Alternate keyboards have fascinated me ever since I first got a smartphone capable of using them. My most memorable experimental trials were 8pen[1] and one where the user would "slalom" from key to key as columns of letters would move from the right side of the screen to the left, expanding the target area in a fisheye type zoom as you neared your desired letter.<p>Unfortunately the name of the second keyboard evades me, but as a single-finger input it was fairly efficient, and I believe targeted at disabled people with limited mobility.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.8pen.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.8pen.com/</a>
First, loved the technical writing here.<p>Second, if we're willing to make people learn a different keycap arrangement, why aren't we willing to make them learn a different physical layout? I suspect a completely different physical layout would likely reduce the error rate from confusion between keycap arrangements (e.g., you'll still have to use QWERTY).<p>Anyone remember "Fitaly"? It was a big timesaver on my Compaq iPaq. From Wikipedia:<p><i>FITALY is a keyboard layout specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input. The design places the most common letters closest to the centre to minimize distance travelled while entering a word. The name, FITALY, is derived from the letters occupying the second row in the layout (as QWERTY comes from the first row of standard keyboards)...</i><p><i>The aim of the design is to optimise text entry by organising keys to minimise key-to-key finger movement, allowing faster input through one-finger entry (compared to 10 fingers required to type efficiently on QWERTY layout). As compared to the 3-row QWERTY keyboard, FITALY has 5 rows with at most 6 letters in a row (as against 10 on QWERTY).</i><p><i>Keys are arranged based on individual frequencies of letters in the English language, and the probability of transitions.</i><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITALY" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITALY</a>
This was a fascinating article. The first thing that jumped out at me when I reached the end was "there's no way this would ever work."<p>I am a Swype user and love the product, but I'm reasonably fast at typing on it because I know the QWERTY layout like the back of my hand. Switching to a new layout would bring me back to a crawl. I'd probably be better off typing on a 9-digit pre-smartphone keypad at that point.<p>Cool things to consider though. I love the idea of an alternate and more efficient keyboard, but at around 140wpm, the idea of mentally and physically training myself to learn a new one at this stage in the game is sub-optimal.
The first swype-like input system I used was the IBM Shark.<p><a href="https://gigaom.com/2004/11/03/text_entry_epip/" rel="nofollow">https://gigaom.com/2004/11/03/text_entry_epip/</a><p>That had hexagonal keys and used the ATOMIK layout. It also focussed much more on shape, with the intention being that once you were expert, you could write words without looking at the keyboard, as the layout was just for guidance. You didn't actually have to start on the letter as long as the shape was right.
<p><pre><code> > Back in the Day...
> “Turn your pagers to 1993.” -Christopher Wallace
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Love the Biggie references :-)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notorious_B.I.G" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notorious_B.I.G</a>.
The article and the paper are a nice find that I plan to share on the Colemak forum.<p>One thing I've found is that a layout that is highly optimized for touch typing is terrible for swiping. I touch-type Colemak on hardware keyboards; for those who don't know, it's a layout optimized for fast and ergonomic typing in English (there are variants for some other languages), without being as different from QWERTY as Dvorak is. SwiftKey supports Colemak out of the box for English, so I tried it. I normally use SwiftKey Flow for writing long bits of text on my tablet.<p>My experience with Flow and Colemak was that the rate of errors was much higher -- there were far more ambiguities, mainly because many of the most common letters are on the home row (arst neio), and so you're often just swiping back and forth across the home row, which could mean anything. You also end up having to swipe farther, because of more lateral movement from one end of the keyboard to the other, and less top-to-bottom movement.<p>I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's tried swiping on a Dvorak layout.<p>One final note, if anyone hasn't seen MessageEase, they should check it out. It's a compelely different model for typing that involves a very compact and optimized layout to minimize finger movement, as well as a mixture of tapping and swiping. If it had the benefit of SwiftKey's language model, I'd use it for everything, but as it stands, I use it mainly where completion is not available (e.g. in terminal sessions).
I actually taught myself an "optimized" keyboard layout called QGMLWY[1] and got up to my normal typing speed. I had to go back to qwerty though because it was too much overhead to get the layout on every device I use. I definitely noticed an improvement in ergonomics.<p>My current project is building an Atreus keyboard[2] which will have the QGMLWY layout in hardware, hopefully bypassing all the compatibility issues.<p>[1] <a href="http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization" rel="nofollow">http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/technomancy/atreus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/technomancy/atreus</a>
This was really cool! I realize there are many DoF in this so pure optimization likely wouldn't solve it, but I'd like to see an optimization on the form of the keyboard itself in addition to just the ordering of the keys (like minuum?)
Of course, the inventors of Swype originally did this as well:<p><a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shumin_Zhai/publication/228875756_SHARK_2_a_large_vocabulary_shorthand_writing_system_for_pen-based_computers/links/0c96051688d4ace342000000.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shumin_Zhai/publication/...</a><p>They recently won a "lasting impact" award for this paper.
Interesting posting date.<p>My hunch, upon starting to read this article & looking at the patterns, is that as soon as you arrive at an optimized keyboard layout, you have created a new kind of cursive & you can dispense with the keyboard. You might need one more optimization step to do it, but you can unfold the strokes patterns & there you have a kind of shorthand.
Fascinating - although I wonder if you're missing a trick by not looking at misspellings?<p>I often don't know how to correctly spell a word. On T9 it can be difficult to get a prediction if you don't know how many Cs & Ss there are in "necessary".<p>I find that SwiftKey (through which this comment is typed) is very good at correcting my showing as I swipe.
Feature request for any swype hackers reading this: please allow me to type punctuation using graffiti. Faster to draw a semi-colon with my finger than to tap the modifier key, peck the semi-colon and then modifier again.