"For the FITALY layout, we have obtained an average travel of 1.8, to be compared to an average travel of 3.2 for the QWERTY layout. (For prose, involving few numbers and symbols, the results are even better.)"
"Please use this idea! If you are a software developer, I urge you to consider adding this functionality to your product. My hope is that ten years from now, we won't have to laboriously tap out messages letter by letter, but instead will be able to zip them out quickly and efficiently with something like HexInput." -Sept2006
I wanted to install it to give it a try, but in the playstore I saw the application roughly translated is "susceptible to share my approximative location with other enterprises or organization".
I must ask, what could the reason(s) for a keyboard have access to a location ?
I’ve always thought about copying other useful apps that are clearly trying to collect data or make you pay for stupid IAP, and then publishing and maintaining it through donations. The apps would all be free in the various offical stores.
same thought, we've been using smartphones since 2 decades now, and not just we dont have a problem with qwerty, but anything new will be requiring more cycles to get accustomed to
People riding horse buggies probably thought the same when powered vehicles first came about, and look at the world now. You won't know unless you give it a honest try.
We did a lot of experimentation with keyboards in Android - finding better ways to type and click is pure HCI dream work
The key challenge is:
- At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for most people, that means standardised layout across all their devices, and they won't consider phones that push them into other models.
- Only after they've mastered that standard layout do they start to care about speed, but by then they've gotten good enough at the basic system that swapping to anything else is too much of a regression
So I really do love the existence of third party keyboards that cater to the set of people that are willing to deal with that setback
The thing I dislike about smartphone keyboards is the amount of screen real estate they use. This keyboard seems to take more screen real estate rather than less.
Yeah, the example is pretty bad. This layout also seems to be hard so squash vertically without increasing the error rate a lot compared to a normal one. The error rate on smaller sizes is something a lot of novel touchscreen keyboards should probably have focused on instead.
If one could swipe through the center without inserting a space, it would be incredible instead of perhaps only great... There was a PalmOS 5 keyboard like this named myKbd(1) based on some IBM research(2) which was quite fast to use. the atomik layout was quite quick to use.
I'm a user of ClearFlow, a layout with similar design goals (and it's available on GBoard by default). Interestingly, ClearFlow is an ortholinear layout, but I'm not sure if that's due to a limitation of GBoard or the intention of its author.
Not on a phone right now, but you have to type in sample text above and press check. Bad UI choice of showing bars before text has been entered and separating bars from the input field by additional text.
I think the key to smartphone keyboards is something like Nintype, two-finger swiping. It's incredibly fast and doesn't require you to learn a completely new keyboard layout to succeed.
It's also a lot more comfortable for one-hand typing since you can do multiple swipes per word.
Funny that looking at their "number of touches" and "distance covered" checker, I've tried a few words and thinking in my head how it'd be in Nintype and it would score far better than Keybee.
Unfortunately I haven't seen anyone since Nintype (and the older Keymonk) to give it an attempt.
Well, it’s interesting, but who is heavily working with text, which requires a lot of typing, and only has a smartphone? Phones are mostly for consuming. For creating, it’s usually easier and more comfortable to use a device with a keyboard (PC or laptop)
2) In my (wealthy, Boston area) suburb most high school students do all their work - including writing multi-page papers - entirely on their phone. They think laptops are for old people.
Very cool. The biggest questions someone skimming would likely be why the letters are in this order, and how this is consumed (eg ios app?). You may answer those details but they were not front and center to me.
Looking at the English keyboard and the English digraphs, it doesn't seem like the coverage is that well optimized. We are currently capturing 8.65% of the digraph weight, but just getting the top-5 would account for 5% by itself.
I also feel like distance travelled is the wrong (or an incomplete) metric. Change in direction seems like a good proxy for mental or physical effort. To take it to an extreme, I'd be very satisfied with a keyboard that had me move my thumb in a circle as on the original iPod, provided it just read my mind and inputted the right text. That's extreme distance but little effort.
+---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
| Digraph | Frequency (%) | Adjacent? | Pair on Keyboard |
+---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
| TH | 1.52 | Yes | T is right of H |
| HE | 1.28 | No | Separated by O and [Space] |
| IN | 0.94 | Yes | I is top-left of N |
| ER | 0.94 | Yes | E is below R |
| AN | 0.82 | No | A is bottom-center; N is top-right |
| RE | 0.68 | Yes | R is above E |
| ND | 0.63 | No | N is top-right; D is bottom-right |
| AT | 0.59 | No | Separated by [Space] and S |
| ON | 0.57 | No | Separated by H and T |
| NT | 0.56 | Yes | N is top-right of T |
| HA | 0.56 | No | Separated by [Space] |
| ES | 0.56 | No | Separated by [Space] |
| ST | 0.55 | Yes | S is below T |
| EN | 0.55 | No | N/E are on opposite sides |
| ED | 0.53 | No | E is center-left; D is bottom-right |
| TO | 0.52 | No | Separated by H |
| IT | 0.50 | Yes | I is above T |
| OU | 0.50 | Yes | O is below U |
| EA | 0.47 | Yes | E is top-left of A |
| HI | 0.46 | Yes | H is below-left of I |
| IS | 0.46 | No | Separated by T |
| OR | 0.43 | Yes | O is below R |
| TI | 0.34 | Yes | T is below I |
| AS | 0.33 | Yes | A is below-left of S |
| TE | 0.27 | No | Separated by H and [Space] |
| ET | 0.19 | No | Separated by H and [Space] |
| NG | 0.18 | Yes | N is above G |
| OF | 0.16 | Yes | O is below F |
| AL | 0.09 | Yes | A is right of L |
| DE | 0.09 | No | E/D are distant |
+---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
I agree that distance is not a great metric. The maximum travel distance on a smartphone screen is already tiny. I'd say the best metric is accuracy or lack of amibiguity, something like average confidence level that any given swipe means a particular word and not another. (This is assuming swipe-based word entry, which I much prefer to anything tap-based.)
