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    Noisy Fanboys

    • Started by Golden_Hammer
    • 9 Replies:
    • Reputation: 1
    • Registered: 17-Nov-2006
    • Posts: 68

    I was surfing the net this morning, and I came across James Mckay's website. Is anyone else familiar with it? I'm not trying to start trouble or anything, but I just found one thing that he said particularly interesting.

    James Mckay said:

    There are actually several qwerty derivatives knocking about, and the main thing that makes Colemak different from, say, Asset or Arensito is its small but noisy fanboy community.

    If you want to read the entire blog, you can read it here.

    Last edited by Golden_Hammer (13-Sep-2007 14:32:43)
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    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
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    It's not a very nuanced description. If anything, this small community is very varied. I'm not sure whether I would qualify as a fanboy or not in McKay's eyes, as I'm certainly enthusiastic and quite nerdy about it but at the same time I try to live and let live. I'll counter arguments that I feel aren't right and I won't be shy about it, but have no problems whatsoever with people disagreeing with me in general.

    Maybe he made up his mind too soon based on unrepresentative evidence, who knows? He doesn't seem like a sourpuss judging from that page. At any rate, it must be mildly frustrating for him to try and find the right choice for him and his Kinesis between the different options.

    I'd think that with a Kinesis maybe some other layout may be best - I've no idea. Arensito was made on a Kinesis iirc (but I think it works best for Norwegian Unix/Linux Kinesis users?). One idea behind Colemak was to allow people to switch layouts without buying (and carrying around) new hardware - obviously that won't be a problem for all users!

    Since he likes "geeky but nice" he may yet end up with an unmarked Colemak Kinesis - or a mindlink.  :)

    Dissing this community for the Wikipedia debacle strikes me as a bit ass-forward though. In my mind, the biggest problem in that department hasn't been Colemak fanbois but knights of the Wiki? And maybe our own lack of understanding of the Wikipedia's finer workings as well; I looked at McKay's newest page (http://www.jamesmckay.net/2007/09/) and found it interesting to note some mechanisms he as an experienced wikipedist describes.

    Last edited by DreymaR (13-Sep-2007 16:45:43)

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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
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    I think you guys may have misunderstood what I was saying a bit. My main bone of contention was that I got the impression that Colemak was being somewhat over-hyped in some quarters. In particular, when I saw it described (somewhere on Wikipedia IIRC but I think I noticed this on someone's blog as well) as the "million dollar keyboard" having won the CapsOff competition, that seemed pretty impressive at first, but on closer inspection it turns out that the CapsOff prize fell waaaaaay short of the purported million dollars. (There is no indication whatsoever on the CapsOff site as to how much was raised in the end, though there is a promise there that all donations would be listed.) Personally I thought this was a bit dishonest, and I think that must have made me a bit sceptical of Colemak's other claims.

    Having said that, I did spend a couple of weeks or so trying Colemak properly about a month ago. I was impressed with how easy it was to learn it in the end, and I can say that both Dvorak and Colemak make a huge difference on the Kinesis keyboard, on which I found qwerty almost unusable. However, I didn't find any benefit from either of them on my flat laptop keyboard -- in fact I actually find qwerty more comfortable on more conventional keyboards. At the moment I'm back to qwerty on a Microsoft Natural 4000, and I clocked in at about 80 words per minute on Ryan Heise's typing test with it the other day.

    So if you think I'm frustrated, you're quite right: I've spent a lot of time checking out both Dvorak and Colemak, and a lot of money on a Kinesis keyboard, and in the end of the day, I had to admit that they had all failed to demonstrate any noticeable benefit in terms of either speed or comfort over qwerty on a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. But that's just my personal experience. Some of you do claim to notice an improvement in the end, and it wouldn't surprise me if you're right. However, all I can say from my own experience is that Your Mileage May Vary.

    Sorry to disappoint...

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    • From: Houston, Texas
    • Registered: 03-Jan-2007
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    Well, I strongly disagree with your conclusions but you are entitled to your personal experience. 

    I am not a programmer or someone spends hours a day typing on blogs and such.  I spend much more time talking and visiting business owners in their offices.  I went through school before the time of the personal computer (I used punch cards in college.).  Touch typing class was seen as something you took if you wanted to be a secretary.  So I never learned to touch type.  Since computers, I thought occasionally it might be worth learning to touch type for productivity sake. Every time I looked into Qwerty seemed like a horrible system learn if you weren't a child.  Since I learned Colemak on my Macbook, I have been noticing just how many business owners using their computers are NOT touch typing on their Qwerty keyboards.  So I know there are a many out there in the 40's, 50's like me that are not using their qwerty boards with any thing more than 2-3 fingers.    Colemak made it easy for me to learn to touch type (I tried Dvorak briefly, that was just weird, and the location of L (ugh!), no thank you.).  It's not an issue of comfort for me.  It's an issue of touch typing at all.

    as you said YMMV.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    Hi James!

