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efficient touch screen input?

  • Started by ghen
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  • From: Sofia, Bulgaria
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And what I love about it is that it doesn't matter if you type a letter or some character you can't even find on a normal PC keyboard – it requires the same effort. Typing quotation marks, parenthesis, punctuation signs and capital letters is effortless. Such a genius app.

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  • From: Viken, Norway
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Yes, one almost gets a little envious at the power of it when back on the normal keyboard (which is faster than ME but more of a hassle when writing special stuff as pafkata points out!).

I didn't like circling at first, and thus I found the capitalized tap letters hard to type! But now I've discovered that you don't have to make an actual circle but can make a U shape instead as long as the return isn't too narrow (so it becomes a drag-return). That made the important capital ANIHORTES easy as well, thankfully.

Interestingly, have you noticed that circling on the 123 pad leads to some weird mappings? ;) The 123 pad drag-returns are the same as the ABC pad ones, with two exceptions (¶ → ¦ and º → 0).

Last edited by DreymaR (28-Jan-2013 11:01:14)

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(I think Dreymar's quite taken with MessageEase.)

@innovine, do you think it's possible to use 8pen blindly?  Also @dreymar, could you use MessageEase on a numpad without looking?

Last edited by pinkyache (28-Jan-2013 11:45:45)

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MessagEase even encourages you to use it blindly. It has a feature (gesture) to turn the letters off, and see only the grid. Which, by the way, you can also make transparent.

Thanks for the pointer for doing U-shapes for capitalizing, DreymaR! Didn't think of that.

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Never without looking, as there is no tactile feedback at all, but a half eye is enough.

Also, the ME keyboard can be made (semi) transparent so to regain screen space "behind" it, although I haven't managed to set this up yet.

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It's right there, in the settings. Doesn't it work for you? Maybe it could be the version of Android, or device incompatibility.

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Ok, I just tried it again, and it seems to depend on which app you use it with.  Eg. a Chrome window shows the current webpage under the transparent keyboard when entering a new URL, but the standard Android browser does not.   With SMS or Memo, the text window is also still limited to the space above the keyboard – and even then the keyboard is dark, so you lose twice.

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Yes, I've noticed a dodgy behaviour on some programs in landscape mode as well. The space around or between the two keypads is not always used by the program.

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I have the same problem as Ghen with transparency it seems: The keyboard is on a black rectangle no matter what, so the only thing transparency accomplishes is making it hard to see. I've mailed Saied about this. I suspect it's a device thing.

On a physical 10-button phone pad you could actually type blind with the MessagEase layout! And you'd have to, as the pad wouldn't have ME markings anyway. The blind mode for the touch screen apps have a circle in the middle to help you see where you are. I'd love to use that with a functional transparency mode, as the circle and grid would cover very little of the background!

When I had made my "Colemakoid" mappings of the non-tap letters, I found that I could type blindly with them almost immediately (not fast at first though). I was very happy about that. Too bad Pafkata didn't get the same benefit; don't know if it worked so well for me in part because I created it, or whether it'd work as well for some others.

And yes, I'm taken in. I'm happy as a child about this. So are ghen and pafkata, from the looks of it! ;)

Last edited by DreymaR (28-Jan-2013 14:58:21)

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I actually came to appreciate a lot of the default placement of the letters. Some nice combos happen. "You" is fast to type, and "CK" is very easy left-right movement.

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Yes, the "ck" digraph is nice, and "would" is almost too easy. :-)  The worst for me is "ij" (pretty common in Dutch pronouns).

Regarding the keyboard transparency, I think that's just how it works in Android (and each individual app), and not much MessagEase could do about.

For blind typing and no screen size loss, I think a physical GEKOS keyboard on the back of the phone would be best.  I tried the Android touch implementation but it's really not the same.  Nifty how they made the chords (optionally) available as drags as well though.

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I tried the touch GKOS as well, and hated it profoundly. I felt it was clunky and trying to make my head explode. That button implementation should be efficient I guess, once you learn it, but my guess is it'd take some learning! Also, it should be a flat film for maximum portability at minimal cost and not a button jig (but then you lose the tactility...).

There are nice combos with the Colemakoid as well: Typing with two thumbs at least, 'YOU' runs well here too, the common 'ING' is delightful and 'ED' nice. I'm not too happy with 'ME' or 'MEM' but it's getting better all the time I feel. The n-gram frequencies matter much too; I've found that some bigrams I had a feeling about were after all quite rare.

On a "blasphemic" side note: I updated the moving the space up post with further musings. :)

Last edited by DreymaR (28-Jan-2013 15:00:01)

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ghen said:

Let's just design one, you never know if Exideas will accept it – or if they decide to make the main letters configurable as well. ;-)

I put some thought into this already, but didn't come to a conclusion; ANI*ORTES are trivial to map (and also very frequent in Russian/Bulgarian so that's good), but H is difficult: it is usually mapped to either Ч or Х, but both are so infrequent they don't deserve a prime position like H.  So either we stick to the simple transliteration rule and sacrifice one tap position to an uncommon letter, or we prefer some optimization in this case and make a better choice for the H position.  According to letter frequency tables, Л and В are candidates, but then we'll have to move the L or V positions in the layout as well, and we lose the simple transliteration...

