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>Yes. He's the reason the Apple II had support for the Dvorak keyboard layout, hidden as it may have been. That's a big UX thing for me. That's just adding a f

>Yes. He's the reason the Apple II had support for the Dvorak keyboard layout, hidden as it may have been. That's a big UX thing for me. That's just adding a feature, and one designed by someone else (well, Dvorak) at that, not UX design. Plus, the Dvorak keyboard was an elaborate scam, an early version of "bio-magnetic bracelets" and such: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html It's popular with guys that like the exclusivity of using it and enjoy the placebo effect, but has never been conclusively shown easier or faster to type. Not to mention that for programmers its case is made even worst, because something designed for regular typing is not at all necessary to also be good for programming languages, where the common characters change, and even include ones like {} and such. It's the ideal keyboard layout for the guys that make optimizations without profiling.

to3m 14y ago
One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense... You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization You can get metrics for sequences of text here: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/ http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/ Or, more here, if you're (somehow) not bored yet: http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense... I doubt common sense comes into play into such complex matters as determining keyboard layout performance. Without testing between different options, using control groups and working on some specific domain (e.g performance for programming vs prose writing), common sense is useless. (Not to mention that even in programming common sense can be both right and irrelevant --e.g. common sense might correctly assume that some function can be optimized to perform 3x faster, but fails to that it takes only 0.2% of the total running time in the first place so the win would be negligible). >You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization* http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization* I never argued against alternative keyboard layouts, or that qwerty is the best. Just that Dvorak is not worth it (and mostly, badly tested placebo solution). I've read the mwbrooks article in the past, the points he makes are not really worth it -- mostly a hack job. In any case, if we need a future keyboard layout standard, it would have to take into account use cases (e.g programming vs journalism, etc), modern typography and extended glyphs, and of course since this is 2012, international language switching (I, and billions of other people, alternate between english and my language layout).

to3m 14y ago

One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense... You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization You can get metrics for sequences of text here: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/ http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/ Or, more here, if you're (somehow) not bored yet: http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html

pretoriusB 14y ago
>One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense... I doubt common sense comes into play into such complex matters as determining keyboard layout performance. Without testing between different options, using control groups and working on some specific domain (e.g performance for programming vs prose writing), common sense is useless. (Not to mention that even in programming common sense can be both right and irrelevant --e.g. common sense might correctly assume that some function can be optimized to perform 3x faster, but fails to that it takes only 0.2% of the total running time in the first place so the win would be negligible). >You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization* http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization* I never argued against alternative keyboard layouts, or that qwerty is the best. Just that Dvorak is not worth it (and mostly, badly tested placebo solution). I've read the mwbrooks article in the past, the points he makes are not really worth it -- mostly a hack job. In any case, if we need a future keyboard layout standard, it would have to take into account use cases (e.g programming vs journalism, etc), modern typography and extended glyphs, and of course since this is 2012, international language switching (I, and billions of other people, alternate between english and my language layout).