Five Finger Keyboards

Tijaska writes "Mobile devices are becoming more capable all the time, but their small screens and keyboards limit their usefulness. This article shows ways in which five buttons located on the edges of a mobile could be used in combinations to generate 325 or many more different characters, making a full-sized keyboard unnecessary. If that sounds like a tall story, remember the case of the retired 93 year old telegraph operator who used a Morse key to send a text message faster than a teenager could send it via mobile phone (see here)."

Twiddler.

[AltGrendel]

I prefer the Twiddler [handykey.com]. After some practice, it's actually pretty easy to use.

Re:AKA chording keyboard

[phil reed]

I remember reading about chording keyboards as far back as early Byte magazines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The idea is not new. There's a reason they haven't caught on, and it's the same reason that Dvorak keyboards haven't -- it's very hard to learn unless you're relatively young.

It would also help if there was a standard for chorded data entry.

Re:Prototype - Microwriter

[DaveCar]

Old news [wikipedia.org]. I remember reading about this back in the early 80s when I had my ZX Spectrum.

As endorsed by Douglas Adams.

Here's an old example

[MythMoth]

The Sharp Agenda had its "microwriter" chording keyboard.

http://www.geoff.org.uk/museum/microwriter.htm [geoff.org.uk]

Circa 1989, so patent worries should be minimal!

Why the Qwerty exists

[CaptainPatent]

This is an interesting concept, but I feel that a true standard will need to lend familiarity to the infamous qwerty keyboard.
 
The reason qwerty was adopted as a standard was not for efficiency, but because kingpin (at the time) IBM decided that when electronic buffers were introduced to typewriters and there was no longer a need to obscure keys on the keyboard in order to prevent mechanical jams, a keyboard layout they were currently producing would become the standard.
 
Since then, every typing class, every default layout and the vast majority of keyboards have been based upon the qwerty layout.
 
While some people on the bleeding edge of technology are willing to learn something new (I personally am proficient on Dvorak, Palm Graffiti, phone texting, and blackberry) A real standard of input will arise when the device is both similar to the qwerty equivalent and small enough to take along in your pocket. The average users are more willing to learn something slightly different than new altogether.

Chords are used all the time for subtitling

[pfft]

There are services for hearing impaired people, where they have operators watching TV and adding subtitles to the programs in real-time. (Obviously the subtitles will a few seconds behind the audio, but it's good enough to let you watch the news).

Those operators use chording keyboard (though with more than 5 keys), set up so that particular key chords map to common phrases. Typing this way is a lot faster than typing on a conventional keyboard, but it obviously is a lot of effort to learn.

So yes, it does work.

Re:One finger keyboard

[monk.e.boy]

I worked with blind and partially sighted kids who use 5 finger keyboards. They use a 'chord' system, like a guitar or piano.

The chords kinda look like the letter you are spelling, so to create a J you would hold the keys that kinda make that shape, I forget the exact sequence, but it was pretty easy to use.

But, the 5 finger keyboard was used like a regular keyboard, it was placed on a desk. I dunno how this would work if you had to hold it at the same time. Much harder I'd imagine.

monk.e.boy

Did you read the article?

[godfra]

He clearly lays out a way around this problem - just have an identical row of buttons down each side, and when you turn the thing on, you quickly calibrate the keyboard so it knows which button to use for your thumb etc.

Re:IM-speak compression

[everphilski]

we do :)

Q codes [flashwebhost.com], internationally recognized 3 letter codes beginning with the letter Q. Used in the Ham community, but there are Q codes for aeronautical, nautical, etc. use as well. It is possible to hold a meaningful conversation with someone, regardless of what language you speak.

Re:emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean: Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift

Re:One finger keyboard

[twoboxen]

"I grow my right hand thumbnail long, file it down so I have a bit of an edge leaning left"... Gross. Move it to your pinky nail, and I'm sure the number of your "friends" with similar abnormalities will grow faster than you expect. I'll leave it to you to figure out why ;)

Re:Chords are used all the time for subtitling

[LWATCDR]

For closed captioning it is called a stenomachine.

Re:One finger keyboard

[Cedric Tsui]

People who play the guitar do the same sort of thing.
You'll notice they have long nails on the right hand for strumming and picking, and shortened nails on the left so they don't get in the way.

Re:1968: Engelbart shows chord keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read this [amazon.com].* His approach to NLS and chorded keyboards was inspiring but it catered more to the "make it steep as possible" school of UI.

*"This is not a simple distinction to fathom, and that may be one reason Engelbart's project, unlike his mouse, never caught fire. Another reason, perhaps was his determination to stick to a pure version of his "augmentation" plan. Unlike later computer innovators who elevated the term "usability" to a mantra Engelbart didn't place a lot of faith in making tools simple to learn. The computer was to be a sort of prosthesis for human reason, and Engelbart wanted it to be powerful and versatile; he didn't want to cripple it just to ease the user's first few days or weeks in the harness. The typical office worker might be comfortable with the familiar typewriter keyboard, but Engelbart believed that the "chord keyset" he had built, which looked like five piano keys and allowed a skilled user to input text with one hand, gave users so much more power that it was worth the effort required to adapt to it.

His vision was of "coevolution" between man and machine. The machine would change its human user, improving his ability to work, even as the human user was constantly improving the machine. And, indeed, as the band of researchers clustered around his Stanford lab wove the NLS into their lives, something like that could be observed. According to Engelbart biographer Thierry Bardini, "Some astonished visitors reported that [Engelbart's team had developed] strange codes or habits, such as being able to communicate in a 'weird' sign language. Some staff members occasionally communicated across the distance of the room by showing the fingers position of a specific chord entry on the keyset."

You can glean a little of that sense of weirdness today in the picture of Engelbart we encounter in the 1968 video: With a headset over his ear, one hand moving the mouse, and the other tickling the chord keyset, he looks like an earth-bound astronaut leading a tour of inner space, confident that he is showing us a better future. From the apogee of the 1968 demo, though, his project fell into disarray. He wanted to keep improving the existing NLS, whereas many of his young engineers wanted to throw it away and start afresh with the newer, more powerful hardware that each...[OCR errors mine]"

Evidence that learning/benefit ratio is too low

[dpbsmith]

I once considered buying a used stenotyping machine--it was on sale for $15 IIRC. It was in working condition. I could press combination any combination of keys I liked, all at the same time, and it would enter them all together in a horizontal row across a piece of something like adding-machine tape, then advance the tape to the next line. The ribbon even had ink and everything. It was just so cool I was tempted, just for the joy of possessing one.

The stenotype machine was, invented in 1830 [wikipedia.org], still in production, and still in use by court reporters who can attain up to 300 wpm with it. In contrast, the record sustained typing speed for a Dvorak typist is 150 wpm [wikipedia.org].

The fact that stenotype machines have been around for well over a century and that nobody but court reporters use them... and that when Doug Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, it was only intended to be used only in conjunction with a chording keyboard... and the fact that most modern keyboards actually allow a form of chording (shift, control, alt, and a letter) but there are no common hacks to use this to increase typing speed... strongly suggest to me that the learning/benefit ratio is way too low for any scheme of this kind to be adopted.

If I recall correctly there was a glove-like chording keyboard marketed a few years ago, whose designers had even devised a clever chording scheme in which the fingers you used sorta-kinda had a relationship to the shape of the letter, and a number of reviewers praised it and said they were able to achieve facility with it in a week or so. It obviously didn't take the world by storm.