5 Tiles Keyboard
play.google.com
play.google.com
I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.)
This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm.
If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless.
Thank you.
Most require a large learning curving. This one feels like the iOS one but it's a bit smoother.
Nice find!
Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.
There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards. I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty. The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers? In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade alternative keyboard for my personal use.
For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that realize it.
I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits.
You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.
You'll probably spend a few days with a text editor open so you can click over to find { or whatever. You'll probably let more fingers touch the keyboard, just so you can anchor your hands in space, over 2 up 1 for O or whatever.
I'm not a fast typist, but when i moved from typing and looking, to just muscle memory, i got a nice speed boost.
What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160 character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.
I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?
To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?
These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.
I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles.
Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing.
Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'".
Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…
/edit: And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version tomorrow.
/edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".
The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work.
This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character.
The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.
But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use.
One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.
It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.
I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.