From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Input devices (Was: [9fans] weird cursor motion)
Message-ID: <20010426142323.C354@cackle.proxima.alt.za>
References: <20010426095152.B07FA199DD@mail.cse.psu.edu>
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In-Reply-To: <20010426095152.B07FA199DD@mail.cse.psu.edu>; from rob pike on Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 05:51:50AM -0400
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 14:23:24 +0200
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On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 05:51:50AM -0400, rob pike wrote:
>
> Giving your right hand for a second mouse strikes me as a
> philosophical conundrum. Or perhaps an opportunity for
> creative input devices.
>
Am I really that cryptic?  I thought I agreed to the above in my
original message :-)

To be sure, I think Palm have the right idea (I don't care that
3Com are in Boyd's bad books presently).  In fact, it's a pity Bell
Labs did not explore the graffiti input further with their bitsy
development, because to my mind there's room for shorthand (Pitman
style) as a form of text entry (but not within the scope of my
personal programming capabilities).

Of course, Apple was there before U.S.Robotics, and they failed to
capture the imagination of the marketplace with the Newton (more's
the pity, in  my opinion) presumably because learning oneself and
at the same time teaching shorthand to one's handheld would be time
consuming and hardly glamorous.  I'll refrain from stating here
what I think of managers turning into desktop publishers and other
unpublishable points of view on modern enterprise leaders, I do
not have the skills of Scott Adams (I hope I remember the right
name).

Yet it strikes me as self-evident that writing has become the
primary task of personal computing, and shorthand would not only
speed text entry considerably, but also eliminate to some extent
the need to remember the exact spelling of words.

I think the biggest obstacle is the need for a two-prong approach:
computing devices have to be taught skeletal shorthand and users
have to learn _and_ teach their particular fashion of shorthand to
their device.  In addition, one needs to somehow track the owner's
"vocabulary" so that it can be ported to new, different devices
(or should one have just a personal translator as the input device?
No, the market place wouldn't really permit this).

Just some lateral thinking that's been bugging me a while.

++L