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PSN: SAW776
I can type faster than I can write. What about a projected keyboard of some kind that can read your finger movements?
I generally type faster than I write, too. I admit that.
I also rather like the thumb keyboard on my phone. I don't think we have to be limited to a 10-inch keyboard.
I admit that I rather dislike touchscreen keyboards. I want to have tactile feedback when I type.
Yeah I know it all comes down to personal preferences.
I think devices of the future should have multiple options for input, so people can choose what works best for them. There's no reason you couldn't have a hardware chorded keyboard, an onscreen QWERTY touch keyboard, and a stylus for handwriting recnogition in one machine.
At first, we'll laugh at people using them. "Oh, he's talking on his brainwave thingy. He must think he's so important!"
Then executives will start using them and they'll start to become a status symbol.
Then they'll shrink down to the size of a small earpiece and drop below $100. Teenage girls will want them so they can talk to their friends at school.
Eventually state governments will start passing laws that it's illegal to drive with an audio headset and encourage people to use brainwave transmitters instead.
Did anyone ever see that eye-motion typing interface? Letters come streaming at you a la the old starfield screen saver. You find and look towards the first letter of the word, and that shifts the animation and draws that letter towards the center of the screen in order to "type" it, and then an algorithm similar to auto-type starts enlarging and bringing forth letters that would likely follow the letters you've already typed, so that they are easier to quickly look at, and such that after a few letters have been typed this way, you're basically just looking towards a few foreshortened 3d strings of letters representing the most likely words you're trying to type, with other alternative letters further off in the distance you can continue looking towards if you aren't typing one of the more common words. It works well because when you get good at it, you can do it pretty fast, to where you just start looking for the word you're trying to type and it finds its way towards you. Tough as hell to backspace, though.
Aren't chorded keyboards supposed to be easier to learn and faster to type on than the full-sized thing?
Edit: Not to mention better ergonomics AND smaller?
Actually, it doesn't seem that bad if you really think about it. Just using your fingers, you'd already have 8 characters without resorting to any combinatorics.
Then you'd have an octave key for capitals.
It'll be just like a flute.
Except at that point it's not so compact anymore. Maybe a piccolo instead.
I could be like 30% more lazy when I'm dicking about online.
Yea, 99% of the reason I still use Firefox instead of Chrome is lack of built-in mouse gesture support for Chrome, and when I tried using StrokeIt, a mouse gesture program that works on any window, it wouldn't allow me to gesture with either the right or left mouse buttons. Only one of them.
Mouse Gestures should be a part of everyone's next OS if you ask me.
Those aren't actually closed anymore. It's just zipped XML. Microsoft controls the format spec (and thank god, the W3C are a bunch of fucking wankers) but anyone can read the files now.
Of course rather a lot of people are using 6+ year old versions of office that save to closed formats natively but still...
Actually not anymore. QQ's moved to a new protocol and warned you for months, but they never updated it. So now you can't get on with Pidgin.
Also, you're assuming my friends are willing to use something unfamiliar like pidgin.
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And QQ has a linux client, so it's a needless worry.
MSN Messenger, on the other hand... does Pidgin support WLM's full featureset yet?
I was very adamant about hardware keyboards for devices such as smartphones. I wanted the tactile feedback and the precision of a hardware keyboard. I find the iPhone's on-screen keyboard much better than my old HTC 6800's hardware keyboard. I can touch type and I type much faster and just as accurately thanks to the auto-correct. On-screen keyboard technology can only improve and it's already pretty good.
But you are assuming here that a year from now processors that are more powerful will also be using more power or take up more space. This is almost certainly not going to be the case. My quad core 2.5 GHz CPU is smaller physicially and uses the slightly less power than the 300 MHz single core Pentium III I bought ~10 years ago.
It is completely reasonable to expect chips to continue to get more powerful and lighter, cheaper and use less electricity (or, at worse, the same).
Now in terms of physical size of the entire unit, the only way to get something smaller than a current netbook, which pack enough power to run windows just fine, is to do away with the Qwerty keyboard ala the iPhone.
Basicially, if you want a keyboard netbooks are not getting any smaller because human fingers sure aren't going to. The smaller size Asus EEE PCs are already just a bit too small to be comfortable.
"Chrome is linux? Hey how do I use this .deb .tar .rpm thing? Which linux am I using? Where's the Chrome version?"
It's a variant of Murphy's Law. If they can fail in any way at getting it to work, they will fail.
Also, pretty sure the answer to that is no.
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My solution, if I were a hardware manufacturer (or accessory manufacturer) would be a software keyboard with a plastic "screen protector" that has the tiniest of ridges over where the keys appear. Obviously, you'd want it to be as transparent as possible, easily removable, etc.
That's a good point.
Well, I personally don't have an issue with thumb keyboards or handwriting recognition, but I understand others dislike those options.
But an iPhone has an important function that neither netbooks, laptops, nor desktops have. Make and receive phone calls (not Skype).
Given that most of people I know already have laptops, why should they pick a Google Chrome OS netbook over a WinXP netbook except to go "ooh Google! Google's good!" and then get frustrated a la my examples?
My feeling is a lot of people look at netbooks as just smaller laptops, not iPhone replacements, and they expect everything they get from their laptops, just smaller and more portable.
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Only for so long though. The main reason new chips are more energy efficient and more powerful is that the transistors are becoming smaller. We're gonna run into the wall there fairly soon though, we don't have much space to spare from individual atoms. This won't mean development stops, but it does mean they are gonna start getting bigger and hotter aswell.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
Well, yes. Eventually this will happen. And they are running into these physical limits already in experimental chips in laboratories. But there is a lot of lag time between lab and production line.
My guess is there is at least three more years of improvements available given current architectures and materiels.
And Google Chome is going to come out in a bit over 1 year.
The Kindle has a nice form factor. It really hits that balance between big enough to use and small enough to carry around everywhere.
Though more so if they could somehow push gaming across coz then we'd be talking "full time windows replacement" territory for me.
Eh, by then we'll start moving to optical circuits. When we start running up against Landauer's Principle is when I'll start to worry.
Anyway, I'm kinda wondering why they're doing both this and Android; it sort of feels like nobody's at the wheel over there.
edit: as to gaming, forget it: if you want gaming that's not on Windows, buy a console. It's sad but it is what it is; I'm the biggest Linux geek I know and I'll be the first to admit it.
No.