Man Campaigns For Addition of 'Th' Key To Keyboard 258
beaverdownunder writes "Melbourne restauranteur Paul Mathis has developed a one-character replacement for the word 'The' – effectively an upper-case 'T' and a lower-case 'h' bunched together so they share the upright stem – and an app that puts it in everyone's hand by allowing users to download an entirely new keyboard complete not just with his 'Th' symbol, but also a row of keys containing the 10 or 15 (depending on the version) most frequently typed words in English. Mathis has already copped criticism from people who claim he is attempting to trademark a symbol that is part of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced 'tshe,' the letter represents the 'ch' sound found in the word 'chew')."
Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd submit that the biggest change that mobile keyboards need is to move letters that are similarly replaceable in words further apart.
For instance:
bit
but
bot
The three vowels are packed together. Regardless of your input method, you'll probably have to place your finger over more than one of those letters. It doesn't help to have autocorrect either, since it's just as likely to provide a valid but incorrect choice--unless the system has contextual correction. Ideally, the vowels should be as far spread apart as possible. Other similarly replaceable letters should also be moved apart. Letters that rarely replace one another (a and z, say) should be close together. I've got pretty slender fingers and I still mistype all over the place. The iPhone's autocorrect is quite good, and appears to me to autocorrect based on what side of the letter you typed (that is, it seems to be able to tell the difference between you typing on the left side of i or the right, allowing it to occasionally correctly guess between 'but' and 'bot', even if you put your finger mostly on the i) but even still, it's too easy to confuse the letters.