Keybee: a new keyboard layout designed specifically for touchscreen devices | Hacker News Reader

Keybee: a new keyboard layout designed specifically for touchscreen devices

keybee.it

38 pointsse7entime69 comments

Looking at this Keybee layout it seems not very usable. The biggest change when typing on touchscreen is using your two thumbs instead of ten fingers, and IMO for the flow is more important that letters alternate the left (L) and right (R) thumb, instead of minimizing distance. This way one finger can move while the other is pressing. I'll take their "Hello there is a starman waiting in the sky" as an example. On a qwerty layout the letters you type with L and R are evenly distributed and the longest run with the same thumb is 3: "There" is LRLLL. On Keybee however, the same sentence is typed almost entirely with the right thumb (dominant hand, so I would probably use it to type the middle letters W, H, A and space). Now the longest run is 16! I guess this would be a bit more balanced is I figured out which of the middle keys to take with my left thumb, but it doesnt seem worth it especially with the enormous keyboard. As part of the younger generation I can type blind and relatively fast and error free on touchscreen. If you really need to type a long email just switch to a regular keyboard, having ten fingers typing is much faster than any layout using only your thumbs will achieve.

That's because Keybee is designed for one thumb typing. So it is correct to use mostly the right thumb. Happy new year..!!!

Having the keyboard centered on the ipad seems to suggest otherwise.

Typed on Keybee.

You can move it to the left or right.

Do you have a flipped version for left-handed typing then?

No need to be flipped because the Keybee arrangement starts from the center of the keyboard. So it is optimized for left and right handed at the same time.

I thought you did not understand but rethinking I think Marco is mostly right, actually.

If I am a right hand user, the right part of my keyboard is covered by my hand, and is easier to be used. I've seen this in keyboard which don't have any keys on a 1/4th circle on the bottom right of the screen.

If I am a left hand user, the left part of my keyboard is covered by my hand and is easier to be used. But the left part of the keyboard has less important keys than the right part.

Essentially, a mirror of the keyboard would be more optimal for left hand users. Although the issue is less important than on say QWERTY. Because the amount of space on the outer rings (most strain) is still the same for left and right hand users. And that's Marco's point.

The amount of space your fingers can move back is smaller than the amount of space they can reach up. Going back puts more strain on the fingers. (Anecdotal experience.) (EDIT: and the arm, as well.)

Perfect..!!!

this, tried it for a while just to realize that it was meant for right handed people, it felt cumbersome.

Writing anything on modern touchscreen smartphones is so frustrating. I think the problem is that the touchscreen is always going to be an inferior interface to a physical button.

I remember what it was like using PDAs and smartphones with actual physical keys. After a brief period of adjustment to a new device, I was soon typing without any mistakes. It was such a low-friction transfer of my thoughts to digital form, I took it for granted it would always be that easy.

I look forward to trying one of the new Blackberry phones for my next upgrade.

You might be interested in the physical keyboard add-on module "Moto Mods" for the Motorola Z series https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keyboard-mod-a-physical-k...

Yay, QWERTY! QWERTY is being used for legacy reasons ("because we've always had QWERTY"), because its the widely available standard (including on computers not owned by the user meaning users need to ask or configure other computers are swap back and forth between layouts), and because people don't want to relearn a new layout. The original reason why QWERTY was desired is due to typewriters getting stuck less quick because the movement wasn't efficient. That was intentional, a legacy from the 19th century!

Programmer Dvorak or Colemak are alternatives to QWERTY but they suffer from a lack of widespread adoption. Keyboard shortcuts might still be awkward, you're still going to meet a massive learning curve (less with Colemak though since it deviates only 6 key positions from QWERTY). See this post on SO for an in depth, anecdotal comparison between the 3 [2]. A new keyboard layout is going to suffer from these issues as well. Most of these are chicken-egg problems. But that doesn't mean it isn't better in the long run.

Without having used Keybee some things to keep in mind, apart from not being programmer/sysadmin friendly, are that some users use a smartphone with one hand whilst others use two. Another one seems that the screen is being used more than with QWERTY.

I've sticked to SwiftKey because it can support multiple dictionaries, and I like that there's a lot of themes available. However they got bought by Microsoft recently. I also got Hacker Keyboard installed, so if I'm using CLI (local via Termux or SSH) I can easily use common UNIX keybinds. So I'm certainly interested trying something better, even if there's a learning curve attached and even if its only going to be usable during touchscreen usage.

