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.