information efficient text enty using dasher

Thomas Gstädtner thomas at gstaedtner.net
Wed May 30 11:03:42 CEST 2007


Finger Splash looks very cool and useful.
Imho a cool idea.
@openmoko at mauve.plus.com: You are right, abcde... keyboards can be used for
blind typing. But not on a only-touchscreen-phone.
I used a Nokia 7710 for about 1.5 years and typing blind was simply
impossible.
Theres no feedback at all.


2007/5/30, Ben Burdette <bburdette at comcast.net>:
>
>
> > Dasher is only really information efficient considering the input only.
> > The output stream needs to be quite dense.
> >
> > This pretty much means that you have to stare at the display all the
> time
> > when inputting text.
> > Sure - in theory, dasher may approach arithmetic coding in terms of
> > information input.
> > But unless you can do the coding in your head, you've got to stare at
> the
> > screen, making it less useful for environments where you've got
> vibration,
> > sunlight, walking down the street, or less likely for a phone, if you're
> > blind. (Hmm. /me ponders dasher with audio prompting)
> > T9 or even abc def ... you can use blind.
> > Even qwerty with real hardware keys. (I think on-screen keyb would be
> > optimistic :) )
> >
> >
>
> To me, it looks like Dasher has a some drawbacks:
>
> one, it seems to be CPU intensive - there's a lot of animation going on
> during text entry.  Not a problem for PCs, but it might not be optimal
> on a low power device.
>
> two, its storage intensive.  You have to have a dictionary of some sort
> available for it to do its prediction.  Or, several dictionaries, each
> for a different type of text entry (like english and japanese, or
> english and C++ programming).
>
> three, it takes up a lot of screen space.  If you are just doing pure
> text entry without needing to look at something else, that's ok.  But
> I'd rather it didn't take up the whole screen so that I can't see an IM
> that I'm replying to, or several lines of the website form I'm filling
> out.
>
> That's not to say I'm against Dasher.  But I'd like to see a lot of
> flexibility available in openmoko text entry so that I can change to
> dasher, or some other text entry method when needed, or just to try
> things out.  I hope someone will implement it for openmoko, together
> with several other alternatives for doing text entry.
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenMoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/attachments/20070530/587f69a1/attachment.htm 


More information about the community mailing list