A keyboard without keys - Dasher

What I really like about this is that this is open source doing cutting edge stuff that will benefit people everywhere. There's not a hint of "me too", "microsoft replacement" here. The promise of open source in full force.

This is the kind of thing that even 10 years ago would have been barricaded behind dozens of patents and royalties to the point of being unusable; just another technical oddity that no one could afford to use. A few would have been donated to token disabled folks for publicity and then that would have been the end of it.

Here's the link to get it and try it out, sans RTFA.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

I was shocked when I tried this how easy it is to pick up. I got fast enough to IM comfortably after two or three sentences. I may break this out now and again when I'm too tired or messed up to type properly.

Apparantly you can train it on sample text, which I haven't yet tried. I wonder if this can work well for code.

When I first saw Dasher about 4 years ago I think there was a demo using a camera for eye movement sensing--the idea being that your eyes can find the next letter faster than your hand-controlled cursor.

I actually read "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" a while back and all I could think the whole time was "binary search, binary search, huffman tree, something other than linear search please god".