The keyboard you linked seems akin to what I had on a Nokia N900 / Nokia N950 or a Nokia Communicator. Its keys are small, it adds weight/space or takes time to pull in/out. Plus, you're stuck to a Motorola Z (Motorola doesn't give software updates for long). Take for example the iPad Pro case which includes a keyboard. Its not a bad keyboard given its size but even that layout isn't standard given the key spaces are different (small shift for example!). Both very much not ideal IMO. Another thing one can consider is a Bluetooth keyboard for situations where one ends up having to type a lot, or short, quick bursts such as during keynote taking f.e. student during seminar. I'd say that is a very viable use case. Disadvantage is these use batteries which get eventually depleted and cannot be recharged. Plus the insecurities of Bluetooth being wireless & sniffable.

Also important in these comparisons is how people use their keyboards (touchscreen and physical). Which exact layout version do they use? Do they swipe on their touchscreen? How long have they used layout X or Y? For example, I never really got into swiping even though it has been available for a decade. And finally, there's voice dictation which has taken some ground past years.

[1] https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question458.htm

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23078626/are-alternative...

>The original reason why QWERTY was desired is due to typewriters getting stuck less quick because the movement wasn't efficient. That was intentional, a legacy from the 19th century!

That is an urban myth refuted by the author of qwerty, but it just doesn't die.

While I agree with your sentiment, I don't think physical keyboards are a good solution either. Not having the smallest hands, I vividly remember trying to type on those tiny buttons of old and getting pretty frustrated, too.

I was thinking about switching from Android to Sailfish OS for a while now and quickly realized that my personal reason for Android lock-in is a keyboard called SlideType[1]. I really have to figure out how to write keyboards for Sailfish one day.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.latinsud.a...

I still use my Blackberry 9900 as my main phone and for work emails. They keyboard is fantastic and given the comparatively small size of the phone nothing comes close. I'm aware I'm on the losing team though as so many family & friends use WhatsApp now and I can't have that.

They newer Android Blackberries are OK but their keyboard isn't as good as the 9900.

Many of my friends and family agree, but for anything over a sentence or two I just dictate. Voice recognition on my iPhone is fantastic these days and I hear Android is as good if not better, even without internet access. I think the world is moving past typing for shorter, informal input.

Did you try swipe? I can't really use it personally because I switch between different languages too often, but it's practical if you're only writing in one language.

Swipe-based touch keyboards don't work for me. Compared to touch-tapping, I find I have worse accuracy. I also find them much more frustrating, because correcting a swipe mistake is a lot more expensive compared to tap mistake. At least when tapping, I get steady and immediate feedback when spelling out a word, and I can fix a mistake quickly just using backspace and without much thought, and then carry on as usual. But with the swipe keyboards I tried, I find out about mistakes only after I spelled out a whole word, and at that point it's really awkward to fix without breaking my flow. Often what happens in my case is that all the autosuggestions are way off the mark.

Does anyone have any research on the effectiveness of swype-based keyboards? Accuracy and correcting mistakes based on dictionaries? How does age and previous experience affect the use cases?

Keybee has suggestions support based on AOSP dictionaries, by default off.

Text algorithms (swipe, prediction and autocorrection) create issues on performances of the mobile devices (swiftkey for instance is super slow) and often mistakes due to misunderstanding meaning slowing down the typing experience.

google keyboard is unsuable currently on iOS 11 (iPhone 6S), but that might also be because Apple updares are messing up with older phones.

For my experience working on iOS is very complex for third party keyboards. Also Google has problems with it. :-(

They should have two layout options: Qwerty & Keybee. After all, the hexagonal keys save space with qwerty as well.

> Yes, all the greatest tech innovations are free. So Keybee is free and it will be always free because the keyboard is the basic human

> Keybee was invented, developed and patented by Marco Papalia

That is dishonest, it isn't free if it is encumbered by patents. Also i'm not sure how this works considering the author is from Italy and EU doesn't consider software patentable.

While I fully agree with you, there are several issues here:

- the word "free" has several meanings in English, i.e. "free" as in "no charge" and "free" as in "freedom" (free access, free software, etc.) - the answer given there does not indicate which one of those is meant.

- patents have most likely been granted in countries that recognise them - this does not prevent from the patent being put into public domain. However, the second sentence in question 17 seems to indicate that the license bears a fee, which also contradicts one of the meanings of "free above.

