I made the experience that an extra-bold title might attract readers. Let’s see. It just occurred to me today that touch based input using software-emulated keyboards with keys and stuff is more stupid than anything else I can think of. Why is that?
Keyboards were invented for typewriters. Typewriters are mechanical machines used by humans to avoid handwriting. Since the first typewriters were invented somewhere around the 18th century, they were rather clumsy, and the machinery used wasn’t really working too well, which is why something as awkward as the QWERTY-layout was invented. The QWERTY-layout, still used today, had its justification in the fact that early typewriters had problems when adjacent keys were used simultaneously, which lead to those keys blocking each other. At this point, in the year 1867, keyboard innovation stalled. No real invention has ever had an effect on any keyboard that is widely used until today. There have been some, like the Dvorak layout, a proposed alternative to the QWERTY-layout, but none of these made it’s way to the mainstream, unfortunately.
Today, we are using beautiful, ultra-turbo-high-speed computers that are still equipped with QWERTY-keyboards. And the nonsense doesn’t stop here, we even shrunk those keyboards down to create digital equivalents. This is just ridiculous. I am in no way doubting that a trained writer can actually write fast using an iPhone, iPad or Android Keyboard, but the reason is certainly not the superior design of those keyboards, but our ability to adapt to even the worst of circumstances.
Of course, numerous attempts have been made to improve the typing experience by adding suggestions, which is done on both Android and iOS, and by invisibly changing the “Hit Box” of each key, which is also done on both platforms. I have done qwerted, which did that highlighting both extremely and visually. There have been similar attempts to do this by Thickbuttons, and maybe some others. IBM recently filed a patent that deals with arranging the keys on a touch keyboard to adapt to a specific user, certainly interesting. But it just masks the fact that this approach is seriously flawed, as it still relies on the basic QWERTY-pattern, instead of something better.
Another approach that has become quite popular lately is the Swype‘s approach. When using Swype ( or SlideIT, and there are certainly a few other similar apps for all systems except stock iOS ), the user just moves over the keys the input consists of. Their homepage has some demo videos if you are curious. Again, the foundation is the old-school QWERTY-keyboard, and even though this concept is highly interesting and working reportedly very well, I consider it broken by design.
The question is: why are we wasting a huge amount of screen real estate displaying keys that won’t ever be typed ( or touched over ) ? Take for example Q and X. Those keys are so rarely used after a word has started, it’s unnecessary that they are displayed by default. But it’s getting better: We can even predict very reliably which words are likely to be typed even after a few words or letters have been typed. If you don’t trust me on this one, you should try Google Scribe. The techniques used here are based on n-grams ( at least a part of it ). N-Grams describe a set of n words, which can then be evaluated in terms of probability. Google has extracted a huge set of n-grams from their datasets which can be obtained at the LDC.
Someone must have come up with a great idea to revolutionize touch input. Like, not some fancy new feature, no, a completely new approach. Do you know Dasher? Something like that, of course massively polished.
I hope you are getting my point here, and I’m sorry I don’t have anything more to offer but a few entry points if you want to read further. This is really interesting field and, if time allows, I’d like to do some work here. What are your ideas?
. So basically, your mac adressbook is now able to get the gravatars again.. hrhr-