    Sorry your time didn't seem well spent to you. If you do 80 WPM on QWERTY you're well into in the fast typist segment in my opinion, and your QWERTY skills will be well wired in your motor memory. I managed to train Dvorak to nearly 60 WPM and I found it hard to switch to Colemak - but fruitful in the end, luckily. Maybe your Colemak mileage was cut short before you reached the interesting places? But I'll understand if you feel unwilling to invest more.

    I agree that the $1,000,000 keyboard thing is funny. But I'd blame any strangeness there on the CapsOff site, not on Colemak. And if it says somewhere that Colemak won the $1,000,000 Keyboard Competition then ... that's what it was called, no less. Maybe a disclaimer would be in place whenever that competition is mentioned, to account for the discrepancy. But the claim on that site is that site's and not Shai's so put blame where blame is due.

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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
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    Hmmm, you're right there, maybe I did let it colour my opinions of Colemak a bit unduly at the time.

    Something that I found rather interesting though was that Colemak and the Kinesis Advantage keyboard seem almost like two pieces of a jigsaw. Both Dvorak and Colemak gave me quite a lot of discomfort on a conventional flat keyboard, which disappeared when I switched back to qwerty. However, on the Kinesis I found that the converse was true: Dvorak and Colemak both worked rather well, but it I found it almost totally unusable with qwerty. The reason why I didn't stick with Colemak/Kinesis in the end was that I work a lot with curly-brackety languages such as C# and JavaScript, and the Kinesis sucks lemons for that kind of thing no matter what keyboard layout you are using. If I had only been using it for typing text, it would probably be a different story.

    Last edited by jammycakes (01-Nov-2007 19:43:52)
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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    Could you try to describe the source of your discomfort more precisely?

    Since you liked the layouts working on a Kinesis but not on a conventional board, I'm assuming it has something to do with row staggering?

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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
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    Mainly a discomfort in my right forearm. I think it probably is partly the row staggering that did it.

    What I found was that Colemak almost forces you to adopt the proper disciplines for touch typing, and the Kinesis keyboard does the same. However, both the row staggering on conventional keyboards and the qwerty layout tend to fight against touch typing the "proper" way and favour a more free-form approach. It felt to me as if the keyboard and the layout were fighting against each other somehow.

    The other thing I noticed is that with qwerty your right hand has a kind of natural resting position on the J, I, O and P keys rather than the home row, and I think that on a flat keyboard this allows your wrists to adopt a more comfortable angle, a bit like with a split keyboard. With Dvorak and Colemak, on the other hand, your hands are forced closer together and into a more uncomfortable angle on a flat keyboard.

    My conclusion was that for me it was pretty much a case of all or nothing: either Colemak on the Kinesis, or qwerty on something more conventional. My gut feeling is that I'd find the two alternatives more or less the same in terms of speed and comfort in the end of the day, but that's no doubt mainly because I've been typing qwerty for years and the muscle memory is pretty deepy ingrained.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    Interesting observations. I've never found a resting position like the one you describe for my right hand but I see that it's likely - I probably just forced a home row rest on myself early on. I'd think that the middle-hinged boards should do wonders for this problem. But then we're already talking special hardware which begs the question of why not go Kinesis right away?

    My thought is that since I'll be typing a lot on conventional boards no matter what, I need to use something that doesn't make me confused when going back and forth. I wonder how Kinesis would work in that respect for me.

    You may have seen the tweak I did to the left-hand bottom row, shifting the ZXCVB keys left since I have a VK_102 key on my European board. The '<' that sat on that key is fine on the old B position, and I'm happy not to have to stretch to that awkward position as much as before. I feel that this simple trick helps out with the left-hand rest position and stretches, and it was a very quick adaptation for my muscle memory since I'm still using the same fingers as before for the ZXCVB keys. In fact, if you choose to stay with QWERTY on a row-staggered board and have a VK_102 key I'd recommend you try out the same tweak even for QWERTY! The brave 101-key users might try out changing ZXCVB for XCVBZ to make the B easier to reach and the XC stretches more ergonomic, but it's less perfect since moving the Z around like that may be undesirable to many.

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
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    Hmmm I haven't tried that one.

    In case you hadn't noticed, I finally decided (just over a couple of weeks ago) to go Colemak in the end. I'm now approaching 60wpm and I can safely say it's definitely been the right decision. It seems to go quite nicely with my new Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard too.

    (I eventually gave up on the Kinesis though. It just wasn't working out.)

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