Either way, the Q&A/FAQ is full of marketing mumble.

The sentence itself implies libre, not being patent-encumbered. Donating a great innovation to humanity means making the knowledge freely available for use. It does not mean using the knowledge to create a product and then making this product freely available.

thank you, random stranger, for sharing your gnu/extremism.

while i am in no way defending software patents (which I don't like at all), i find the full-frontal attack attitude that you and many other gnu/zealots exhibit towards random strangers on the internet so infuriating that i am writing this comment here to let you know that people like you are exactly what prevents me (and many others) from getting involved in some free (libre) software projects.

thanks so much for your contribution to the advancement of libre software.

yuck.

My comment has absolutely nothing to do with preaching free software or even trying to push people to make their software available under a free license. You could even take out the word "libre" from my comment, if it irks you that much. The meaning is the same. And the meaning is simply my interpretation of that sentence. After having read that sentence, the last thing I expected was for it to be patented and I was so sure of that, that I did also feel it was dishonest to put that sentence on the webpage.

Yes, I generally would prefer for people to publish their software as libre, especially if it does not interfere with their way of making money as is the case here, yes, I was somewhat annoyed that I could not actually try this keyboard out, since yes, I am enough of a free software zealot for my personal use that I only have F-Droid installed and yes, I do actually find it unacceptable for a keyboard app on Android to not at least allow its source code to be inspected, as once enabled it can read everything you type from personal conversations down to passwords and Android does fuckall to prevent a keyboard app from just sending all of that to somewhere on the internet, but none of that was expressed in my previous comment.

> The sentence itself implies libre

Free can imply free as in speech (libre) or free as in beer (gratis). Libre does not imply not being patent encumbered either, it refers to the software license.

Also, I suggest you Hanlon's razor [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

https://www.google.nl/search?q=define+free&oq=define+free

>The sentence itself implies libre, not being patent-encumbered

Nope. It is used as an adverb, for which the dominant meaning is 'without cost'.

And you know this. You are just here spinning. I love libre software, but when you abuse language to make a political point it disgusts me just as much when I hear the words 'pro-life' or 'job-creators'.

If you want to claim you continuously confuse 'free' as as an adverb for patent free gnu stuff you are either an idiot or disingenuous

Free as free app and not pay app. Most keyboards are trial or you have to pay for use them. That's it.

"swipe typing" is already streets ahead speed-wise on mobile devices. One touch per word. And having a little travel distance is actually a benefit as it helps distinguish the words.

this is a very important point. i tried swiping in my phone using the colemak keyboard layout which i use on normal keyboards, and found it utterly unusable because the prediction quality dramatically goes down. this is most likely caused by the lack of shapes made with the swiping gestures: colemak has the most common letters on the home row so on practice you're mostly swiping left/right.

I'm confused by this statement:

> "Keybee is simple and clear because all the letters are always available (no hidden keys) and they all have the same size"

Checking my iPhone and my wife's Android phone, as well as an old Windows Phone I have in a drawer, all of the letters of the alphabet are available on the default board, none are hidden, and they are all the same size as each other on each respective keyboard.

At first I thought you might be talking about non-English keyboards, but looking at the Keybee board screenshots it's the same standard 26 English letters.

So, from that particular standpoint, how does Keybee offer a more complete set of English language characters than a device's default keyboard? This feels like either a bad translation or dubious marketing.

I think that statement was referencing other alternative keyboards, not standard qwerty

Yeah, I'm starting to think it's a language barrier issue and nothing deceptive per se.

Check this link (slide number 9) for the answer: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/keybee2013/keybee-she-smar...

That does absolutely nothing to answer my question. You show a QWERTY layout in the center, from a Windows Phone device, with every letter key the same size relative to one another as I said above.

Maybe I'm just not smart enough to see the difference from a slide with screenshots and captions that make dubious statements, but I'd appreciate if you would explain anyway.

Of course. There is no difference between qwerty and keybee in term of instantness. The difference is between other alternative layouts which claims to be quicker even if they do not shows all the letters (lack of instantness). Qwerty as Keybee shows all the letters at the same size. But Keybee can show them two times bigger than qwerty thanks to the hex structure.

That's still a non-answer. I'm going to chalk it up to a language barrier as I don't want to assume bad faith on your part.

I already answered at your question. There's no difference between qwerty and keybee for your specific argument. Also the other user answered to you.

I'm not sure how this answers GP's question.

