On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 01:54:58PM +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> We all know that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow us down.
That's a myth. QWERTY was designed to speed us up by moving the typebars
for common letter sequences (e.g. TH) to different ends of the spread so
that they jammed less. But this is all well covered by numerous web pages
which goole can point you at.
> anyone know any good mechanisms which are designed to speed us up?
>
> I would like to be able to input data at speech speed.
I doubt that you would. Speech recognition works fine for linear dictation
of english text. But as soon as you need to use punctuation (e.g. for any
kind of programming), edit what you've written, or anything else like that,
then the limitations of speech technology become readily apparent.
The same is true of keyboards to some extent. Touch typing is fine if you're
typing plain text and don't have to move your fingers from the home keys
to insert punctuation, find the cursor control keys and so on. But for
the kind of things that most of us use keyboards for, the excessive
punctuation tends to restrict the usefulness of both speech recognition
and touch typing. No-one seems capable of conceiving, let alone designing
a keyboard which specifically addresses the needs of programmers[*].
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we don't write what we say and
we don't say what we write.
A
[*] I once soldered a 3.5" jack socket onto the back of a keyboard which
allowed me to plug in an electric piano footpedal (simple make/break
switch) to control the shift key via foot pedal. Worked pretty well,
especially reducing the pinky stress from too many { } ( ) $ " < >
characters. I later found out that you could already buy keyboards
with foot pedals so it was hardly revolutionary...
