On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 20:47 +0100, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
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.
My trusty Agenda hardly left my side for many years until it got stolen. By the time that happened they were nearly impossible to find so I moved to a Psion series 5 and then after that a Palm. Both the Psion and the Palm were streets ahead in terms of software capability, but I never achieved anything like the same input speed using graffiti or (what was the best ever) pda size qwerty keyboard.
The chiclet keyboard on the Agenda got in the way a bit I agree, but was pretty much essential for anything other than very common symbols. I don't think I ever quite got up to Full size QWERTY speeds, but I got better speeds than on any text input device I have used of a similar size.
I did start seriously looking at the CyKey, even to the point of asking MJR about it once I had a "tip off" from #alug that he had one. But on reflection I think I have decided that it is of more limited benefit on a desktop computer, even more so when you are trying to drive Gnome with a combination of mouse in your right hand and keyboard shortcuts.
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
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