Triangular Buttons Make On-Screen Keyboards More Usable 287
As someone targeted for perpetual failure by the designers of most keyboards, I'm happy to read
The Register's report that "A British inventor has submitted a patent application for a wacky touchscreen keyboard design which, he claims, could spell the end for accidental key presses."
Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Interesting)
Is to get rid of the damned, usless, pain in the ass keycaps key.
As for the keyboard itself, seems I've seen that in some si-fi movie.
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Schizoid Moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
Some might find this interesting. This is the moderation email I got for the orginal comment. Not a political comment, not calling anyone names. Sure as hell not dissing Linux or Macs or Windows or Obama.
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Further moderations that I have not been notified about have reduced the score to 0.
Just as sure as I say I don't really care someone will say I obviously do. But WTF ever.
What is reallying interesting is that some people appear to have some serious emotional investment in the caps lock key.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Informative)
The Logitech wave keyboard has a little "moat" around Capslock and Numlock keys, making them far less easy to accidentally press.
You can also disable those keys in software, which I did straight away.
Best keyboard I've ever owned.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Informative)
You can also disable those keys in software, which I did straight away.
Both X and XP/Vista can do that with any keyboard.
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I use it for switching keyboard layouts. Much more convenient with Caps Lock than with Ctrl-Shift or Alt-Shift (damn you Windows for not allowing Caps Lock to toggle layouts!).
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It isn't totally worthless. Some data entry apps require that some or all fields are in all caps. It is simpler for the clerks to use a caps lock then hold down the shift.
Of course if the programmer wasn't an idiot they would just convert the field to all caps but sometimes people have to live with old software.
Or I guess somewhere somebody used a lower case entry to be a sentential value to end data input.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
so can most keyboards, when you use the (not supplied) screwdriver tool. :)
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PowerOff, Sleep and WakeUp are pretty much standard keys.
This [wikipedia.org] is the standard.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:4, Insightful)
Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than youâ(TM)d find on a standard Qwerty layout. Consequently, users are more likely to press the correct key each time they tap.
Significantly more is right. It's about the same size as the buttons themselves, doubling screen real-estate.
From my minimalistic POV, that's horrid.
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Of course the catch with using triangular shaped keys on a touch screen, is the dead space between keys is now far greater then the live space for the keys. So technically while you are far less likely to hit the wrong key you are also far more likely to hit dead space. So tapping the screen twice as often to get the same key strokes versus the occasional incorrect key stroke.
I bet I can guess which will annoy the users the most, they will tend to blame themselves for pressing the wrong key and blamer th
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
Excellent. So then, the formula I need will be:
(num_users * keyboard_price) + (num_users * large_reptile_price * crocodiles_per_moat)
?
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:4, Funny)
How many users can each crocodile kill or maim?
How many users can attempt to cross each moat at a time?
Can the users access the drawbridge controls? What is the cost of the security on the drawbridge controls?
What is the value, in crocodiles, of a moat-bound kraken?
Have you considered ill-tempered sea bass as an alternative to crocodiles (they are much cheaper than sharks WFLBs)?
In short, I'm not sure you've thought through the moat implementation in depth. My firm, Moats and Goats, LLC, would be happy to offer our moat consulting services for a small fee. If you sign a contract by the 15th of this month, I'll throw in free goat lawn trimming for your castle courtyard (please note that goat disposal is not an issue; the crocs or kraks will need to be fed, after all).
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You can also disable those keys in hardware, on practically any keyboard ever. Wedge anything from a pen cap to a screwdriver under one edge of the offending key and pry it off. My 108-key keyboard is now a 101 (well actually 100 - its missing the caps lock key)-key keyboard.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who sues it, I would say do NOT remove the caps lock. kthxby.
In fact, serious data entry users use it regularly.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:4, Funny)
> As someone who sues it
Why so litigious??
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
As someone who sues it
How exactly do you sue a keyboard key?
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
Don't me an idiot. He clearly meant "suse".
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Whoosh!
P.S. Your comments seems to missing a couple of
-dZ.
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"You" don't. That's what Apple's legal department is for. Believe me, if this keyboard outshines the iPhone keyboard, they'll find a way ;)
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
How do you shout without a caps lock key?
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
By pushing on the keys very, very hard.
Re:The Best Thing To Do (Score:5, Funny)
How do you shout without a caps lock key?
Like this [bash.org].
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Why would you want sexually explicit words all over your screen all of the time?
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The idea is so wrong, but I like it.
