"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then this would be ideal.
I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?
To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
There really is a lack of actual usage-videos which is kind of off putting. The posted "trailer" video didn't make me want to use it either, although this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 made me a little bit more curious.
And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
He's really slow in the video. I use Swift key (not swiping, just typing) and I'm many times faster than that. Can't see how an expert would be faster either, the gestures simply take longer than simply hitting the right spot.
Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
I'm sorry I may be stupid but I still don't understand how the keyboard works after having seen that second video.
Seriously they should make a video where we can see what happens on the keyboard and on the screen at the same time.
Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?
These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.
I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
Each of the 5 tiles represent a group of letters/numbers. The reason you see 'EABCD' is because he is only using the first (blue) tile. If you wanted to type 'n' you would put your finger on the yellow, which contains 'KLONM', and slide it to the fourth tile.
The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles.
Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing.
Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'".
Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…
we didn't make it clear enough in that video that it's of the keyboard in "Learning Mode", which shows you which letters you can swipe to when you've got your finger on one of the keys. We'll make a new with the Learning Mode turned off....
If the people doing this are listening: I don't think the business model is ok. If this keyboard is to get some traction, it will require us users to use it for real before paying. You can't have a keyboard lite, it's a vital utility, not a game. If I type a url or a password and discover that a character is only on premium, I'll switch back to my usual keyboard and not look back.
Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.
Swiftkey's approach is to give you 30 days free. Of course you can get around this, but with Swiftkey the more you use it, the more it learns. I imagine they have reasonable conversion rates.
We're listening, and really appreciate all of the great feedback here - we're taking it all on board. Good point about a number mode - at the moment, the best way to see the Number gestures is in the Cheat Sheet: http://fivetiles.com/use-cheatsheets/
The way they provide responses to their user reviews on the Play store is a bit off-putting -- they have a very "you're doing it wrong" tone, rather than accepting the premises and complaints of their users.
I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.
There is such a keyboard, i used it, and i case you take the huddle of learning morse code (that is very hard and requires LOTs of pratice that i unfortunatly don't have) it's absolutly awesome. Eyes free typing. I think that shouldn't be a aprils fool.
I can't figure out how I'm expected to use more than one digit on this thing at once. I usually type on a touchscreen keyboard with at least two fingers(either both thumbs, or the index and middle finger of one hand).
The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work.
This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character.
The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.
On the subject of alternative keyboards, I've been using MessagEase (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...) for about a year and am pretty pleased with it. It's still roughly the size of a regular QWERTY keyboard, but the buttons are enormous, and I can type any letter, number, or symbol I care about without modifier keys. (It accomplishes this by differentiating between taps and short swipes—so each button has nine characters assigned to it, the tapping one and then eight for swiping to each side/corner.)
I've been using MessageEase too and I really like it. I was fed up with miss-keying on a standard Qwerty shaped on-screen keyboard, and I really haven't liked any predictive typing solutions I've tried.
What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160 character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.
Public service announcement to all companies that are trying to sell us keyboards or keyboard-like solutions:
I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.)
This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm.
If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless.
Yes, it's a practice application with pangrams, with the auto-complete turned on. Here's a video of a speed test with everything turned off: http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM (good point to get this more visible on the website)
After viewing this video six times, I'd like someone to explain to me how the program knew to autocomplete "z" into "zippers" without consulting the users. Could it be that they've trained it for this specific sentence, making this entire video meaningless at best and a fraud at worst?
Yes, I have just moved from iOS to Android in the last few weeks, and I was thinking about giving up and moving back until I found this keyboard. I'm glad it was helpful! Best two dollars I've spent recently.
I would have liked to see this too. I tried the YouTube on the Google Play store, read enough of the description to understand how it works, then gave up trying it.
Hm, feels like this should make it more complicated to enter text. Let's say I have a telephone and it has 11 buttons. 0 - 9, call and hang up. This is easy for a person to remember and use.
But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use.
One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.
It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.
Just downloaded it to try. WAY too high of a learning curve. For example to delete a character you swipe up on the first tile (likely accidentally activating Google Now). To show/hide the cheat sheet swipe down on the fourth tile. I can tell right from the start this is way too much information to remember. Swiping keyboards already work pretty well and are quite easy to pickup.
This is an interesting design, independently if it may or may not be successful. In my opinion the keyboard should be reinvented. The qwerty and similar designs works, but not for everybody. I for example, took a course on using qwerty correctly, with all fingers, and without having to look at it, and failed. I can type fairly fast, but must look at the keys most of the time, and mostly use both index fingers only. The arrangement feels not intuitive for me, more like a mess. I can't never remember where a key is located exactly. All I can memorize are approximate locations. I am sure that at least for me, there could be better keyboard implementations. I have been thinking, and have some ideas. Both for on-screen touch, and physical keyboards. I may try implementing them soon.
There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards. I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty. The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers? In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade alternative keyboard for my personal use.
For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that realize it.
I'm guessing it's harder to learn to touch type these days for folks who spend huge amounts of time using keyboards. While you're taking the course, you're partially hobbled by only knowing a few letters by memory, and you spend 90% of your day needing to actually type, so practicing your new touch-typing has got to be very hard to do.
I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits.
You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.
If you ever care to touch type, look into a Das Keyboard with no markings. Or even better, get a cheapo keyboard and spray paint it. You get the letters committed to muscle memory remarkably quickly when all you have to go on is key position. The numbers are a little rougher, and the symbols toughest of all.
You'll probably spend a few days with a text editor open so you can click over to find { or whatever. You'll probably let more fingers touch the keyboard, just so you can anchor your hands in space, over 2 up 1 for O or whatever.
I'm not a fast typist, but when i moved from typing and looking, to just muscle memory, i got a nice speed boost.
Absolutly awesome. I tried serveral alternative keyboards since the day i own a smartphone, this is the first one I liked right from the start. Minuum seemed pretty lame, haven't tried it, but I tried Swype, Swiftkey, GKOS, 8Pen, and a morse-key keyboard. The latter was very neat in theory, but the learning curve was just to steep. Now, starting form thre and increasing the number of buttons from two to five and adding hints on for the fly is IMO genius. Two thumbs up. Now i want a smartwatch. I just wished there was a explanation what the difference between the light and the full version is.
/edit:
And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version tomorrow.
/edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".
I really think you should give Minuum a try. I've used most of the ones you listed above (Swype, Swiftkey, 8Pen, Fleksy) and ended up sticking with Minuum. I've been using it for almost a year and don't regret switching. I used to love Swype, but it started to get pretty slow and once I switched to Minuum, it was nice to see how much screen space I could reclaim.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 96.4 ms ] threadI learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?
To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?
These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.
I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles.
Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing.
Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'".
Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…
Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.
I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ
The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work.
This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character.
The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.
What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160 character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.
I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.)
This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm.
If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless.
Thank you.
Most require a large learning curving. This one feels like the iOS one but it's a bit smoother.
Nice find!
But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use.
One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.
It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.
There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards. I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty. The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers? In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade alternative keyboard for my personal use.
For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that realize it.
I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits.
You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.
You'll probably spend a few days with a text editor open so you can click over to find { or whatever. You'll probably let more fingers touch the keyboard, just so you can anchor your hands in space, over 2 up 1 for O or whatever.
I'm not a fast typist, but when i moved from typing and looking, to just muscle memory, i got a nice speed boost.
/edit: And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version tomorrow.
/edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".