On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, nemesis wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Made me wonder - what is the fastest method of user input into a > > computer. > > > > We all know that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow us down. > > So, anyone know any good mechanisms which are designed to speed us up? > > I think the DVORAK keyboard would be the alternative[0], designed for > speed.
IIRC, in _Psychology of Everyday Things_, the author cited studies suggesting that skilled typists could generally expect to get about the same rate on QWERTY or DVORAK keyboards. He suggested that moving from QWERTY to DVORAK involved a slight learning curve, but once you're comfortable with it you aren't likely to get significantly better typing speeds, though you might find it more comfortable to work with. On the other hand, many would assume that a "simple" alphabetic keyboad might be easy to learn and fast to use, but in fact neither of these assumptions is borne out, and it's actually much harder to keep up with QWERTY or DVORAK. Also note, if you're considering DVORAK, that it's designed to favor right handedness. That's fine if you're right handed, but if you're left handed then the benefit of that layout largely vanishes, and it really does just become in most ways comparable to QWERTY. As for truly faster, speech-speed input -- how about a microphone? Speech recognition software might not be perfect yet (or ever), but you can at least dictate to a file for later retrieval/transcribing. Alternatively, the GUI could arguably be faster than speech for some tasks -- at least it feels like it when you're standing behind someone, trying to get them to print out a document and saying "no click *there* ...now click *here*... ...ok now click on *this* *that* and hit OK. Oh nevermind this is taking forever, just hit Control+P so we can skip to the end..." :) But for inputting text, all the current software & hardware seems to be optimized for some variation of the conventional keyboard... -- Chris Devers "Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!" [....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded without missing a beat "Yeah. I'm not human."
