8pen - A new way to write on mobile devices | Hacker News Reader

8pen - A new way to write on mobile devices

8pen.com

42 pointsGabeN44 comments

I actually forced myself to learn to use this. It seemed cool, and potentially very powerful, so I used it exclusively for 6 months on my phone.

I got to the point where it was completely coded into muscle memory, I can still type on it without the letters displayed. While it feels really cool when you are using it, there are some pretty fatal flaws.

First off, even when you are going full tilt, it is slower than using the built in keyboard. Tapping the screen is much faster than making a loop on it.

The bigger problem, which I think would be interesting to see addressed, is that there is no tactile feedback to let you know where your finger is. Sometimes you will accidentally hit the middle partway through a figure, giving the wrong character. Other times you are on the wrong side of the dividing lines when you get to the centre. These things happen often enough that it gets annoying having to go back and delete characters.

A quick fix for the "being in the wrong spot" problems would be to make the centre into a square. A more complicated fix would be to try to look at the patterns that advanced users are making and analyze them to figure out what they are actually typing ( If my finger is moving down, I am probably trying to type the top quadrant ).

When you get going, it is pretty cool, but you are still slower than other keyboards, and when you try to relax a bit you will hit the lines in the wrong places from time to time.

A bit of work on making it smarter, and giving some sort of tactile feedback, and it would be a really great way to touch type on a smartphone, but for now it is not worth it.

I also used it extensively. There are options to make the center spot much smaller that make it far easier to type with.

Also, my major complaint (and the reason I use Swiftkey now) is simply that the built in dictionary is simply not good enough at predicting N-gram sentences that I use often. There are times on swiftkey where I just tap the middle suggestion to write a sentence (although perhaps that's more revealing about my low-entropy text messaging habits than anything)

Cache, since it's down: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.8p...

This is genius as an idea, but I don't know if it could ever catch any sort of momentum in the market. It seems like it would take a long time to become fast at it.

A comparison to keyboards comes to mind - the keys on a keyboard really seem arbitrarily placed (though I am aware of the historical origin of QWERTY). Many people type slowly on keyboards, and it takes a lot of using one to get good at it. However the keys on a keyboard are labeled, so there is a lower threshold for newbies. Imagine what someone would look like typing on a blank keyboard. Their fingers would seem to be flying around at random.

People would be afraid to try learning it. That's what using 8pen is like.

And the problem is, there's no way to ever label all the loops and have them be visible.

It also seems like it would be easy to miss the center circle sometimes when closing a loop. I wish I could try it but I don't own an Android device.

Also, OP are you Gabe Newell or a different gaben?

> genius

Maybe if swype and gesture typing didn't exist, and it was still 2010.

(Or do people think this because they are only familiar with the iOS keyboard?)

I think this because I really love geometry and I think the motions that result from this system are beautiful and natural-looking, even if hard to execute on a small touch screen phone.

Tutorial video and app download at this address:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eightpen.a...

Definitely won't take the place still in my heart for Graffiti ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) ).

Still write some letters accidentally in Grafitti sometimes.

When I got my Galaxy note and tried out writing with the stylus -- it was hard to write normal english, grafitti kept on coming out

Interesting idea.

The explainer video is painful, and does most of the things I find painful in videos like that. Slow paced, oddly accented English, very wordy in places, and essentially monotone. No clear promise about what it's going to show you early on -- the first 15 seconds or so made me disinterested. It got better, but normally I'd just skip to something else by then.

I actually found the voice of the speaker, especially her accent, quite fascinating :)

minor pedantic note: I believe you meant that the first 15 seconds made you "uninterested", not "disinterested". "disinterested" means "impartial and objective" while "uninterested" means "not interested".

sorry but I try to correct this mistake when i see it ;)

thanks! (I was sort of aware of the distinction, but it was really late)

my favorite similar pedantry is nauseous vs. nauseated :)

This appears to be a variant of a technique known in the research literature as Quikwriting [1] (a type of FlowMenu [2]), which you can still try online [3]. There hasn't been much in the way of evaluation of Quickwriting, but one study found people's initial performance was around 4WPM, increasing to 16WPM after five hours of practice [4].

I haven't used 8pen's implementation (so I don't know how their version differs), but I imagine it has a similarly steep learning curve.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=288613 [2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=354401.354778 [3] http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/demos/quikwriting.html [4] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1028014.1028031

Agreed, I demo'd Dr. Perlin's Quikwriting for the Palm which back in the day of capacitive touch, one had to put a plastic film template overlay of the glyphs. While novel and innovative, it was unfortunately overshadowed by other keyboarding methods, fitaly et al. That said, 8open efforts while admirable need to be tested against stock 4.2 swipe with autocorrection which i found most satisfactory above all other methods. ymmv

8pen has been around for a while, I remember using it in 2010.

