On 16 Aug 2005, at 18:52, Jesse Ross wrote:
Text input methods:
Texting on a cell phone is horribly slow. Narcoleptic Electron and
I were
throwing around ideas for alternate methods of text input on a
handheld
device. We've come up with a few thoughts -- they might be
something that
could be utilized, if anyone wants to discuss further.
Predictive text isn't too bad. Predictive text with auto-completion
could be really good. When I am writing code, I get a drop-down box
that gives possible completions, and I just keep typing until there
is only one and then hit tab (or press tab to get a root word then
add characters on the end). This makes typing a lot faster, and I
would like to see it extended to English.
Without predictive texting, you could do a lot by re-designing the
keyboard layout so that keys that were often used next to each other
were not on the same key.
Recent tests showed that morse code can be entered faster than text
messages on a normal 'phone keypad.
I'd be interested to hear more about your ideas. My favourite is the
chord-keys keyboard. You have 6 buttons and any combination of 1-5
is a character. This gives 45 possible characters (15 for each
combination of finger buttons with no thumb button, with one and with
the other) - enough for letters, numbers and some symbols, but not
enough for capitals (although a good system would auto-capitalise
based on context).
To be honest, I'd be inclined to use handwriting recognition most of
the time, and a bluetooth keyboard when I wanted fast text entry.
