Thank you for this post chris, nice to know, that dasher was running on a so old and slow device already. I'm see the things like you do: Touchscreen means you always have to stare at the device for making inputs. Like I said - I had a nokia 7710 before and it was nearby impossible to use it blind. Even if you had a fullscreen T9-keyboad with huge keys you had to check the display, because you cannot feel which "key" you are pressing. I also like the "driving a car" comparison :)
2007/5/30, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Hi, I'm one of the Dasher developers, and am also interested in hacking on OpenMoko. So, getting Dasher going is fairly likely. > This pretty much means that you have to stare at the display all > the time when inputting text. Yes, this is the main difference between Dasher and T9. However, the comments about needing a lot of screen resolution or CPU aren't so true -- we did Dasher on the iPaq seven years ago at full-speed and using 150x150 resolution, and it works great. The reason we get away with not so much resolution is that you're only really ever being asked to choose between five or so probable letters at each turn, and it doesn't take much screen space to show those, and you can predict whereabouts you're headed by knowing the alphabetic order of which character comes next. > Sure - in theory, dasher may approach arithmetic coding in terms of > information input. (I'm not sure what you mean by "approach" -- Dasher *is* an arithmetic coder, and matches the information-theoretic efficiency of one in terms of bits/input to characters/output.) > But unless you can do the coding in your head, you've got to stare > at the screen, making it less useful for environments where you've > got vibration, sunlight, walking down the street, or less likely > for a phone, if you're blind. Yes, but the Neo doesn't have a keyboard, and doesn't have keys for T9 that you can use without looking at the screen, so I don't think this is a useful criticism. Dasher's very tolerant of vibration and mistakes, unlike T9 on a touchscreen -- it's much like driving a car, in that if you oversteer or understeer you just correct yourself later, because it's all about navigation and where you end up. We can type easily over 20wpm on the iPaq with a touchscreen and stylus. Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> One Laptop per Child _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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