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')."

Comments

No

[mmcxii]

What teh hell is his problem? We don't need anotehr key on out keyboards.

Re:No

[elfprince13]

Not only at, but we already have two letters to solve ðis problem (although it would help if /. didn't delete the first one).

Thorn

[Dynamoo]

Thorn already exists as an obsolete form of "th". I don't think it will work it I try to enter it here, but here goes..

Bah. Doesn't go far enough.

[Chris Mattern]

I insist on the return of thorn and eth to the language! If only slashdot's character support wasn't utterly broken, I could type them here...

Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead?

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead?

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead?

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead?

[serviscope_minor]

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 :)

In reply to this gentleman...

[TCaptain]

I would like to put forward a letter of my own to this man.

y?

"The" is so last Thursday

[kheldan]

I'd like to start a petition to include a "Teh" key on all standard keyboards, who's with me?

Nah ...

[rjmx]

The "Any" key would be far more useful.

Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead?

[Goaway]

The comfort comes from that comfortable feeling that you are special and better than everyone else because you use a special keyboard.