Slashdot Mirror
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.
No.
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.
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
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.
I, fir one, don"f cee whad thi fuss es apout.
I'n abendonned QWERTY wonks ago amd I'n doung jist fane.
But how do you feel about your keyboard?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion