Gizmodo Australia » typing

Lenovo On The Slow, Painful Evolution Of Keyboards

John Herrman — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:36:20 +0000

The Lenovo T400 series, aside from its occasional tussles with heavy machinery, doesn’t immediately stand out in the mid-size, high-end laptop crowd. That is, until you try to type on one.

What Lenovo has done sounds like a smaller deal than it actually is: on the T400 series, the delete and escape keys are about twice as large as normal, taking an odd, long vertical form. As anyone who has used international keyboards can attest, even a little layout or proportion change can throw your typing off. Now why in the world would Lenovo go and do that? USA Today explains:

In designing the new ThinkPad, [Lenovo] installed keystroke-tracking software on about 30 employees’ computers (They volunteered). On average, they used the “Escape” and “Delete” keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only “outboard” keys, or non-letter keys, that hadn’t been enlarged.

As you can see, this is probably a practical change. The most fascinating thing about this kind of change, though, is how rare it is. Nearly everything about modern keyboards harks back to the early days of the typewriter, from letter spacing to key layout. This anecdote from the article sums up the problem fairly succinctly:

Tom Hardy, who designed the original IBM PC of 1981, said companies have tried many times to change the sizes of keys. That first PC had a smaller “Shift” key than IBM’s popular Selectric typewriter did, and it was placed in a different spot, in part because the industry didn’t think computers would replace typewriters for high-volume typing tasks. IBM reversed course with the next version to quiet the outcry from skilled touch-typists.

When we’re all living on Mars, our spacepods will still have Model Ms. [USA Today]

Cinema’s Most Dramatic Typing Scenes

Mark Wilson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Are you telling me that no one has thought to combine the inherent suspense of a typing scene with the added drama of slow motion? I smell a low-hanging Oscar, Hollywood visual effects artists.

OK, Joel Johnson’s comment on this video was funnier than mine.

Every time I hit “Save” in Movable Type I pause and mouth “Bingo”.

It’s true, too, though I’ve seen him jazz it up with a squinted blow to his finger guns.

UPDATE: For whatever reason, Current video doesn’t like our site. So either check out the clip HERE or over at bbGadgets. Your call. [via bbGadgets]

KeyRight’s Look & Learning Typing Solution = If Colouring Books and Twister Had a Tech Baby

Gizmodo US Edition — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:47:13 +0000

Right-pinky to red, left-pointer to sky blue: KeyRight’s Look & Learn Typing Solution takes us back to old-school learning by assigning each of your fingers to a certain set of keys distinguished by colour. This QWERTY keyboard comes with a typing tutor, which helps you become a touch typist through muscle memory, although the rainbow keyboard’s intuitiveness makes this software unnecessary. Plus, dont’cha think learning to type on this keyboard would be a lot more effective than simply being forced to type “a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” a million times over and over and over and over again? Yeah, we do too. [KeyRight via cNet]

TouchType Allows for Landscape Writing in iPhone Mail

Jesus Diaz — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:15:00 +0000

If you are like me and prefer to write in landscape mode in the iPhone, go and download TouchType for just 99 cents at the iTunes App Store. This program will allow you to write your emails faster and with more accuracy than with the smaller portrait keyboard. When are you are done, click a button to send the text to the Mail application, where a new message will be created with your message text. Fill the To and Subject fields and you will be ready to go. [iTunes via TechCrunch]

Blindingly Fast Touchscreen Text Entry System Gets a Push By Creator of T9

John Mahoney — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:45:00 +0000

Everyone who has owned a mobile phone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system that knows you mean “DONKEY” when you type 366539 in an SMS. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype–a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo–so amazing that we remembered we’ve seen it somewhere before. Thankfully, it could be heading to the iPhone and Android really, really soon.

This is the demo Kushler gave to CNET, where he claims he can get a blazing 50 words per minute with the system. And we believe him–it’s quite a sight.

And then we remembered WritingPad–a demo of an Android text editor that uses the exact same interface:

Turns out, as the folks at jkOnTheRun also point out, that the idea of this kind of input system has been around since 2004 (when touchscreens were still kind of from the future), when it was developed by IBM and called SHARK. Now, SHARK is called ShapeWriter, who are the developers of the WritingPad Android app and a similar app for the iPhone. How about that?

Swype is currently near prime time for Windows Mobile, with an SDK to bring it to other platforms in the works. ShapeWriter’s Android version of WritingPad is forthcoming, and their iPhone version, which was released briefly before being pulled from the App Store for reasons unknown, should be back soon. No matter who brings it, I’m liking this. [CNET via Gadget Lab, jkOnTheRun, ShapeWriter]

Question of the Day: How Fast Can You Type? (Test Yourself)

Sean Fallon — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 +0000

With all of that time spent on the computer, I would imagine that most of you can type at a pretty good clip. Back in elementary school I managed a personal best of 88 WPM (Not that great, but I still had to cheat by working over the same paragraph for an hour or so *shhhhh*). Anyway, I’m curious to know what the average is, so pick the closest figure to your WPM score in the poll after the break. If you don’t know your WPM, take this typing test to find out (set on default: 1 min, Zebra, WPM). Make sure to enter in your net speed figure.

USB Speedometer Measures WPM From Super Slow to Court Reporter Speed

Jason Chen — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:20:00 +0000

We can see this USB typing Speedometer being extremely useful for young typists who want to improve their speed, or Brian Lam if he ever wants to type faster than three words per minute, but it’s a USB gadget that plugs into your computer and tells you how fast you’re typing. If you want to keep track of how much you’ve typed during the entire day (say, if you’re a writer getting paid by the word), it measures that too. The meter goes up to 260 WPM, but the world’s fastest typist can only go 212 WPM. And that was with a DVORAK keyboard layout, which you’re probably not using. [Drink Stuff via Nexus 404 via Technabob]