5 ms·

Adding cursor swipe to the Firefox OS keyboard

42 points by rnyman 14y ago

lucb1e 14y ago
I could swear I saw this a few months ago, though I think it was for iOS.
- joosters 14y ago
  That's because the video on the page shows the iOS version.
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    Oh, right, should have seen that I guess.
ck2 14y ago
This is great but I still cannot get over how horribly bad screen keyboards are - I hate them. I guess I am just old. Look how hard that person is typing at that keyboard, you'd type three times as much on a real keyboard with that much effort.
- lukifer 14y ago
  I agree, it's shameful that there's been so little innovation from the big players to move beyond QWERTY. I was thinking recently about the possibility of two radial dials for the thumbs. Start the dial wherever touched, spin around to the desired letter. Possibly double the range by using two layers: pull back to center for one letter, flick outward for another. Eventually, muscle memory would make the whole thing flow. Doesn't solve the one-handed use case, though. Admittedly, it's a tough nut to crack. Ubiquitous voice recognition helps, but we may not have a real breakthrough to text input until neural interfaces. I feel like Minuum is at least a good start.
  - prawks 14y ago
    How about one large dial with letters around it, press & hold, then swipe from one letter to the center to another. Tap the middle to change charsets. The thing is all about muscle memory. I can type much faster than the guy in the video on my touchscreen QWERTY, because I do it so often. The same would go for these radial ideas. But how fast would you really start out at on either?
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    No one would use a non-QWERTY keyboard. It's bad because it's not familiar, but also because when it fails, the fallback sucks. With Swype (or the Android swipy thing), both are non-issues. It's easy to get started and the fallback is your regular QWERTY. It's also quite fast.
- Adirael 14y ago
  I love them! I would love a big piece of rectangular glass with bluetooth that would work as multimedia and normal keyboard. It would be great if the bumps on F and J were real (or stickers) and you could have any keyboard you want, including special stuff for MIDI, special keys for games, etc. I've tried phones with real keyboards, old PDAs with virtual keyboards and the keyboards shipped with Android and iOS; I write much much faster in the virtual ones than the real ones. I think the reason is the lack of feedback, there's no spring, no mechanism to oppose force to my fingers. That's the reason I like chiclet keyboards (the ones on the MBP) more than mechanical.
arunoda 14y ago
This is available on Cydia for iOs. SwipeSelection
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
One of the great things about Firefox OS is that the developers working on it are directly accessible via public mailing lists. So you can come up with something cool like this, post about it on the mailing list and get it merged into master (hasn't happened here yet, but I bet it will). Much less of a buffer than on the other mobile OSes where conversation happens in private, feedback is one-way and hard to find. I think we're going to continue to see more clever hacks that usually only show up in places like Cydia and custom Android ROMs make their way into Firefox OS.
jello4pres 14y ago
This is a great read. Thanks!

42 points by rnyman 14y ago

lucb1e 14y ago

I could swear I saw this a few months ago, though I think it was for iOS.

joosters 14y ago
That's because the video on the page shows the iOS version.
- lucb1e 14y ago
  Oh, right, should have seen that I guess.

ck2 14y ago

This is great but I still cannot get over how horribly bad screen keyboards are - I hate them. I guess I am just old. Look how hard that person is typing at that keyboard, you'd type three times as much on a real keyboard with that much effort.

lukifer 14y ago
I agree, it's shameful that there's been so little innovation from the big players to move beyond QWERTY. I was thinking recently about the possibility of two radial dials for the thumbs. Start the dial wherever touched, spin around to the desired letter. Possibly double the range by using two layers: pull back to center for one letter, flick outward for another. Eventually, muscle memory would make the whole thing flow. Doesn't solve the one-handed use case, though. Admittedly, it's a tough nut to crack. Ubiquitous voice recognition helps, but we may not have a real breakthrough to text input until neural interfaces. I feel like Minuum is at least a good start.
- prawks 14y ago
  How about one large dial with letters around it, press & hold, then swipe from one letter to the center to another. Tap the middle to change charsets. The thing is all about muscle memory. I can type much faster than the guy in the video on my touchscreen QWERTY, because I do it so often. The same would go for these radial ideas. But how fast would you really start out at on either?
- lucian1900 14y ago
  No one would use a non-QWERTY keyboard. It's bad because it's not familiar, but also because when it fails, the fallback sucks. With Swype (or the Android swipy thing), both are non-issues. It's easy to get started and the fallback is your regular QWERTY. It's also quite fast.
Adirael 14y ago
I love them! I would love a big piece of rectangular glass with bluetooth that would work as multimedia and normal keyboard. It would be great if the bumps on F and J were real (or stickers) and you could have any keyboard you want, including special stuff for MIDI, special keys for games, etc. I've tried phones with real keyboards, old PDAs with virtual keyboards and the keyboards shipped with Android and iOS; I write much much faster in the virtual ones than the real ones. I think the reason is the lack of feedback, there's no spring, no mechanism to oppose force to my fingers. That's the reason I like chiclet keyboards (the ones on the MBP) more than mechanical.

arunoda 14y ago

This is available on Cydia for iOs. SwipeSelection

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

One of the great things about Firefox OS is that the developers working on it are directly accessible via public mailing lists. So you can come up with something cool like this, post about it on the mailing list and get it merged into master (hasn't happened here yet, but I bet it will). Much less of a buffer than on the other mobile OSes where conversation happens in private, feedback is one-way and hard to find. I think we're going to continue to see more clever hacks that usually only show up in places like Cydia and custom Android ROMs make their way into Firefox OS.

jello4pres 14y ago

This is a great read. Thanks!