Dead-On Typing

Yeah, Typing Of The Dead got mentioned again. Heh. So much fun.

Have anyone tried out the updated version available at Steam? It may have more shine, but it appears to have less challenge modes. The original even had a typing course (albeit QWERTY-based of course).

http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/

The original is still lying about, so if you're interested you may give it a spin (of the gun barrel):

http://www.theisozone.com/downloads/pc/ … e-dead-pc/

It's not the same text snippet over and over, but multiple text snippets from day to day. So I think my claims hold. Furthermore, I see how my flow is excellent at times and not at other times, regardless of the text snippet in question.

I never shirk from hard text. Currently I'm type-reading an old book on Greek mythology. Good thing I have a good layout so I can type the occasional æ and ï in those books, or references that amusingly pop {1} up between words in a fashion no longer common [2]. The name of Hades is written in the old way, as Aïdes! Fun.

I cannot say for sure, but I don't feel that the hard text is what leads to most errors for me (albeit some slow-down). I see from the Amphetype stats that the word "Zeus" is hard, but other than a few hard ones like that I take the biggest hit from common words like 'their there then' etc.

The maker of Amphetype was interested in smooth typing, so he made the "viscosity" parameter (which I think might be better called "irregularity", or its inverse "fluidity"). Indeed, the best days feel flowing and effortless. This is not to say that the typing speed doesn't vary between simple/common and harder words, but that there is an overall smoothness to the experience that leads to good flow. Pretty much regardless of the text.

Sean Wrona won the typing championship with one normal and one very hard-to-type text. It was on the hardest text he really outclassed his opponent, if I recall correctly. He can just keep his flow up without getting stressed. He's a beast at long-distance typing, too.

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{1}: Old book style reference (in between words)
[2]: Modern-style reference (after the phrase)

I'm not sure whether there's a frequency normalisation. You can filter by count to avoid seeing the rarest words, but obviously in my book about Greek mythology there's bound to be a high number of 'Zeus' and 'Hera' to challenge me, in addition to 'with', 'which', 'that', 'were' etc. I've typed 'Zeus' 56 times in that book, vs 'with' 88 and 'which' 87 times!

I think Amphetype tries to show you which words/trigrams/etc actually did most damage to your typing lately. That is, no normalisation and therefore dependent on text content. But the same common words show up in all texts, pretty much.

When I type-read that English 17th-Century erotic book, the analysis tab made me blush. Apparently, some graphic words tripped me up a lot. :-D