Misfiring Neurons Just another geek with a blog

The lost and found art of touch typing

I remember being rather frustrated the first time I tried a mechanical typewriter. It took ages to find the right letter, then push on the key with quite a bit of effort, and get a tiny imprint on the blank page with each noisy strike.

I can't remember when I first tried typing on a computer keyboard. Doing it with any regularity started when I was about ten, and my mum brought home a borrowed work Pravetz-16 for the summer holidays. The experience was even more frustrating because now there were mountains of text I *wanted* to input (long listings of Basic programs at first) yet progress was glacial.

It is hard to imagine a time when the qwerty layout hadn't been burned into my muscle memory. Like all self-taught computer geeks, typing was a funny mixture of using two or three fingers, flying all over the keyboard. It was only much later, once my typing speed had picked up tremendously, that I realized I need to make a consciouss effort to change or risk permanent injury. Typing tutorial time well spent. I transitioned to touch typing, eliminated wrist movement almost completely, and reduced my error rate significantly.

I realized yesterday that I am back at the same point with my iPad -- sometimes using just two fingers, other times more using something closer to touch typing but only using three or maybe four fingers. And not just me, plenty of others I’ve observed have invented their own technique. It works surprisingly well considering the “keys” are projected onto a glass screen with zero tactile feedback.

So this got me thinking -- will there be a time when we look back to this early period of learning a new input method? Will the software/touch keyboards enable more innovation than the qwerty layout now that they're not baked into hardware? Or is touch typing proper going to become a rare and arcane skill, known only to a subset of computing users, akin to long haul truck driving today? Replaced by pointing, touching, voice, eye and movement tracking? Can't wait to find out.

Marco Arment nails tablets

In his Kindle Fire review, Marco absolutely nails what makes the iPad great:

A tablet is a tough sell. It’s too big for your pocket, so you won’t always have it available like a phone. It’s too small to have rich and precise input methods like keyboards and mice, and its power and size constraints prevent it from using advanced PC-class hardware, so it’s probably not going to replace your laptop. It’s just one more gadget to charge, encase, carry (sometimes), care for, and update. And it’s one more expenditure that can easily be cut and done without, especially in an economic depression.

“Tablets” weren’t a category that anyone needed to give a damn about until the iPad. It was a massive hit not because it managed to remove any of the problems inherent to tablets, but because it was so delightful, fun, and pleasant to use that anyone who tried their friend’s iPad for a few minutes needed to have one of their own.

Hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived with an iPad for a little while. (I tend to think a few minutes are not enough for everyone.) Spec-obsessed hardcore PC geeks excepted, of course