse and Firmware Programmable USB Keyboard, right now i have the all the schematics and pcb ready to built the pcb and i hope to finish the first prototype by the end of this month, there is also some forks of the project that you want to check out, all of then are listed on the website.
There's Dvorak (for two-handed typing) and Fitaly for stylus/one-finger operation.
Both are designed for minimum finger travel (in English, anyhow). I doubt seriously that this "new" layout improves upon them in any signifigant fashion, and (from the Wikipidia Dvorak article):
So if you wanted to switch in any major fashion, you always have to get poeple ewho already type on some other layout to switch, and it's not generally cost effective.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I don't let that out often (it's unbecoming), so let's finish the scene.
Suppose Steve Supremo sits down with Tony Soprano and starts to impose Steve's aesthetic imperative on the fat clown with Steve's characteristic insistence and charm? Well, the bite out of the Apple logo would quickly come to represent the nut sack of his former masculinity mumping his jowls.
Those of us who generate, rather than borrow, our force of being all feel that way about the ways and customs of the Old Country. There's an investment in where you've been and who you are that digital technology just can't wait to castrate, casting us adrift as the nomads of cool.
wurls for me kust finw.
Link is being slashdotted. Is this like those old Blackberry keyboards that had 2 letters on each key? DO NOT WANT!
It'll take a big improvement to be worth losing the familiarity of QWERTY, and if it puts multiple letters on one key then screw that.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
QWERTY is a local optimum that we can't easily escape for as long as we're typing. I think I get the strategy: everyone's going to stop typing (for a while? forever?) so now it's time to escape.
The problem with that, is the premise is totally wrong. Nobody's stopped typing. We haven't abandoned our keyboards for smartphones and there's no reason to think we have, unless you simply count the fact that a lot of people are using smartphones. And that's a bullshit argument: nobody is using those for significant text entry. Smartphones are either additive (the person already has another machine with keyboard, and that person is still trapped in QWERTY) or they're for people who didn't need a PC or keyboard anyway, so those people weren't QWERTY prisoners to begin with. You might shift that second group.. except why would they take up your new design? They don't care about typing anyway.
Nothing has actually changed. The conditions that have kept us in the local optimum, are still here.
One of the things I see people constantly getting wrong about PCs, is that they see the growth rate falling, so they take that as a sign PCs are going away. Excuse me, but one doesn't imply the other. Where's your evidence that the number of deployed PCs is shrinking? Oh, that's right: you you don't have any.
Escaping QWERTY is going to be hard. Maybe (?) you can do it, but there isn't anything special happening right now, which makes it easier.
Not until Apple ships a computer/device with a different layout will it happen.
The //c had Dvorak toggle. I have Dvorak on my iPhone and it's very good.
I don't see any compelling reason to switch keyboard layouts. I've been typing on QWERTY my whole life, switching to something else would require me to retrain years of muscle memory, for no real benefit.
to herd an entire planet's worth of cats?
Damn. Just when I finally learned how to type at a reasonable speed...
There are plenty of different keyboards with different layouts you can download, I'm looking at a Dvorak keyboard in the Play Store right now. I don't think GP was saying you could just change an option on the standard Android Keyboard, just that there are other keyboards you can download and install.
Qwerty is certainly not perfect, but most of the tools I use daily as a programmer were designed based on that layout. Would we use ctrl-C ctrl-V to copy paste if those letters were on the other side of the keyboard? Do you know anyone who would rather use an azerty layout than use a qwerty one to code in C (or C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, ...) ? Has anyone in his sane mind tried to use a mac azerty keyboard with emacs / ssh (need a pipe for a shell command? alt+shift+L, ni a ~? alt+shift+N... and it is not written on the damn keyboard...)?
In my opinion if anything should change about keyboards, it is that they should be easily remappable. So the good question would be: when the hell will we find affordable optimus keyboard clones? If I could code using a US qwerty layout and write emails using a french azerty layout without switching physical keyboards then I would be happy. Adding another layout without any use for it is just plain stupidity...
