Shark-keyboard?

[Demens]

Just saw this on news:
http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-5783650-1.html?part=cnet&tag=feed_2501&subj=ns_5783650

- One thing i've been hating on pda-onscreen keyboards is that you have to tap them. Tapping fastly usually ends in missing letters.

I think that what IBM is doing, will never reach the palmos-world, maybe we could have something similar? Maybe we just need a hack?

Funny how the name on that keyboard is Shark... ITS YOUR DESTINY! MUahaahaha. :D

[Sharkk717]

haha lol. did you take a look at what Scott R is doing with his fullscreen keyboard app?

regards, sharky

[jjesusfreak01]

I wouldnt be a hack, it would probably have to be a full blown silk plugin (we need more good silk plugins). It would be infinitely cool if Sharky could release something like this. It would have to be open source of course, to help eliminate the threat of prosecution from IBM.

[Scott R]

Personally, I'd like to move away from portrait mode and stylus input as much as possible, which is what my thumbboard app aims to assist in. I just took a quick look at this IBM keyboard and it looks neat, but it also looks familiar. Aren't there already some virtual keyboard apps that work this way?

[Tam Hanna]

Well, I dont quite understand the way bhow you would like to eg enter e and t which are in a line. You have to stop moving the pen, etc. Nothing for me.
I personally beleive that a good move may be the laser keybaords. I tried it at home typing with my leather gloves on a table and it didnt really hurt..

[Scott R]

Tam, I was thinking about how this IBM thing would work and I'm guessing that it assumes that you're done writing a letter when you pause briefly and done writing a word when you pause even longer. It probably then inserts a space in that situation. If so, it seems like it could be somewhat tiresome and also wouldn't be flexible for you to write, pause, think about what you want to write next, write some more, pause to think some more, etc. I would think that it would also be difficult to spot typos. You'll need to look at the lines you're drawing and not the area where the text is being written. And when you look up to check for typos, you'll be pausing and could end up inserting a space. Of course, I'm making several assumptions based on one little screenshot.

On that point, I don't see why this one idea gets front-page coverage on CNET. As I said before, there are plenty of creative and innovative text input solutions for the Palm and PPC platforms, and at first glance this one doesn't strike me as being that different from a couple of solutions that are already available.

[JAmerican]

If this was ever developed for handhelds, it would be a nice way to shorthen the lifespan of your digitizer and scratch your screen more

JAmerican

[SonyStyle]

built in keyboards are still the best

[Scott R]

I went back to CNET and read an actual article about it (I only saw the screenshot yesterday). The screenshot of the QWERTY keyboard is a bit misleading because they actually went out of their way to say that a QWERTY keyboard wasn't the best keyboard design for their technology. Basically, the gist of their concept is that it assigns a shorthand pattern to a word. So, take the picture of the QWERTY keyboard they have with the overlayed stroke and remove the QWERTY keyboard portion so that you only have the stroke. That's the "symbol" you would draw to form that word. So, I think it has some fuzzy logic there such that the width and height of the symbol wouldn't have to be perfect (perhaps even other aspects).

I think the idea is that you would eventually learn the pattern instictively so that you wouldn't have to look down at the keyboard (whatever layout you might use) and would just draw the symbol and the software would try to figure out what word you were trying to write.

So with that new bit of knowledge about this, here's my updated thoughts...Real-short words (e.g., "A", "I") will require that you look down and tap on that one letter (not necessarily a bad thing). Long words will also require that you look down since you won't likely remember the pattern for "elephant" and you'll be more apt to not draw it perfectly enough for the system to know what you're trying to write. 3-5 letter words, if you can successfully memorize the patterns, could be written quickly. The patterns for very common words (e.g., "the", your name) would be memorized with repetition. Less commonly used words would not. That may not be a problem, though.

In short, I'd say it sounds interesting, but I'm still skeptical of it. Correcting errors would likely be inefficient as it probably prints out the entire word upon completion of the symbol. If you (or the interpretation system) messes up, you've got to delete the word, and rewrite the entire word again.

Recently I've been thinking of ways that I can improve my virtual thumbboard in terms of reducing errors and allowing the user to look at the text area and not at the letters of the keyboard and I have some ideas which I hope to be able to implement. Back in the good old days of my Pilot 5000 I was able to write Graffiti very quickly without hardly ever looking at the Graffiti area. I think that a good input method should let you look at the text as it's appearing and be able to spot and quickly correct typos.