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I thought the caps lock key made things easier? http://www.bash.org/?835030 [bash.org]
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I think that particular case calls for electrifying the caps lock key.
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After that he took a moment out of the interview to stick his head out the window and yell at a group of young kids to "get off my lawn"...
Seriously though all languages evolve and English isn't an exception. Sci-Fi is a generally accepted short-hand for "science fiction" most of the rest of society, that bothers to use the word, out-voted my Bradbury and they're the ones that get to decide.
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*Mr.
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I find no problem with "Sci-Fi" as shorthand. "SyFy", on the other hand is a horrible marketing conception that looks like a pet name for a venereal disease.
Anyway, I'm not going to bitch when someone calls a desktop tower a "CPU", so Bradbury (or whomever made the statement, as the poster was not sure) can go cry about his little pet-peeve in the corner and let everyone else continue to evolve the language.
make users adapt to hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than youâ(TM)d find on a standard Qwerty layout.
Assuming the keys have the same pitch, then that means the active triangular zones are SMALLER than normal keys occupying the same overall keyboard area, making it even HARDER to type accurately, or, in other words, this trains the user to be more careful with their finger placements. It isn't magic (like standard rollover logic in keyboards), it's behavioral modification.
Funny, I was always taught that programs and computers should be designed to make things easier for the user, not harder.
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Funny, I was always taught that programs and computers should be designed to make things easier for the user, not harder.
Um, yes but not easier to make mistakes...
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On the one hand it does change user behaviour by making them hit a different key area, but OTOH it also reduces the liklihood of hitting the wrong key because the sense area for the next key across is not right next to what they're trying to hit.
Of course this may make it frustrating to use compared to a more intelligent keyboard, as you miss the key totally if you're a bit off centre... hmmm.
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So I guess:
- It increase the likelyhood of hitting NO key.
- It decrease the likelyhood of hitting the WRONG key.
- It decrease the likelyhood of hitting the RIGHT key.
So the design fails, since my goal is to hit the RIGHT key.
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It's like peeing on the fly; having something to aim at makes it easier to aim.
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I understood the design differently. since the use of triangles allows more neutral space the chance of overlapping to another key is lessoned. He also figured out how to do this without making the keyboard itself bigger. Not sure it has anything to do with behavioral modification. if this was the case palms graffiti would be king of the world.
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Not sure it has anything to do with behavioral modification.
Not 100% sure, but what I think the parent poster was assuming is that the spot that a finger makes contact with the keyboard is an infinitely small point.
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It may lead to behavioral modification, but the immediate result is to lower the amount of false positives. It errs on the side of not registering a key press rather than registering an unintended key choice.
Re:make users adapt to hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the early 90's (92, I believe), I was co-op'ing for IBM and was lucky enough to get to go to COMDEX provided I man a booth for a while. The product I was demo'ing was voice independant voice recognition (it was all the rage at the time). There was no training required, random guy from the street could walk up and interact with the computer by voice, regardless of dialect or accent. I got pretty good with it, but I noticed that some people did have to repeat themselves (but not more than twice) to get it to work -- again, early times in terms of speech recognition. But the reason I was good at it was that repeated practice actually trained ME to speak the way it wanted instead of it being able to adjust to how I spoke. Speech recognition has become more prevelant since then (BING 411 anyone? http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/ [discoverbing.com] ), and I'm sure you've made adjustments to how you speak to computers just to get past the voice prompts. You speak slower with more distinct pauses between words.
Behavior modification is an effective way to improve computer input.
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Goog-411 [google.com] anyone? Been around for years too...
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I just swear at computers until they put me through to an operator.
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that means the active triangular zones are SMALLER than normal keys occupying the same overall keyboard area, making it even HARDER to type accurately
There's an easy solution to that: Make the visual deadspace around the key part of the input for that key, in say a rectangular shape.</sarcasm>
Really what he's trying to patent is the idea of putting more space between two things to avoid accidentally hitting the wrong one, which should make it a nominee for the "duh!" patent of the year. The shape o
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Exactly, and it just might work. They recently pulled a similar bevavioral trick in my apartment's car park: instead of painting white lines to separate the car slots, they painted grey rectangles on each space, more or less the width of a car so that there's seemingly a lot more dead space between slots. The result? I notice that
I'll consider... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...and I'll upgrade my car when my Model-T stops running :^)
Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it misses the point, since "significanty more dead space between keys" is only a feasible solution if you have a physically larger screen. He's effectively making the keys smaller, thus harder to hit, and the "dead space" is just space where nothing happens = confused users.