It's actually even worse, at least for me. I don't conceive of the alphabet as a one-dimensional string. If I did, I would have absolutely no problem reciting it backwards since I could just read it off.
So not only is it one-dimensional, it's strongly (but not entirely) one-directional.
Yes, studies have shown that QWERTY is an inefficient keyboard for the English language. However, you have to take into account that, except for maybe 1-2 bln. people, the other part and the big majority has to deal regularly with international layouts. Since different languages would require completely different layouts to optimize typing, it would create a complete mess whenever you have to switch keyboards.
That is why QWERTY is there to stay. QWERTY is standard and inefficient but it is so for everyone at the same time!
On screen keyboards are small and cramped. We don't need to rearrange the keys we need to rethink the whole thing.
WPM people have been able to get with this thing is amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
The great thing about software overlays for input is they are reconfigurable allowing experimentation and user choice with little cost. All manners of corded schemes are now possible thanks to multi-touch.
The change I most want to see adopted is getting rid of the slant and getting the columns aligned vertically. This is a legacy of manual typewriters and should have been corrected when offices went to electrics.
All your database are belong to U.S.
You'll get my QWERTY keyboard when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
I learned QWERTY over 25 years ago and I'm not going to be bothered to re-learn how to type.
Similarly, any keyboard I buy for myself will have "= \ Backspace" in the top right corner, with a big reverse-L-shaped ENTER key above it. I can't stand having the single-row ENTER key or the backslash anywhere else. The same goes for screwing around with the keys above the arrow keys, or removing any of them or shoving them down to add "power" buttons (that don't work).
It's not a manual typewriter. It's an input device for an operating system that can support a wide range of keyboards. So if you know how to touch-type for an AZERTY or Swiss-German keyboard, tell the OS that that's what you're using, don't look at the keys, and just touch-type. (And remember to set it back to the original when you're done :-)
My mother's manual typewriter didn't have 1 or 0 on it, but it was a QWERTY which also had accent marks and a couple of extra characters such as ç and ñ, for writing French and Spanish. I don't remember if it had any of the Scandinavian accents and weird letters.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Nearly all the tasks were speed was limited by typing did go away with the advent of computer networks. Nowadays typing speed is botlenecked by cognitive speed. People (with a minimal amount of practice) simply type faster than they think, there is no reason go improve further.
Rethinking email
Epic fail.
Time and time again its been proven that sequential listing of the alphabet is NOT the optimal arrangement of keys. Certain characters are used more often then others, so placement of those character keys in easier to access locations is preferred over "logical" order.
Also, having 5 rows of characters versus 3 wastes more screen space.
I will agree that QWERTY is not the best arrangement for on screen keyboards, but this is not an acceptable replacement either.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
No.
It is not time. It never will be time.
While we're at it what up with those outdated and obsolete pointing devices? And display screens!?! Yeah they need to go too..
No. Sholes arranged the keys so the arms wouldn't jam in order to allow typists to type faster. Typewriter salesmen would show this feature off for managers by having a speed contest with groups of typists on rival brands with different layouts, and QWERTY would always win. Even if you could physically hit the keys faster on another layout, you'd have to slow down to keep it from jamming. It's why QWERTY became popular, then standard, it was faster. Faster layouts only became possible once the arm mechanism improved to eliminate jamming, but by then the QWERTY patent had ended and QWERTY was already standard. [No company was going to shut down their entire typing pool to wait six months for them to retrain on Dvorak, on the chance that maybe it was 10% faster.]
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
In order to maximize mental flexibility, the keyboard should be remapped with each login. The keycaps should all be blank (cutting production cost), forcing the user to discover and memorize each new layout by experiment.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
And here I was thinking it was cookie crumbs and dried hand lotion. Now someone tells me it's built in to the design..
Experiments have shown that steering with your dominant hand is safer, reducing accidents. Since most people are right handed, the proper English RHD makes for safer drivers than the hateful French LHD that you use.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The typo issue is only part of the QWERTY benefit.