Pafkata90 and I had some off-line discussion about this, and we came up with the following proposal for a Russian layout:

+-------+-------+-------+   +-------+-------+-------+
|       |       |       |   |       |       |       |
|   А   |   Н   |   И   |   |   A   |   N   |   I   |
|   ч ж |   л   | х     |   |     v |   l   | x     |
+-----------------------+   +-----------------------+
|   ъ   | я у п |       |   |       | q u p |       |
|   В к | ц О б | м Р   |   |   H k | c O b | m R   |
|   ь ы | г д й |       |   |     _ | g d j |       |
+-----------------------+   +-----------------------+
|   ё ю | " ш щ | ф     |   |     y | " w ' | f     |
|   Т   | э Е з | № С   |   |   T   |   E z | # S   |
|       | , . : | ;     |   |       | , . : | ;     |
+-------+-------+-------+   +-------+-------+-------+

We submitted it to Exideas and they like the idea, so it may appear in a MessagEase release soon!

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Nice work guys! Kudos, and grats on the breakthrough!

ghen said:

Pafkata90 and I had some off-line discussion about this

Yes, it's a really short way from Denmark to Belgium... ;)

Last edited by DreymaR (05-Feb-2013 10:33:06)

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DreymaR said:

Yes, it's a really short way from Denmark to Holland... ;)

No, Flanders (Belgium), I'm not from Holland, please! ;-)

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Oops! Or as Douglas Adams would've said it: Oh, Belgium!

Last edited by DreymaR (05-Feb-2013 10:33:59)

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Ok I've given up on 8pen now. Although it was actually very fun and interesting to use, I found it both inaccurate and difficult to correct mistakes with (a lethal combination) and also very, very slow. It was just way too frustrating. I'm already at 20wpm with MessagEase and climbing slowly.

In the long term though I think the 8pen style holds some potential. It would be awesome to recognize the curves and changes in direction, rather than where you enter and leave the central circle. This would solve many of the accuracy problems, and give (without needing to look) a feel close to natural handwriting. It most certainly deserves to be placed closer to handwriting recognition than a virtual keyboard. You could think of it as its own alphabet of letters all composed of loops and curves.
And on the other hand, keyboards are twice as fast as handwriting, so it's probably doomed as an input system.

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There are several problems with 8pen from what I've heard: It's just too slow(!), and it can't handle extra characters and symbols well. The latter point may not be important to all, but imagine what we can do with the full-blown keyboard capabilities of MessagEase in the future? Ghen has used it to communicate with servers which requires the use of special symbols, which is just awesome. And all the locale characters are easy to implement.

The flow and power of this keyboard is just stunning. (And no, I'm not getting paid...) ;)

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I don't know about the flow; as mentioned, lots of ME feels rather random, but it's working nice and I like that I can do english and swedish. It's growing on me quite a bit actually.

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Using the Colemakoid mappings I don't feel that anything is random anymore. :)

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You'll learn the letter positions in no time and it wont feel random. It took me less than two days for this.

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The symbol placements feel semi-random, the letters falling outside the compass (locale letters and z) feel random, and the relationships of the other drag letters feels semi-random... to me.

Pafkata mentioned some nice mnemonics; if the drag mappings aren't that important to efficiency one could utilize that to make it even more so. For instance:

   MessagEase_IntuitiveDrags-v1-0_DreymaR.png
   A suggestion of more intuitive drag mappings for MessagEase based on letter shapes/sounds.

I think some of the drags are optimized for efficiency and should be, but most shouldn't need that. And both could be realized at the same time with a little cleverness. For myself, I'll still prefer two-by-two letter rows for the drags.

It's nice if drag bigrams aren't on back-and-forth drags I think, as that cramps me up a bit. But on the other hand, back-and-forth drags are the common way of capitalizing letters so they can't be all bad. :)

Last edited by DreymaR (07-Feb-2013 15:00:09)

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I've got to say it depends a lot on how you type. If you type with two thumbs I personally find only the diagonals between TO and SO (both ways) somewhat uncomfortable from all the letter positions. But more important, I think, is to stick with whatever you've started with. I mean if you've started with one layout and switch to another arrangement with the idea that it'd be easier to memorize.. I think that works the other way around – it's just confusing.

As to optimization – I think there is need for optimization just so, that you don't have to type often used pairs of letters with uncomfortable motions that provoke errors. The default English layout, I've found does this pretty nicely.

Last edited by pafkata90 (07-Feb-2013 16:44:26)
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All true, pafkata, all true. I know I've confused myself overly with my experiments; but that's how I roll.  ;)

In my suggestion, the j and b and y aren't common so they're probably okay like that. I used to have the d in exactly that position on my Colemakoid but now I've moved it to the middle drag (E>O) because of a similar feeling to yours - plus some bigrams. So yeah, maybe that suggestion goes a bit heavy on the mnemonics. It's mostly for illustrative purposes, not a layout I'd use myself.

Last edited by DreymaR (07-Feb-2013 23:19:40)

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ghen said:

Pafkata90 and I had some off-line discussion about this, and we came up with the following proposal for a Russian layout:
...
We submitted it to Exideas and they like the idea, so it may appear in a MessagEase release soon!

And yes, after further discussion with Exideas and some tweaks to the layout, our Russian translit layout has been released with MessagEase 8.3.  It's really intuitive to type on when you already know the English/Latin layout, much like Rulemak wrt. Colemak.

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