Next thing we know, someone will be inventing a "capacitive stylus" touting "higher precision" while using your iPhone. Well yes, but that's SO not the point of a capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
No one presses a single point, the press an area. By putting the spaces there you are more likely to get the correct key as opposed to fat finger the next key by imstake becasue it got a larger area pressed.
It's pretty clever.
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I don't see anything clever with the shape at all. Unless it just doesn't respond when you hit outside of the shape, which I can only see as an annoyance, taking up so much space but n
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You want Q A and Z to have the same up/down orientation. (if you put the fat ends together you get too much border crossing). You could also interlock the teeth but keep them far apart, that would allow you to have more space and pull the user towards the target.
I found that even very small areas users will get very close to if that's the size you make the button. Better to make a button a few pixels smaller with a border that still clicks IMO.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Next thing we know, someone will be inventing a "capacitive stylus" touting "higher precision" while using your iPhone. Well yes, but that's SO not the point of a capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen.
You're late to the party: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/a31f/ [thinkgeek.com]
Also, you can get gloves with capacitive tips on the fingers, for iPhone use when it's too damn cold outside (less relevant in summer...) http://www.tavoproducts.com/ [tavoproducts.com]
Re:Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it prevents users from hitting two keys at once, preventing the need for the software to decide which one the user hit (the one hit first in time or the one hit most by area).
And then maybe it will remove the predictive typing that prevents users from typing "kewl" by presuming the fourth letter should be a "p".
If it was made up of triangles in alternating directions (like a Pegasus Galaxy DHD) then you'd have no benefit for Fat Finger Syndrome.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot is it helpful to explain how something works by pointing out it is similar to devices in the Pegasus galaxy.
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I disagree. The size of your finger has not changed. This just means that when you press 'w' there's less chance of your finger spilling over into 'q' or 'e' because they've been moved away. And 'more dead space between the keys does not require a 'significantly bigger screen,' he achieved this by making the keys triangular instead of square.
Other innevitable innovations... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other innevitable innovations... (Score:5, Funny)
And you could put little springs under the bumps, so that you could feel them move when you pressed them hard enough!
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On-screen keyboards. It's right there in the article title.
Apple is, or should be, FAR ahead of this... (Score:5, Interesting)
...based on the IP they acquired from FingerWorks [fingerworks.com]. You can do really sophisticated error-correction if you're getting not only a stream of characters, but the exact location of the press, contact area, dwell time, and possibly more. So, with a virtual multi-touch keyboard, you can say "Okay, that looked like an R, but the contact was actually most of the way over toward E, and the previous two letters were T-H, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an E."
I know it'll rankle the manual-transmission crowd, but I've been using a FingerWorks keyboard for years, and most of the time, it's absolutely spooky how well the autocorrect works. (Just don't try high-intensity vi work.)
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Release keys don't work as well now with the accented characters as they used to. If you dwell long enough for an accent, you must select one of the options presented, even if you meant the next key over.
Re:Apple is, or should be, FAR ahead of this... (Score:5, Funny)
most of the way over toward E, and the previous two letters were T-H, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an E.
That is the single most aggravating "feature" of the iPhone keyboard. To he'll with that ducking shot.
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Settings > General > Keyboard > Auto-Correction
Been there since v. 2.2
Training to make unaware mistakes? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Does using such an auto-correcting keyboard make it harder to type correctly when you move to a "normal" keyboard? Something bothers me about devices that train me to make more unaware mistakes.
A little. But it's completely overwhelmed by the rich tactile feedback that you get from a physical keyboard. Without that tactile feedback, even the recovered-from-alien-spacecraft-level intelligence in the FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard only gets you up to about half the typing speed you see on a conventional keyboard; that, and the $300-400 price tag, made it a commercial failure.
But I'm much happier typing half as fast and having zero wrist pain. (No reaching for the mouse or modifier keys; they're
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Agree. Anyone who thinks this is a cool idea hasn't used an iPhone keypad much.
The inventor's still stuck on the notion that each keypress must map onto a single character somehow, but the iPhone is smarter than that. It resolves ambiguous keypresses based on the letters that came before, and *also* the ones that came after. For instance, typing "THI", it assumes I'm on my way to "this", "thin", or "thick", but if I follow it up with "MAS", it changes the I to an O for "THOMAS".