It also places the keys you are most likely to type next, at least in English, on different hands, which if you can do different things with your hands, also makes for faster typing (some people can't; tends to make them bad piano players).
It additionally has the benefit of allowing matrix keyboards take less expensive electronics by reducing the ghost key suppression to unlikely intersections of keys (three keys have to have one pair share a row and one pair a column and all three be down at the same time to trigger ghosting). The alternative would be frequency keying or split row matrices or diodes on each key to allow row/column major scanning and detection.
People have been trying to to replace the QWERTY keyboard for about 100 years. Lots of "better" keyboards have been proposed. None have caught on.
The fact of the matter is once you learn it you can go very, very fast on the QWERTY. I touch type at about 135 wpm sustained. I knew someone who was even faster. Most people I know can do 35 to 55 wpm easily. Sure, I could go faster with a more efficient keyboard but they're not standardized and standards matter, a lot.
What is awful is these new on-screen keyboards with all their weird layouts and no feedback.
Now, let's have a nice long troll about Dvorak keyboard layouts, etc.
Maybe someone can chime in with some rambling about their 'special' IBM Model M keyboard. My personal favorite is the IBM 84 key PC-AT keyboard. The function keys on the side are nice,
It will happen right after the US adopts the metric system and the French adopt English as their national language.
... traffic researchers have determined that driving on the left side of the road is more efficient than driving on the "dysfunctional" right side of the road. Is now the time to convert the rest of the world to driving on the left?
I came here to say that QWERTY as a layout isn't the problem. The problem is the staggered keys. I used to own a Fingerworks keyboard, which was awesome, and now I own a Truly Ergonomic keyboard, which is awesome. With keys laid out in columns, my wrists don't constantly twitch back and forth while typing. With some of the special keys moved to the center of the keyboard, I can hit them with my strong index fingers instead of my weak pinkies. I got used to the Truly Ergonomic in about a day and a half. The other reason I like the TE is that it did away with the useless numberpad, which just sits there like a goiter on the side of most keyboards, forcing me to reach four times farther to find my mouse with my right hand.
If I were the king of keyboards, this is the change I would make as a gift to the world. People can cleave to their beloved layout (including me, I think qwerty is fine), and we can slightly evolve the keyboard in a way that will improve health and typing speed. All keyboards should have columnar layouts.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Vote parent +20.
Why are monolithic methods even discussed any more when we're talking about configurable computers? Well? Why?
Let's see:
æ--¥æoeäããããã(TM)ï¼åfããfãfããfãã(TM)ï¼Zåäåï¼Y
ï½ï½ï½OEï½OEãï½--ï½ï½ï½"ï½ãï½ï½OEï½ï½ï½ï½Zï½ï½ï½...ï½'ï½ï½fï¼
Î'Ðnwоrd ÐvÐÑÑ-оn tÐÑ...t tÐÑt.
ÑáááOEáOE áááÑ-ÑááOEÑ ÑáÑÑ.
ÏαÉÉÏÊ ÏÏââ® âÏ©âá(TM)á(TM) Êâ®ÏÊ
Nope, unicode is still not here.
AnySoftKeyboard is an easy app to change the layout.
Not a sentence!
it's not... qwerty keyboards aren't going anywhere
Its much more comfortable to type with than qwerty (a lot less finger movement), and as of 10.7 Lion it comes built-into Mac OS X so there is nothing extra to install.
