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CES: Another Chording Keyboard Hits the Market (Video)
Wayne Rasanen's Decatxt chording keyboard may be new and exciting to him, and he says has a patent on it so apparently the USPTO found it novel and original, but it's not the first chording keyboard by many long shots. The idea has been around (at least) since 1968. And let's not forget Braille chording keyboards, as described in a 1992 IEEE paper. And if you have an iPhone and want to experiment with a virtual Braille chording keyboard, there's an app for that. Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands. So it's hard for us to get excited about a chording keyboard. Be that as it may, we wish Wayne Rasanen all the luck in the world as he brings his invention to market.
It really doesn't look comfortable to use. Must be awesome to develop RSI with.
With a little bit of practice you can easily use a normal keyboard without looking at it all the time.
Why go into business to make a product that targets like 0.0001% of the market? In my office there are only like three people who can type without looking at their keyboard.
Man, that thing looks like it was sent directly from Hell by Satan himself.
As such, it would become the mandatory input device for Windows 8.. and Unity.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Wow...no need to be nasty.
There may have been many chording keyboards on the market over the past decades, but clearly nobody has really gotten the design right. There's plenty of demand in the industrial/commercial/warehouse/field work markets for good one-handed data entry. Nothing has stuck.
This guy is trying. Maybe he has figured out the magicsauce. He probably hasn't. Either way, there's no need for Slashdot editors to be total dicks about it.
...unless you're going to at least bother to track down the patent in question and link to it, so we can decide for ourselves whether anything in it is interesting. I would guess there is more to it than just the basic idea of chording.
Or the suggestion that installing the thing on a steering wheel could improve driving safety. Seriously, what? A distraction is a distraction, and if you're texting away in traffic, you're fucking distracted.
Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands.
OK I'll bite how does that work? I know the braille system is 2x3 grid aka 6 bits ... and you claim there is a one handed keyboard, so I'm optimistically giving you 4 fingers and a thumb. In between I wonder how the protocol encoding works. It would be a heck of a lot simple if we had 7 or so fingers on each hand, or braille was just merely morse code. If I were inventing my own system I'd totally use two hands and one bit for pointer, middle, and ring fingers on each finger and probably either thumb as "clock signal". Or maybe rather than momentary keys the keys are little J/K toggle flipflops or S/R flipflops. Maybe two fingers pointer/middle in a three cycle mode where hitting the thumb advances?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've spent the last 30 minutes looking for a video of someone actually USING this stuff instead of just explaining the layout. Guess what? Nada ... I say crap!
You're supposed to run your hand over the mousepad when you visit that site not look at the monitor.
(Yup looks like I'm going to hell now)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Major downside is that he doesn't have proof that I will be able to type faster or more effectively. Changing keyboard layouts to such a degree can take a lot out of my productivity.
Upsides is that he isn't married to any one shape for his input platform. Having the wraparound for the game controller could be handy. Same with the steering wheel option. I do hope that he offers some better design options for the handheld, as I'm not keen on pushing a little box up to my chest in order to type quickly.
Theoretically these chord keyboards would allow someone to work one-handed and use their other hand for something else, but in practice typing takes too much brainpower to really split your attention anyway and these chord keyboards just increase the load on your brain. In the end it seems that most people with a lot of practice can get 50-75% of their normal typing speed with these, which is just sort of annoying when you could just use a regular keyboard and get 100% and then shift both hands over to whatever other task you need to do.
There might be a few niche markets for these products, but historically they have never been able to sustain a product. It just takes too much training for mediocre results. There's too much compromise inherent in the product.
I read the internet for the articles.
The most common one handed input device is The Twiddler; you can hold it and type at the same time.
Another one-handed input method is Half-Qwerty; it's been stuck in patent limbo for a couple of decades, and the inventor basically killed off the mobile market for the device, but the patent is expiring.
Easy2Key seems exceptionally badly designed from an ergonomic point of view. Also, spending months getting good at a patented input method is stupid, because if he stops making the device, you're in trouble.
At $69 for the usb model I would have purchased one 5 months ago when I broke my arm. The chording keyboards I found were quite pricey (so I didn't want to take the risk) and half qwerty on my mechanical keyboard barely go me up to what this guy claims he can do on his chorded keyboard (and took a lot of practice). I'm curious about learning curve on this.
On the negative side, the hardware looks amateurish (ghetto decals that look like they'd peel off in a week, buttons with very little movement that you bottom out each stroke). It also looks like you can't currently purchase it. If this is a Slashvertisement then not having it actually available for sale on the website is pretty damn short sighted (miss out on any impulse purchases).
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Handeykey's product destroys this one hard.
http://www.handykey.com/
Keyboard and mouse in one... leaves the other hand completely free for......
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've always thought a piano-style chording keyboard for the desk would be nice, having musical training. In the past, I've not seen any that caught my fancy. I do have an older Twiddler, but that version didn't appear to be quite usable for me due to a restriction on the modifier keys that could be generated.
Does anyone actually use chording keyboards? We've been messing with chording keyboards since the 1980s with the Microwriter and the Frogpad today and yet I've never actually seen anyone really using one beyond as a tech demo.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
WTFV. It's at 4:52 in the video
Hold Nexus 7 up to mouth (with one hand).
