Anyone using alternative input devices with Squeak?

Alan Kay alank at wdi.disney.com
Sat Nov 7 13:40:26 UTC 1998


Daniel --

Long ago, Doug Engelbart came up with both a theory for such interaction,
and a particular instance of the theory.

The theory was that you should be able to stay at either the keyboard or
the pointing device for long periods of time without having to switch very
often.

His instance of the theory was to have a five finger "chord" keyboard for
the nonmouse hand. This plus two of the three buttons on the mouse allowed
127 characters to be typed, which included both text and commands. (The
other mouse button was "command accept".) So one typically would have
"hands out" on the mouse and chord keyboard for most navigation, commands,
correction of typos, and short text inputs. When it came time to type a
whole paragraph, the hands would come into the keyboard. I got fluent at
this in the late sixties, and liked it. The PARC Alto came with the chord
keyboards, but they didn't catch on.

In the early Dynabook design, Engelbart's idea was adapted to a pen-based
interface. RAND had done GRAIL, a really great pen-based system with a
recognizer similar in spirit to and better than Grafitti. We realized from
experience with Engelbart that even a perfect recognizer (which GRAIL
almost was) was still too slow for some interactions, so I put a keyboard
on the Dynabook model. Again the scheme was to navigate, give commands, fix
typos, and do short text inputs with the pen, and then to switch to the
keyboard for intensive text entry.

This scheme was argued for the Newton and rejected (not on logical grounds).

Now, it happens that there is a GRAIL-type character recognizer lurking in
Squeak that I did in the earliest days for fun and to provide some
benchmarks. It is trainable, etc. We plan to put this back in operation by
January, but you might have fun playing with it now. It is called Class
CharRecog. The code is very short and should be clear.

Cheers,

Alan

---------

At 10:32 AM -0000 11/7/98, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
>I'm a keyboard type of person, and I generally don't like the mouse at
>all,
>but I hate switching between them even more.
>
>Using Smalltalk, and Squeak specifically, requires almost constant use
>of the mouse.
>
>Does anyone here have any experience with things like Twiddlers or such?
>
>The idea of a device that combines the mouse and keyboard into one
>device,
>not requiring the annoying context switch, sounds great in theory. Any
>"but"s?
>
>As it is now I simply use one hand for most typing, one hand constantly
>on the
>mouse, occaisonally abandoning the mouse when on a real coding roll.
>
>I'd be interested to hear how others play.





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