On 19 Jun 2007, at 22:24, MJ Ray wrote:
Ruth Bygrave rbygrave@ntlworld.com wrote:
I think I've got it now. In fact, everybody was right. [...]
No. Everybody was wrong. ;-)
www.cykey.co.uk should have won by now.
Yes, but pure ergonomics is never going to win over the economies of the market, unfortunately for those of us for whom the chord keyboard makes perfect sense.
Mind you, the ergonomics of CyKey and Agenda are IMO broken compared to the original Microwriter, because the Agenda's stupid 'chiclet' keys designed for businessmen got in the way a bit, and both the later models seem to have lost that big hefty palmrest with 'light' chord keys which made it heavy-to-carry but incredibly usable-without- looking-at-it.
If you had one and took to it, you could learn the idea in about a week, and spend years carrying it about with you, pulling it out on buses and typing very comfortably. All alpha-numeric-and-punct were right under your hand, so you never had to orient yourself, it was steady on one leg, and the battery lasted a fair time because the machine wasn't that ambitious. The delete key was a comfortable reach, so I'd check the 16-char screen, rattle through delete for typos without even thinking about it -- and have a distraction-free non-glam note-taking environment.
Unfortunately, the market will now not support that sort of heavy ugly thing on ergonomics alone, and prefers eye candy and convergence.
Also unfortunately, if you've used a Microwriter consistently for three years, and had it torn out of your clenching hands as you left college, it's a *bugger* to retrain on Qwerty to get to the same level...
Regards, R