I think if you get use to it it might have promise. Myself, I can type fast enough on a QWERTY layout (even on a touchscreen) that any of these fancier input methods just slow me down and annoy me.

I tried this a while ago and could never get used to it. It asks for too much learning to be widely adopted. (Think dvorak)

I tried it with an open mind for about a week when it first came out a while ago. That was the end of it for me.

Lol, this is hilarious.

This is basically Palm OS Graffiti, brought back from the dead and celebrated like innovation.

Heck, even the Apple Newton had it before the Palm OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29

Did we watch the same video, or am I missing how this is terribly similar to Graffiti?

I agree with the graffiti comparison. I think Graffiti is preferable, also, because its characters seem to be faster to draw than the 8pen (to this day, I still write my capital Es like I'm using my Palm Zire).

Haha, I thought I was the only one who accidentally writes letters Grafitti style.

I was the worst at writing k's and x's weird.

At the time it was the fastest way to enter data, until the Treos and the original touchscreen/physical keyboard combos came out.

Lol.. Not sure who downvoted, but the act of writing letters on the bottom of the screen to type it in for you = Grafitti.

It may be possible that the trees (not handwriting) are being missed for the forest (writing at the bottom of a touch screen) is nothing new.

The novelty of Graffiti is that it emulates what we write, how we write it in analog form. The motions and shapes made while using this app don't have that sort of relationship. Is gesture typing, or Swype, or Swiftkey rip offs of Graffiti because one traces their finger in a path abstracted from the alphabet?

Did you even watch the video, you missed the point completely.

Recoding the alphabet for input reminds me of this. Shame the page is always overloaded! https://mail.google.com/mail/help/promos/tap/index.html

I think this would be like relearning touch typing. I don't think the time investment would be worth it. And, thumbs are not dexterous enough to make large words through this system without it getting annoying very quickly.

This is interesting but complicated. They might have more commercial success by copyrighting their keyboard layout and licensing it. The most confusing aspect is the number of turns needed to indicate amplitude.

I tried it for a few weeks. What was a real downside is that the tip of my finger got sorta friction burn from swiping too much. Maybe it was my cheapo phone screen, but it just wasn't working that well.

Overview video since site is down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9...

What do people think of this? I feel like it's already made defunct by other options such as the SwiftKey Flow Beta. Not to mention the need to learn a whole new style of writing.

its aweful...dont even bother unless its free

After trying most Android keyboard, I think the best and easiest way to write is using progressively-learning-predictive-technique like in SwiftKey.

I switched to Swiftkey a while back and like it. The swiftkey flow keyboard is the best of both worlds, swype and the swiftkey.

I'm just getting "This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later." on all of the links.

Error

Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

Anyone care to share the direct YouTube links?

Here you go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99vsUF4NuLk

Guys, you killed their site.

I remember using this when Swype was just new. It is very unwieldy and I tried it for a week or two of heavy frustration.

The Gesture swiping built into 4.2 is hard to beat. Between the fast two handed operation with good correction and the freaky fast voice transcription, it's hard to want to deviate from the stock keyboard.

Honestly, the demo video makes it look painfully slow, even when he's doing a full demo sentence compared to what I'm used to.

I've been using gesture typing and regular typing on my phone and my tablet. The muscle memory from one has flown into the other quite nicely. However, something like this would require me to relearn how I type altogether.

Something that, as someone who uses their phone and tablet for valuable emails all the time, I don't have time for.

I thought Swype and Gesture swiping were more or less the same. What's the difference?

Swype only lets some users via a "beta program" use the app. It has a cumbersome installer that never works on the first try. I like the style of the stock keyboard as well as a few of the layout nags. Finally, the Google keyboard also includes fast access to the text-to-voice app. That and I think the algorithm is flatly better than swype. (Swype was always more of a gimmick, especially after Gingerbread when the stock keyboard got a big upgrade. Gesture with the Google keyboard is something I use 75% of the time I'm typing)

I'm pretty sure he meant functionality-wise. As in, same sorts of gestures and such.

Swype is available for everyone, without registration: http://beta.swype.com It may have been that you needed to be approved before. But not anymore.

If you regularly write in multiple languages, Swiftkey3 is the way to go.

I've been using Swiftkey Flow Beta, and it's fantastic! You're right, Swiftkey's killer feature is the way it handles multiple languages without hassle. It is the difference between people hating touch screen keyboards and loving them. If I were an Android handset provider in a multi-language country I would install it by default on all phones. Android would blow all other platforms out of the water in no time then.

Does it do them at the same time?

I know on the Google keyboard you just slide (click and drag finger) across the keyboard to change languages..

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