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> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as
by horsawlarway 4y ago
> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as a freaky unusable layout, just because it would look unfamiliar, lol.
Absolutely. 8-Pen was this for Android. (example video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo)
It was absolutely, hands down without question, the most accurate way to quickly enter text into a phone using only a screen. Seriously - I could type at about 25-35 wpm on my phone screen at 100% accuracy, one handed.
They'd done a ton of work to place letters based on frequency and likely combinations to make typing smooth and relatively fast.
No fucking disaster of auto-complete that I have to click to get the word I want, or when you actually have a vocabulary larger than 150 words, but auto-complete is fucking dumb and always picks the most basic option from the path, or when the word you want isn't in the phone dictionary, no hiccups if you want to misssspell something for impact. It was genuinely just the best keyboard I have EVER used on a phone.
The downside? It takes about 3 weeks of practice to actually learn, and most people just refuse to try for longer than 10 seconds.
I still find it incredibly frustrating that qwerty, of all god-damned things, is the input formula we've picked for phones. It's fucking dumb.
- megous 4y agoHa, interesting! Thanks for sharing. :)
- funcDropShadow 4y agoThat's really interesting. What happened to 8pen, the domain is not used anymore. Are there still some implementations around?
- mackrevinack 4y agojust did a quick search and found this https://github.com/flide/8VIM https://github.com/flide/8VIM
- kerneis 4y agohttps://www.droid-life.com/2019/05/30/tbt-remembering-8pen/ https://www.droid-life.com/2019/05/30/tbt-remembering-8pen/ mentions https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8.
- dirkc 4y agoI remember seeing that video or some other demonstrating that input! I wonder if in the parallel reality where that idea took off people are now using the finger motions as a new alphabet for writing on paper :)