

Adding cursor swipe to the Firefox OS keyboard - rnyman
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/03/adding-cursor-swipe-to-the-firefox-os-keyboard/

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ck2
This is great but I still cannot get over how horribly bad screen keyboards
are - I hate them. I guess I am just old.

Look how hard that person is typing at that keyboard, you'd type three times
as much on a real keyboard with that much effort.

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lukifer
I agree, it's shameful that there's been so little innovation from the big
players to move beyond QWERTY.

I was thinking recently about the possibility of two radial dials for the
thumbs. Start the dial wherever touched, spin around to the desired letter.
Possibly double the range by using two layers: pull back to center for one
letter, flick outward for another. Eventually, muscle memory would make the
whole thing flow. Doesn't solve the one-handed use case, though.

Admittedly, it's a tough nut to crack. Ubiquitous voice recognition helps, but
we may not have a real breakthrough to text input until neural interfaces. I
feel like Minuum is at least a good start.

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prawks
How about one large dial with letters around it, press & hold, then swipe from
one letter to the center to another. Tap the middle to change charsets.

The thing is all about muscle memory. I can type much faster than the guy in
the video on my touchscreen QWERTY, because I do it so often. The same would
go for these radial ideas. But how fast would you really start out at on
either?

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MatthewPhillips
One of the great things about Firefox OS is that the developers working on it
are directly accessible via public mailing lists. So you can come up with
something cool like this, post about it on the mailing list and get it merged
into master (hasn't happened here yet, but I bet it will). Much less of a
buffer than on the other mobile OSes where conversation happens in private,
feedback is one-way and hard to find. I think we're going to continue to see
more clever hacks that usually only show up in places like Cydia and custom
Android ROMs make their way into Firefox OS.

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lucb1e
I could swear I saw this a few months ago, though I think it was for iOS.

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joosters
That's because the video on the page shows the iOS version.

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lucb1e
Oh, right, should have seen that I guess.

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arunoda
This is available on Cydia for iOs. SwipeSelection

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jello4pres
This is a great read. Thanks!