Then speak "what is the distance to the moon"
Anyone else think of the ID10T interface?
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
Summary is off by at least a century. Chorded keyboards have been around since at least 1868. Chorded braille keyboards have been around since 1892. Coincidentally, these were each apparently brought to the computer a century after their analogue versions were made.
It's called a saxophone!
It could have applications on mobile phones. He may not be so dumb.
If your phone doubles as a bluetooth keyboard, that could be used maybe with one of those upcoming Dell "Ophelia" computers.
Effectively, you could carry around your entire computer in two pockets. Just need another little pocket-mouse and you'd be set. No more lugging around heavy laptop computers.
"The idea has been around (at least) since 1968." Try 1913 or earlier, with the development of the stenotype machine, the chorded keyboard device which is used to transcribe courtroom testimony at about 200 WPM.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Make it wireless and TV compatible. On those rare occasions when I plug the laptop into the TV, moving to the keyboard to change videos is a hassle. A wireless keyboard that uses USB, in this little form factor would be useful. You'd have to have all the remote functions too though, and it's gotta be ergonomic. Little rectangular box... probably not ergonomic. Oh, and pay attention to the weight with battery, not just the shape. When handling the remote blindly, you need uneven weight or shape to tell which end is up. My old Zenith remote, sigh... I could pick it up blindly and go to whatever channel I wanted. The new one I got with my set is fucking balanced. Balanced! I have no idea which end I'm holding, and worst of all if you pick it up wrong you end up changing the channel instead of adjusting the volume. I have to look at the stupid remote.
Egads, why? That thing looks horrible to use, and expects people to learn crazy combinations, when most users still hunt-and-peck keyboards and spend half their time looking down at them to type.
There simply isn't a problem that exists that needs fewer buttons and large complexity to type.
... you couldn't type either of those on it.
llàstima
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
and I have been using vi for 15 years.
In the late 60s I was quite fluent with a manual card punch and could probably still use one without difficulty. The punch cards had 12 columns: 0-9 and overpunch 11 and 12. Various combinations gave letters and symbols. E was 12+5.
These date back to the 1920s.
Suggested this to Andy Rubin a couple of years ago.
Wonder if anyone has tried it.
Be that as it may, we wish Wayne Rasanen all the luck in the world as he brings his invention to market.
Well, your slashvertisement is sure to help. How much did he pay you?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Another keyboard similar in some aspects is the Frogpad. At the time I was able to play Wow on it with limited success. The thing with these keyboards is that most would rather carry bluetooth keyboard 3 times bigger, than have to perform 3 actions for every one action.
They actually put research into the layout on the Frogpad, which explains it's non-qwerty, non-alphabetic arrangement. This new one he's just gone for alphabetic order.
... and not found one single video of it being actually used to type actual stuff and not just the English alphabet in order.
This seems like the worst, most retarded idea ever. (I'm typing this on my Model M keyboard.)
Wayne Rasanen's Decatxt chording keyboard may be new and exciting to him, and he says has a patent on it so apparently the USPTO found it novel and original, but it's not the first chording keyboard by many long shots.
Subby, does his patent claim all implementations of chording keyboards, and in fact, the very concept of a chording keyboard? Or does it claim his one implementation? Because his implementation is novel and original - have you ever seen such an uncomfortable looking device? - and as long as he's not trying to claim ownership of the entire concept of chording, his patent could well be narrow enough to be valid. So, how about rather than injecting your FUD, you either link to the patent or stop whining about things you haven't read?
Why, this could be bigger than the Dvorak keyboard!
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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh. He's serious.
Does anyone have experience with stenograph chorded keyboards? Trained transcriptionists are able to keep up with speakers over 200wpm.
There's even a free, open-source implementation of stenography software that runs on Linux/Mac/Windows as long as you have a keyboard with high rollover.
Plover
So then if it's not novel or interesting why the post about it other than to give this person advertising?
Because nobody else at the show wanted to be interviewed by Slashdot. Cheap wannabe journos need cheap wannabe entrepreneurs for their interviews.
Moral of the story: Slashdot: ditch the videos.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The guy says that it's silly to be using keyboards because they're so old and that we need new technology. He demonstrates this by making a video. Film was invented a long damn time ago, moving pictures were possible over one hundred years ago, and digital video has been around for more than three decades. Shoes and pants are even older than that but I see that he's wearing clothes. I guess this guy thinks that it's only a bad idea to use old things if he's selling a product to replace one of them.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Hang on, if this device is so good with one hand. Why does he always push it against his body? Answer... because he can't press the buttons and hold it properly. So its a pointless device in terms of being useful. He'll have to re design it so you don't have to hold up against something to press it!
This in10did device might actually ship, which beats vaporware hands down.
That's a pity, because a far better design was announced on Slashdot over a decade ago (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/02/08/12/1413250/build-a-custom-fit-one-hand-keyboard) which still looks much more comfortable for heavy use (http://www.chordite.com/).
first time here....and i'm posting with the default handle...anonymous coward? this tells me the opinions in this forum are jaded. the name 'colon-smokers' comes to mind. wipe off your chins bitches.