For me, as a two thumb typer, I feel like if you had kept the letters generally on the same side (left/right) as Qwerty, even if nowhere near the same location, I could adapt to it much more quickly.
I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.
Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.
I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.
Oh dear. I'm afraid I'm not going to the take the requisite dozens of hours to be sure by learning this keyboard and making a truly "fair" comparison, but I'd bet I'm faster swiping with the current keyboard than I would be on this one. Swiping is why I can use words like "comparison" or "requisite" on a phone without giving it much thought anymore. I'm still faster on a real keyboard, especially as I rarely get those "tried to write 'hello', got 'grump'" sorts of errors with a keyboard, but it's a lot closer than it was when mobile devices first came out out and Palm's Graffiti input was considered a major breakthrough. (Laughable by modern standards.)
This is gonna be like Dvorak where eventually we all figure out that it’s not significantly faster and you had to re-learn how to type just to figure that out.
I submit the idea that for most smartphone users, distance traveled and layout are not the limiting factor for typing speed.
I find another factor that is not always discussed is comfort and how pleasant it is to use a layout. I know Dvorak is not much faster in the end but it is such a joy to use in comparison to Qwerty. I do wonder if it would be fun or just nice to use this hex-grid layout on a phone.
"For the FITALY layout, we have obtained an average travel of 1.8, to be compared to an average travel of 3.2 for the QWERTY layout. (For prose, involving few numbers and symbols, the results are even better.)"
https://www.textware.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm
https://the-gadgeteer.com/1998/08/22/fitaly_review/
And closer to OP, "HexInput":
"Please use this idea! If you are a software developer, I urge you to consider adding this functionality to your product. My hope is that ten years from now, we won't have to laboriously tap out messages letter by letter, but instead will be able to zip them out quickly and efficiently with something like HexInput." -Sept2006
https://www.strout.net/info/ideas/hexinput.html
1996, 2006, 2026... Your turn?
http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html
c.f., the research project:
https://dasher.zone/docs/getting-started/how-to/
For my part, I just write text out using a Wacom stylus on my Note 10+
I kind of miss my Compaq iPaq, Danger Hiptop, Handspring Visor ... OK, one of those is not like the others, but it was ideal UX for the time.
Holy crap that's a trippy GIF
I must ask, what could the reason(s) for a keyboard have access to a location ?
I strongly encourage people to do it, especially if they’re not going to try to cash in.
It may be efficient, but it's using more screen space; I'm not sure that's a win.
That's to say, I'm writing this comment on my Android phone without looking at the keyboard.
QWERTY is in my muscle memory in such a way that words have become writable as single stroke characters.
I really, really doubt this Keybee thing can be an improvement over that in any way.
The key challenge is:
- At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for most people, that means standardised layout across all their devices, and they won't consider phones that push them into other models.
- Only after they've mastered that standard layout do they start to care about speed, but by then they've gotten good enough at the basic system that swapping to anything else is too much of a regression
So I really do love the existence of third party keyboards that cater to the set of people that are willing to deal with that setback
(1): https://palmdb.net/app/mykbd
(2): https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI172&3_4 https://blakewatson.com/uploads/2023/07/Performance_Optimiza...
'may be able to'? How is this not knowable? Do I have to wait for effect systems to gain popularity before installations make sense?
It's also a lot more comfortable for one-hand typing since you can do multiple swipes per word.
Funny that looking at their "number of touches" and "distance covered" checker, I've tried a few words and thinking in my head how it'd be in Nintype and it would score far better than Keybee.
Unfortunately I haven't seen anyone since Nintype (and the older Keymonk) to give it an attempt.
I didn’t fully optimize for touch but it’s based on the same idea that you want more buttons equidistant from where your thumb centers.
2) In my (wealthy, Boston area) suburb most high school students do all their work - including writing multi-page papers - entirely on their phone. They think laptops are for old people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114412
I also feel like distance travelled is the wrong (or an incomplete) metric. Change in direction seems like a good proxy for mental or physical effort. To take it to an extreme, I'd be very satisfied with a keyboard that had me move my thumb in a circle as on the original iPod, provided it just read my mind and inputted the right text. That's extreme distance but little effort.
https://pi.math.cornell.edu/%7Emec/2003-2004/cryptography/su...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewise
I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.
Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.
I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.
I submit the idea that for most smartphone users, distance traveled and layout are not the limiting factor for typing speed.
Just sayin'...