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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.
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.
In my office there are only like three people who can type without looking at their keyboard.
I really hope that there are only about 5 people in your office, or else it seems like your company is employing morons.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
...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.
Your company needs to send folks on a touch typing course, then, because hundreds of people hunt-and-peck typing is wasting all sorts of man-hours of time.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!