I have a few ideas on that, but I'll let you formulate your own, without interference.
Have I mentioned the book Guns, Germs & Steel yet? Great book. It's also a video you can rent from Netflix.
I just learned, while reading it this morning, that Thomas Edison didn't realize that the phonograph was best suited to replaying music until 20 years after he invented it!!!
That fact was meant to support the notion that invention is the mother of necessity, not the other way around as is commonly understood.
Another interesting notion, that the best invention isn't always adopted by a population. As case in point he mentions the computer keyboard, which you probably know was modeled after the typewriter keyboard. But the typewriter had a limiting feature that keyboards don't; that is, the mechanical arms and their potential to jam if two keys were pressed simultaneously. Consequently the layout of the letters is designed to disperse commonly typed letters widely around the keyboard in order to slow you down!! Clearly this is not what you want in the computer age, but the QWERTY keyboard is so entrenched it is showing little sign of being displaced by designs that would increase speed by double and reduce the total effort by 95%!!
So now, in order to not feel like some ignorant brute I'm going to have to get a Dvorak-style keyboard so that I can achieve the typing speed of....a really fast typist.
Lief introduced me to this concept more than a year ago, but some of the problems I read about prevented me from taking the plunge. The most significant challenge being the switch back to QWERTY whenever you use someone else's keyboard.
Here's an excerpt from fingerworks.com:
The DVORAK key layout was carefully designed by August Dvorak in the 1930's and became an ANSI standard in 1982. All vowels are placed on the left hand home row keys, and the most common consonants ('D','H','T','N','S') lie on the right
hand's home row. This way most (70%) typing is done within home row, and finger hops between upper and lower rows of keys are minimized. This is a stark
contrast to QWERTY, which requires finger hops for common letter sequences like 'EC','EX','CR','CT','CE','BR','BE', and 'UN'. (Compare finger travel to type
'EXCRUCIATING' on QWERTY versus on the DVORAK layout above).
4 comments :
You don't have to get anything in order to use the Dvorak keyboard layout. It is already built into the operating system, well at least the Windows operating system.
I have been using the Dvorak layout for two or three years now. I have both my home PC and my office PC configured to easily switch back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak.
In fact, the first paragraph of this message was typed using the QWERTY layout and the rest was done with Dvorak.
I must admit that it took me a lot longer to type these last few paragraphs, but I have not taken the time to switch over entirely to Dvorak, so I am still struggling with it.
I can help you configure your PC to switch between the two layouts...as soon as you are ready.
Since you said it was built in, I took a look around and figured out how to set it up. Whew, it sure caused friction in my brain when I first tried to use it. But I can see already how it could be beneficial. The word 'the' is a great example of a really easy one. And knowing all the vowels are on one home-row is really going to make those easy to learn.
The first attempts show that I start out 10 times faster with QWERTY. We'll see how it goes.
When I configured my Powerbook I decided I didn't need all that space sucking Korean language support (talking 100's of languages I tossed out with the laundry) and ALL of the associated keyboard layouts...save one.
Dvorak...but alas...I haven't taken the time to set it up for easy switching.
I think I just didn't want to hack away at it any longer, it just wasn't worth the wrestle I guess.
That hurts to say that I tell ya, it really hurts. :)
Well, so far my easy-switching experience has been aggravating. I set it up on Heidi's computer and the thing just switches from Standard to Dvorak and back...unpredictably. So I yanked it off there. I might try it again, since I felt I was learning it fairly quickly, but that's one bad experience with "easy switching".
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