aTypeTrainer4Mac 3.0 is released on 2016-04-19
New in this version:
- aTypeTrainer4Mac works under Mac OS X 10.11 now
- minor improvements
Vassilevski: I'm guessing this is a real post and not a fancy way of spambotting! :-) (We do get our share of those.)
But it's posted in an old and buried thread instead of its own thread! Could you repost in a new thread, please?
Looks like good news for new Mac typists? :-)
]]>New in this version:
- aTypeTrainer4Mac works under Mac OS X 10.11 now
- minor improvements
I've tried both QWERTY and Dvorak before Colemak, myself. I cannot really say whether there is a real difference in comfort between Dvorak and Colemak, nor whether me breaking my Dvorak speed record on Colemak is simply a result of better training. What I can say though, is that it feels easier to use Colemak in a "QWERTY world". It's nice to have the shortcut keys in place, it's nice to have an easier time of switching back and forth. That's my experience.
]]>The typing progam I used was aTypeTrainer4Mac. I highly recommend it. It measures several dimensions of typing ability, but I think one of the coolest features is that it shows you all the keys and associated error rates. Interestingly, I reached a maximum of 60 WPM in a month (so far), but my accuracy has stayed constant at 95%. Unfortunately I don't have measurements of WPM or accuracy in Qwerty or Dvorak.
Now onto the hard part, the subjective review... Having learnt and achieved decent typing speed with Dvorak, Colemak didn't really blow my mind in terms of comfort. It is extremely difficult for me to tell if it's significantly more comfortable than Dvorak, only that I know both are much better than Qwerty. I've come to believe that all of those metrics that we see based on various typing measures are not as fine-grained when you map them to human experience. I'm sure that there is a good degree of correlation between subjective comfort level and those numeric scores, but when it comes to the difference between Dvorak and Colemak those differences are smallish difficult to parse when you actually sit down to type. That said, if you switch from Qwerty, Colemak offers several advantages over Dvorak.
On the subject of right-pinky fatigue, recently I was typing stuff that required a lot of brackets and braces, so that advantage over Dvorak was sort of nullified. I remember reading somewhere that Colemak also has more bottom-row use, and I do feel like my fingers generally stay on the top two rows using Dvorak to a greater extent. I just want to point out again that these are only my impressions.
It's been interesting to compare the different layouts.