History lesson: the QWERTY keyboard was adobted as the English-language standard keyboard on typwriters. This was because, with most words, including most common words, you alternate which side of the keyboad your stroke lands. This helps reduce the amount of times the hammers in mechanical typewritters will jam. This sped up typing time considerably. DVORAK isn't a faster keyboard layout. It's simply more ergonomic, which carries more weight once you get rid of hammers in typewritters. Fast-forward to today: QWERTY keyboards are standard on almost all smartphones. But, as smartphones lack hammers, what are they most pressing criteria for a mobile keyboard? What are the greatest limitation to using mobile keyboards? The size of the keys are a major obstacle, but QWERTY is actually a rather efficient layout to use with auto-correct. The other major limitation is the fact that you only have two digits available for input, the two thumbs. Thus the most optimal keyboard is one where you alternate the sides of the keyboard between strokes as often as possible. So what's the most efficient layout for smartphones? One that's easy to use auto-correct with. One that alternates the side of keyboard used as frequently as possible. In other words the one we just happened to already use. So, upon consideration, QWERTY should be standard on all smartphones.
I really don't think that QWERTY keyboard was designed to make typing easier or any other such crap.
How many of you guys realize that the first row of the QWERTY keyboard, contains all alphabets of word "TYPEWRITER"
That's no coincidence an it was designed that way to carry over that legacy of typewrite,r to future typing devices like PC and Phones. .
Pretty much every touchscreen smartphone can operate sideways. QWERTY keyboard is very comfortable when typing with 2 thumbs. There is no way in Hell I would switch to something different from PC standard. It makes no sense.
Sorry, but there seems to be very little thought put into this keyboard. It seems like the obvious alpha phase of the project. Inevitably in the beta phase, the keys will get rearranged. Wait a minute, these guys are using scrum, so the keys will be "refactored" - and it will be a paired process. As the project is about to enter production, the testers will have been screaming for DVORAK or FITALY based on experimental evidence as to its improved efficiency, but that ideal will get prioritized into the product backlog and then disappear.
The video implies with this new layout you won't generate typos and you won't experience autocorrect failure. Problem is, with ANY small virtual keyboard (meaning without feedback or tactile differentiation between individual keys) you'll press the wrong key fairly often. That means typos. And with typos (or even without) come autocorrect suggestions, and with autocorrect suggestions come autocorrect failure. Until computers have a direct link to your brain to interpret what you typed into what you meant to type, this will always be the case.
You can't type the 'ty' efficiently. People would still know what you meant.
Are they *trying* to show the shortcomings of the layout?
Unless perhaps you use a pianist fingering onto the 3rd finger of the left hand for the 't'.
Hmm. It might be interesting to layout a keyboard like a keyboard.
Hmm.
http://technabob.com/blog/2008/07/13/das-keyboard-no-letters-faster-typing/
Dextr's kind of cute, though most studies have found that for two-handed typing, there isn't actually much performance difference between layouts, once people have time to adjust to them. And while Dvorak may have been a bit better designed, "alternating hands" was pretty much the goal of QWERTY as well, because that kept keys from jamming.
FITALY is a keypad design intended for one-finger (or one-stylus) usage. The design paid attention not only to what letters are used most often, but also what letters are often used near each other, and seems to be fairly efficient. Unfortunately, due to the magic of Software Patents, you may never get to use it, but there are a few implementations out there. (It was patented in 1996, back in Palm Pilot days, but could probably be easily adapted for modern touchscreen smartphones, if the patent holder is still actively developing it.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You wore out your Model M?! Or did it break? They can be repaired, you know.
I'll wait until the keytops on my Model M have faded to illegiblility. It might be some time.
And, yes, I do have a spare.
--
Tomorrow's lesson is called "Not everybody is like me."
considering the number of key-remapping applications that exist for all platforms, does it really matter WHAT your keyboard looks like?
they'll NEVER change the ASCII and UNICODE tables (without the planet collapsing) so you can go map any d@mned key to any d@mned position on the d@mned keyboard that you WANT and have the d@mned computer load it on startup. d@mned.
if you're working on someone ELSE's machine, bring your OWN keyboard - they're small (or flexible) enough - and have the machine recognize it.
Sorry, Nothing will be as efficient or faster than good old qwerty keyboard, the only thing would be better would be brainwave interfaces in the future. if you want to go backwards go with the lame texting style just because its cool go ahead.