Monday, June 21, 2010

Fingers Stop Walking, Start Gliding



Link to June 21 New York Times article, "Phone Software Takes the Taps out of Typing".

Excerpt:    Back in the 1990s, typing out “hello” on most cellphones required an exhausting 13 taps on the number keys, like so: 44-33-555-555-666. 

That was before the inventor Cliff Kushler, based here in Seattle, and a partner created software called T9, which could bring that number down to three by guessing the word being typed.

Now there is a new challenge to typing on phones. More phones are using virtual keyboards on a touch screen, replacing physical buttons. But pecking out a message on a small piece of glass is not so easy, and typos are common.

Mr. Kushler thinks he has a solution once again. His new technology, which he developed with a fellow research scientist, Randy Marsden, is called Swype, and it allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard to spell words, rather than tapping out each lette
r.



The retro way to use your fingers.
This one's #16.

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