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I don't think my fingers are fat, but I have a tough time with the iPhone keypad. I estimate my success rate with it is roughly 1%; ninety-nine times out of 100 I have multiple typos that I need to backspace over to and fix. It feels like I'm trying to repair a watch using two sausages.
For digitally-challenged users like me, help is on the way from Cliff Kushler, the guy who invented the brilliant T9 predictive text system. Kushler's latest invention, called Swype, is a predictive text system specifically designed for touchscreens, so a user can swipe their finger on a particular sequence of letters, like connect-the-dots, and the program spits out the word you're looking for. A demo:
The Swype Beta is currently open and downloadble here if you're an Android user; us iPhone guys will have to wait a few months.
Comments
How does this differ from ShapeWriter, which has been out for iPhone forever?
I was very disappointed that Apple didn't incorporate some type of shape writing, Swype-like input technique for iPad, which seems like an ideal solution.
For iphone users, I have been using a similar app call ShapeWriter. Works pretty well for me.
Or you upgrade your iPhone OS to version 3, and use it in landscape mode. Gives you perfect typing abilities.
I've never thought of T9 as something to marvel over. It could be... but never became quite as useful as it could be. It would be much more useful if it's prediction system chose words based on their frequency of use.
For example, typing "number" (one of the 100 most used words) into T9 requires me to press 6 keys, because it brings up "ou", "nun" "numb" and "ounce" before "number." The earlier words you don't use that frequently unless you are heavily involved in a church or drug-dealing. If it were actually predictive, "number" would appear sooner - perhaps by using a frequency-of-use ranking first, and then filtering by letter combinations.
Asides from that problem (which I doubt would be addressed) this new swiping method could be difficult if some things weren't addressed:
- you don't know if you over/underswiped a letter until you finish the word. As hipstomp noted, people have trouble precisely selecting letters.
- typing adjacent and repeated letters? How would you swipe "trees?" You'd likely just end up with "ts." And making a small circles on already small letters could be tough without hitting adjacent letters and adding them to your word.
Nitpicking? Maybe. It's an interesting concept that could increase typing efficiency greatly, if the design addressed all the small nuances that could keep users from becoming frustrated and going back to pecking at pixels.... and it looks like they're taking care of most of it.
Maybe adding some feedback (vibration/noise) would help improve accuracy? When a letter is selected, the keystroke sound or vibration could occur?
I've been using swype for a few months from a leaked version, and if you haven't already YOU MUST try this out. Give it a few weeks to get used to it...
I've been using swype for a while now, and I love it. Yeah, on occasion it's wrong, but I'd say 95% of the time it works right. It's also about 10 times faster than the standard input. The best part is if it's not sure it pops a list of possible words, and if it guesses wrong, you're just one key press and selecting the right word away from fixing it. I swyped this entire comment with only 4 errors while walking
For iphone users, i have been using a similar app call ShapeWriter. Works pretty well for me and I think it's very good