Dasher

[mattp]

I'm writing this journal entry with an unusual text entry system called Dasher. It was mentioned on UNaXcess, which is a BBS that I'm on. It uses contextbased prediction to give it speed boost. I'm still much slower with it than I am with QWERTY but accuracy is easier so it's less frustrating.

Musing: I wonder if this is the first LiveJournal entry written with it.

Summary for the non-geek: type with your mouse, not your keyboard.

Comments

[paul.livejournal.com]

If so, is this the first LiveJournal comment written using Dasher?

[mattp.livejournal.com]

Yay, congrats to us :-)

[dagonet.livejournal.com]

geeks. but in an endearing way.

dagonet

[kimble.livejournal.com]

Just had a play with it... cool stuff, could see it being a viable solution for people with limited typing ability (though barakta will probably kill me for even suggesting it :) ) or indeed for mobile devices.

I have a weird mental block when it comes to the alphabet, so found it to be painfully slow - that would probably improve with practise. Conversely, I expect it would be really intuitive for people with synesthesia.

When playing around following the big blobs of colour I liked the look of, it kept coming out with stuff about a Mock Turtle, which may have interesting implications regarding the inner workings of my mind...

[mattp.livejournal.com]

I expect it would be really intuitive for people with synesthesia.
Ooh, interesting idea. I know someone who has it. I shall ask for his feedback.

[choric.livejournal.com]

it kept coming out with stuff about a Mock Turtle

That'll be _Alice in Wonderland_, then. Dasher works by being fed a large amount of sample text; since we couldn't distribute copyrighted material, we went for out of copyright books instead. :)

- Chris, the New Dasher Guy. (mjg59's left to go off and do a PhD again.)

[matrixhacker.livejournal.com]

real geeky stuff . somthing new to play with on the ipaq u guess :)

[dineleeeee.livejournal.com]

aha! i have an ipaq, and it works

its easier to use, as there is less tapping of stylus, you just wave the stylus around as the letters float past the screen!

but i think i need to get used to it, im not terribly quick, and forget where some letters in the alphabet go!

but it does seem to learn words ive used a few times...or it looks like its making the boxes for those letters bigger :)

[ninjahamster.livejournal.com]

Thats quite cool.

:plays

[rik.livejournal.com]

let me guess, it was mentioned by chris, from the geekhouse of the 3am curry, now in cambridge?

[mattp.livejournal.com]

Bah, rumbled. Yes, it was him.

[sythic.livejournal.com]

heh, I think I made a post some time ago with dasher when chris first started developing on it.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Ooh, shiny. I wonder how hard it would be to turn the OS X frontend into an input thing (like Kotoeri or the pre-10.3 generic-character-input palette), so it would work with any application....

[mattp.livejournal.com]

Control mode, in the Gnome app at least, makes the menus appear as "character cells" so they can be selected that way..

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I vaguely know one of the people involved in that in Cambridge.
wechsler has submitted bug reports too. Apparently it's very exciting.

[emperor]

mjg59 is a dasher developer, so I suspect not :-)

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I thought it was him I'd seen ranting about it in his inimitable style :)