I don't see the point... QWERTY is great for touch screens, for the same reason it was great for typewriters: common letter combinations are spaced out. Typing with two thumbs on a small screen is comfortable due to greater space between keys and high rate of alternating hands.

I understand your point but it is not only about speed..but ergonomoics, key size and most importantly you can type just with one thumb and let the second hand free..!!

I think the concept is cool, I've always been interested in alternative input methods. However, I agree that patenting it is bullshit.

The keyboard is interesting, it takes a while to get used to the new layout but once you get the hang of it it seems fun.

I just enabled it. I'm still a bit slow but so far it seems there's less fat fingering. I'm in the smaller phones camp so I guess fat fingering is a larger issue for me than it is for most who prefer the big flagship phones.

Problem with smaller phones is the hexagon shaped keyboard takes up more space than the standard AOSP (even with predictions and number row) or Hacker Keyboard. Which matters more on smaller phones. Agreed on this seemingly causing less fat fingering, but good prediction-based keyboards which have users swiping take fat fingering into account.

Thank you for the comments. Please note that I made this Keybee Keyboard first for myself because I could not type good in a qwerty smartphone. Secondly I decided to make it for everyone and give it for free (free apps and no ads). I invested a lot of time, passion and money just to create a better typing experience for more people. I also decided to protect my idea because, in case of success, I can tranform this project in a full time job. There's nothing wrong on that an nobody obliges you to use it as your definitive keyboard. Happy 2018..!!! Marco. ;-)

Interesting! I'm glad to see so many people are willing to learn a new keyboard layout. I was looking at alternative keyboard layout for touch-screens for a while, and ended up coding my own. It's based on two-thumbs input and the layout is designed for alternating between them. There are only 5 buttons on each side/thumb so you don't really miss. You can swipe for special keys like enter, backspace, symbols, emoji etc, and so you should have the whole input spectrum available.

I've used it for over a year now. My friends beat me when their dictionary is on. But without it, I'm around 30% faster. For writing commands, code or formulas - it's superior, and that's why I like it.

It took me about 3 weeks to get on par with a normal dictionary-less QUERTY. Learning new layouts like this takes really long as it has to go into your muscle memory before you feel comfortable. I guess that's why we're still stuck with QUERTY (which was designed to slow down typing on mechanical typewriters).

It might be worth checking out for the technically-inclined. It's open source and as far as I know - patent free. See https://github.com/Adellica/Thumbkeyboard.

I'll have a "P" please, Bob.

https://youtu.be/7Kes23z_oAw?t=2m1s

Haha. That was my first thought too. This is in desperate need of an easter egg where you get to go on a gold run!

That's amazing..!!!

Does that website really just have a single sentence of explanation? I was looking for the theory of what it is trying to solve and why they choose that particular layout. And ideally, some reasonably done studies to demonstrate that it is an improvement.

Also here: https://two-wrongs.com/rethinking-text-input-on-touchscreens

You can check the patent.

Also here: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/keybee2013/keybee-she-smar...

MessageEase keyboard works great for me. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...

Once you have it in your muscle memory, you can sort of type blindly and use symbols as quick as other letters. It doesn't look like KeyBee can improve my typing.

The 4/5 setup screen is confusing because the OK button is hidden. I actually though it wanted me to type in PLAY and got frustrated until I figured out it was just an animation. But I couldn't see the button until I scrolled accidentally and the OK button appeared.

I agree and did exactly the same. Also it describes twipe but the animation shows it typed.

I will fix it soon, I promise..!!! Thank you for your feedback.

I really like the twipe straight up from '123' through '.' to ' ' but it feels like an implementation mistake not to consider that action a space after a dot which is supposed to return the keyboard to ABC. Instead it stays on 123.

There is a specific settings for dot-space combination. Check on Keybee settings.

Does it work in landscape mode? I had some odd issues with landscape mode where the keyboard seemed to be in portrait mode instead, overlaying my other app (WhatsApp in this case).

Hello. For now Keybee it is not optimized for smartphones in landscape mode.

I think a small line should be drawn between "touchscreen devices" and "handheld small touchscreen devices" (please read as "smartphones").

It's just too much muscle involved to switch layouts

Last updated 6 months ago

"For 2018 we are working to add new layouts and more themes..!!!"

- https://twitter.com/KeybeeKeyboard/status/947406254871281664

could be a good thing. sometimes it’s a sign of stability and focus rather than abandon.

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