I gotta say that I just tried the Dasher applet and after just a little
bit of practice was humming along. I am very excited that this may (will <g>) be available on openMoko.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 5/29/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Chris Ball</b> <<a href="mailto:cjb@laptop.org">
cjb@laptop.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br><br><br>Hi,<br><br>I'm one of the Dasher developers, and am also interested in hacking on
<br>OpenMoko. So, getting Dasher going is fairly likely.<br><br> > This pretty much means that you have to stare at the display all<br> > the time when inputting text.<br><br>Yes, this is the main difference between Dasher and T9. However, the
<br>comments about needing a lot of screen resolution or CPU aren't so true<br>-- we did Dasher on the iPaq seven years ago at full-speed and using<br>150x150 resolution, and it works great. The reason we get away with
<br>not so much resolution is that you're only really ever being asked to<br>choose between five or so probable letters at each turn, and it doesn't<br>take much screen space to show those, and you can predict whereabouts
<br>you're headed by knowing the alphabetic order of which character comes<br>next.<br><br> > Sure - in theory, dasher may approach arithmetic coding in terms of<br> > information input.<br><br>(I'm not sure what you mean by "approach" -- Dasher *is* an arithmetic
<br>coder, and matches the information-theoretic efficiency of one in<br>terms of bits/input to characters/output.)<br><br> > But unless you can do the coding in your head, you've got to stare<br> > at the screen, making it less useful for environments where you've
<br> > got vibration, sunlight, walking down the street, or less likely<br> > for a phone, if you're blind.<br><br>Yes, but the Neo doesn't have a keyboard, and doesn't have keys for T9<br>that you can use without looking at the screen, so I don't think this
<br>is a useful criticism. Dasher's very tolerant of vibration and mistakes,<br>unlike T9 on a touchscreen -- it's much like driving a car, in that if<br>you oversteer or understeer you just correct yourself later, because
<br>it's all about navigation and where you end up. We can type easily over<br>20wpm on the iPaq with a touchscreen and stylus.<br><br>Thanks!<br><br>- Chris.<br>--<br>Chris Ball <<a href="mailto:cjb@laptop.org">
cjb@laptop.org</a>><br>One Laptop per Child<br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>OpenMoko community mailing list<br><a href="mailto:community@lists.openmoko.org">community@lists.openmoko.org
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