

Engelbart's Dilemma: Design for Mass Adoption and You Get a Kazoo Not a Violin - skmurphy
http://web2.sys-con.com/read/536976.htm

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zach
Lower-noise version:

<http://web2.sys-con.com/read/536976_p.htm>

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Tichy
Thanks - that was the most annoying ad I have ever seen...

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redorb
my god; how un-usable is that site? .. the odds of me bookmarking it 0% ;/

How much do ads have to pay; to convince you of alienating your users? .. sad.
The ad space is more than the content space..

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Hexstream
So... what's the maximum WPM one can achieve with this 5-finger piano keyboard
thing? Of course, to be fair we'd probably have to double it if we were to
compare it to that of a standard keyboard since it uses only one hand.

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Readmore
Interesting article. I really want to try one of the 5 finger keyboards.

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mechanical_fish
Various companies have tried to make five-finger chording keyboards over the
years, but I have never seen one in person.

I strongly suspect that they don't really work very well. Hacking one together
wouldn't be _that_ hard, and yet you never see anyone but the diehard
wearable-computing hobbyists using them. (The wearables folks, of course,
really _need_ the one-handed-typing feature.)

If they bought you so much as a 10% improvement you'd expect to find hobbyists
using them and raving about them... just look at the adoption of Dvorak, or
ask me about my awesome Kinesis keyboard.

The violin metaphor is a telling one: Despite their cost and the difficulty of
learning to use them, violins and violinists aren't _that_ hard to find.
People take the trouble to learn violin because it pays off. So if you invent
the chorded keyboard and twenty years later nobody has adopted it, you have to
ask yourself whether you've _really_ invented the equivalent of the violin.
Perhaps you've invented the theremin instead: An instrument that is nigh-
impossible to learn and that has no real repertoire beyond _Good Vibrations_
and late-night monster movie soundtracks.

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DaniFong
Stenographers use chorded keyboards, but the demand for speed is much higher.
I think the primary concern is that typing speed simply isn't the bottleneck
for most users. The learning curve for a regular keyboard might level off
earlier, but few really need typing speeds in excess of what's attainable on a
keyboard.

What's surprising, though, is that nobody sells a chorded keyboard for
cellphones.

