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Man Campaigns For Addition of 'Th' Key To Keyboard
beaverdownunder writes "Melbourne restauranteur Paul Mathis has developed a one-character replacement for the word 'The' – effectively an upper-case 'T' and a lower-case 'h' bunched together so they share the upright stem – and an app that puts it in everyone's hand by allowing users to download an entirely new keyboard complete not just with his 'Th' symbol, but also a row of keys containing the 10 or 15 (depending on the version) most frequently typed words in English. Mathis has already copped criticism from people who claim he is attempting to trademark a symbol that is part of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced 'tshe,' the letter represents the 'ch' sound found in the word 'chew')."
For most people, it's not the layout of the keyboard that's slowing them down, but rather the lack of effort in trying to learn proper typing techniques. You could probably put the keyboard in the worst possible configuration ever, with all Q,Z, V, and X all in the home row, and people could still learn to type sufficiently fast on it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'd say that it is because most people could not care less and QWERTY is status quo. QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it. That or someone with a burning desire to push Dvorak gets their hands on a lot of power.
On the bright side, no one is going to start using this change either. As other posters have pointed out, we used to have the Thorn character, and there's a reason we don't anymore.
Because there isn't definitive proof dvorak is faster even for physical keyboards (studies differ on if there's any gain), much less for 1-2 finger tap keyboards like on a phone. Because the world is used to qwerty and the costs of retraining in dvorak dwarf the lifetime gain of dvorak, if there actually is any. Because the fastest method of input on phones so far is to actually not type at all, but use a Swype-like mechanism and/or heavy prediction, which actually work worse with a dvorak keyboard.
I don't really think this is a huge gain either, but the Dvorak as second coming thing annoys the hell out of me.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's probably easy to learn, but if you want to maximize input speed, this guy sort of has the right idea, that consolidating common inputs into single units is the way to go to speed up entry. However stenographers have already come up with much more complete stenotype systems, used mainly by court reporters. The downside is that it's a bit esoteric to learn, moreso than Dvorak.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it
Yeah, but cancer is a vague threat at some point in the future. I need to get work done NOW, so I'm sticking with it.
IOW even the threat of cancer won't get people to change :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I would like to put forward a letter of my own to this man.
y?
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
He should really campaign for touch typing literacy first. Someone having to switch back and forth between looking at their screen and their keyboard will slow them down far more than a few extra keystrokes.
English spelling leans diachronic, meaning that a 'c' represents an underlying 'c' in the language from which a word was borrowed. For example, 'c' is pronounced differently in "focus" and "foci", but the use of the same letter allows readers to associate the plural with the same word's singular.
Besides, you don't need to free up 's' when there's a perfectly good symbol for the sound in the middle of "fishin'" and "fission": the integral sign.