And if I really did want t
For the iPhone, doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
For a physical keyboard, this seems reasonable - if you eliminate edges where the keys touch, each other, then you're less likely to accidentally press two keys at once. But for a virtual keyboard like on the iPod, it doesn't matter if you "touch" two keys at once with your finger - the software can determine which one you were actually closer to, and only register that.
While there are certainly drawbacks to a touchscreen, such as lack of tactile feedback, this is one area where they have an advantage - a larger percentage of usuable surface area, as touches that would be a multiple button mash on physical keyboards can be unambiguously mapped to a single key in software.
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Where it might have been a multiple button mash on a physical keyboard and you'd know about it and correct it, it may be a WRONG single button press on a touchscreen. Give me a physical keyboard ANY day.
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You get tactile feedback on a touchscreen when you touch it.
?? On touchscreens.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quick, you'd better patent that idea so nobody else can use it.
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That's exactly what the iPhone does. You can be really sloppy when typing common letters like "S", but you have to be more precise for nearby uncommon letters like "Z". Not that that's a problem, it'll autocorrect if you miss.
Supposedly the sizes of these sensitive areas can change based on what you're in the process of typing, but I can't tell if it's actually doing that.
Hah! (Score:4, Informative)
They may make commercials about butt-dialing. But on the day after I got my iPhone, I hung up on a customer and dialed the veterinarian's office all without being aware I was doing it--with the side of my face. I therefore invented face-dialing. It took several days to get used to the keyboard, but it took longer to accustom myself to not mashing down on crucial icons while talking. I can use the keyboard efficiently now, but I suspect the learning curve would have been less with the keyboard described in the article. And it's not a mental learning curve. It's a physical skill like typing on a full sized keyboard.I'd also like to see them add a very slight lip around the perimeter of the screen where the silver metal is located. It would be a tactile reminder to keep the damned thing away from my face.
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I think that was fixed in the first OS update; the proximity sensor by the earpiece de-activates the touchscreen...
With all that space between keys... (Score:5, Funny)
Klingon Keyboard? (Score:4, Interesting)
If triangles are good... (Score:2, Funny)
... wouldn't diamonds be better?
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Or hexagons? Come to think of it, although the keys on a standard QWERTY keyboard are square, adjacent rows are actually slightly offset.
I tried it (Score:3, Insightful)
I made the image [regmedia.co.uk] fit the screen (CTRL + [+]) and, well that was it. It felt no different. It looked no different.
Surely it's just a matter of practice when using large on screen keyboards?
Aim for the top of the triangle? Why bother outlining the keyboard letters at all?
Sceptical (Score:3, Insightful)
As a programmer, any time I hear hype like this ". . .could spell the end for accidental key presses." I laugh a little.
We will NEVER spell the end for accidental use of technology by using more technology.
It kind of falls into the old maxim "Try to make anything idiot proof, and the world with generate bigger idiots".
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I'm more upset... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lazy programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Missing the points (Score:3, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with the main reasons that people like me cannot use tiny keyboards.
0. When I press down, my finger pad overlaps way more than one key. therefore, I am prone to make mistakes.
1. I can't see through my finger to the keyboard if my finger covers 2 or more keys, therefore I am prone to make some more mistakes.
2. No, I don't need to see the keys, but I at least need to be able to feel their delineations in lieu of that, and since the thing has no tactile measurable quality like a real keyboard, I am prone to make yet more mistakes.
I can work a blackberry keyboard a little because at least i can feel the difference in the keys vs. spaces. Without some physical delineation or press-from-behind type capacity, I don't think any tiny touchscreen keyboard will be any more for me usable than any other one.
Not a patent... (Score:2)
Seriously, this shouldnt not be considered a patentable design.
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Edit: In my comment above, in my rush to express my outrage at such an abomination of a patent application I used a double negative in my comment. It should read "Seriously, this should not be considered a patentable design."
not convincing (Score:2)
If it's just for the deadspace, then smaller keys should work the same, right? So what's special about the form of triangles? The article doesn't mention that. Also not how the odd layout comes about. With a triangle layout, I would've expected them to have alternating directions, because only then is is really less likely to hit the other key, because the broad end you're trying to hit would be bordering small ends, if you get what I mean.
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That's just a blog with a scaled down version of the image and linking back to The Register.
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Oh man, circular keys? If someone besides Apple made it, I'd buy it for the nostalgic typewriter feel. :)
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Could be much easier for Windows Mobile - if it is implemented as a standard input method it would be possible to use it for every application.
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