Anyone ever use a frogpad?

[Phantomstranger]

Anyone ever use a frogpad? Just wondering how well the work, and if they improve typing speed as much as they say. Also, is it clumsy to use?


http://www.frogpad.com/
incase no one knows what the hell I am talking about it, it looks like this

 

[DermicSavage]

@ that design

 

[TedBundy]

wow that looks hard to learn.

 

[Velocity]

what's wrong with a regular keyboard?

 

[Phantomstranger]

what's wrong with a regular keyboard?

the idea is you can type with one hand, then use the mouse with the other. you wouldn't have to take your hand off the mouse.

I figured it would be great for applications though. you could do every shortcut for the application with one hand.

 

[Babbs]

Improve typing speed? I *highly* doubt that. If you want to improve speed, learn Dvorak. There's no way a one-handed keyboard will do that.

 

[ChowTOdust]

edit: Dvorak?

 

[arcadus]

im sure it would be alright if you were taught to use that kind of keyboard layout from the get-go

 

[Babbs]

edit: Dvorak?

 

[Le Sean]

sam fisher style

 

[JustinCase]

that's supposed to help why?

 

[Psychosis]

faster because it alternates hands more


incidentally, imagine trying current T1 voice chats on a dvorak

lol

 

[Phantomstranger]

edit: Dvorak?

this is a stupid rumor that people won't let die.

"The QWERTY keyboard was not created to slow down typing speed. Early on, there were other publicized touch typists using other keyboards. The Navy study was very poorly documented and designed, and appears to have been conducted by Navy Lieutenant Commander August Dvorak, creator and patent holder on the keyboard bearing his name. A later, carefully constructed and controlled study, performed for the General Services Administration in the 1950s, demonstrated quite the opposite results from the Navy study. More recent studies indicate that there is practically no difference in typing speed between the two keyboard designs."

a different quote

Probably the most frequently cited example of market failure due to network externalities is the design of the typewriter keyboard (David, 1985).14 The beguiling and often told story is that the strike mechanism of the earliest mechanical typewriters was prone to jamming, so the typewriter's inventors designed the (now standard) QWERTY keyboard in order to slow down typing speed. This arrangement became the market leader, largely by accident, because it became associated with the world's only touch typist. Typists remain burdened by this speed-reducing design today, even though there exists a competing Dvorak keyboard -- scientifically designed to be easier to learn and to allow greater speed. Nevertheless, we all learn touch typing on the QWERTY design because there are so few Dvorak typewriters, and there are so few Dvorak keyboard typewriters because almost no one knows how to type on them. This vicious cycle keeps us stuck on the wrong standard. The empirical support for the story is a U.S. Navy study conducted during the World War II. Purportedly, that study conclusively demonstrates the superiority of the Dvorak design, determining that the costs of retraining QWERTY typists on the Dvorak design will be recouped within ten days from the start of training.

I don't know which one is better because you can't get a clear answer from anyone about which is better.

 

[nSpectre]

that's supposed to help why?

It's faster because it's logically designed to place the most often used keys closer to your fingers, and the least used keys farther away.

The QWERTY keyboard, under your fingers right now, was intentionally designed to slow down your typing speed. Old manual-key typewriters would bind up the keys if you typed too fast.

 

[Hugo]

@ that design

 

[SpicyMcHaggis]

what the fuck happened to the rest of the alphabet?

 

[TonyElTigre]

i will still use qwerty

cause i dont wanna break my typewriter

 

[nSpectre]

this is a stupid rumor that people won't let die.



a different quote


I don't know which one is better because you can't get a clear answer from anyone about which is better.

I don't know where you got that first blurb from, but it's wrong.

Before the computer, the typewriter may have been the most significant everyday business tool. Christopher Latham Sholes and his colleagues, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, invented the first practical typewriting machine in 1866. Five years, dozens of experiments, and two patents later, Sholes and his associates produced an improved model similar to today’s typewriters.

The type-bar system and the universal keyboard were the machine’s novelty, but the keys jammed easily. To solve the jamming problem, another business associate, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing. This became today’s standard "QWERTY" keyboard.

 

[Phantomstranger]

I don't know where you got that first blurb from, but it's wrong.

yet the same page you posted, links to something that relates to the first post.
http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynam...tp://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. However, a keyboard need to do more than just "sound" good, and unfortunately, Dvorak has failed to prove itself superior to QWERTY. It appears that many of the studies used to test the effectiveness of Dvorak were flawed. Many were conducted by the good professor himself, creating a conflict of interest question, since he had a financial interest in the venture. A U.S. General Services Administration study of 1953 appears to have been more objective. It found that it really didn't matter what keyboard you used. Good typists type fast, bad typists don't.
.
It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old. A few computer programs and special-order daisy wheels are available to transform modern typewriters or word processors to the Dvorak keyboard, but the demand for these products is small. After all, expert typists can can do nearly 100 words a minute with QWERTY . Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed.

and here is another page linked from the one you posted.
http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynam...www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/index.html

Unfortunately, subsequent investigation has shown that at best, the experiments in the Navy study were biased, and at worst, fabricated. See Typing Errors, from the June 1996 issue of Reason Magazine for a thorough discussion of this topic, as well as more information about the early history of the typewriter and the qwerty keyboard. In the mid 1950s, U.S. Government's General Services Administration commissioned a study by Earle Strong to confirm Dvorak's results. Strong's study, which included proper controls and which was set up to allow direct comparison of qwerty and Dvorak data, found that after sufficient training, Dvorak typists were able to match their previous qwerty speeds, but not surpass them. Furthermore, additional qwerty training for qwerty typists resulted in a greater increase in speed than additional Dvorak training for Dvorak typists who typed at a similar rate. These results would suggest that Dvorak's claims of faster and more efficient typing are bogus, and switching layouts on the basis of speed and efficiency would not make sense.

do you see my point about not getting a clear answer?
yeah qwerty might have been designed to slow down to stop jamming, but there is no clear answer to dvorak being superior.

 

[LoneGunman]

holy shit these things are expensive, cheapest one is 99 bucks