We don't all use a QWERTY keyboard. There's also AZERTY which is used by most French speakers. There's also the German QWERTZ layout. But most people use QWERTY.
Does the arrangement of letters on a keyboard baffle you? Well, it's been that way since Christopher Sholes invented the typewriter in 1868. Though there seems to be no logical reason why our keyboards bear such a weird matrix of letters, QWERTY keyboards have quite a rich history, and the layout is something we've grown accustomed to.
4 comment(s):
QWERTY optimized typing speed... still does. It was a very serious matter to type quickly before computers and the keyboard that helped typists perform optimally was the winner.
It also took a lot more hand strength to type on a manual typewriter. QWERTY arrayed the characters on the keyboard to put the most used ones where the strongest fingers are.
This still has value because of the repetitive stress problem.
One semester of typing instruction lasts an entire lifetime and has the hunt-and-peck method beat eighteen ways to Sunday.
I once heard that QWERTY is just so difficult to rember that it prevented that the user types so fast that the hammers of the type writer get jammed...
The QUWERTY was once in alphabetic order as you stimm may see at the key groups "op", "fgh", "jkl" and "nm"...
Still hate this damn keyboard layout...
the second curse of this Keyboard resides in the alignment of the keys in each row, that once also originated form the key levers of a mechanical typewriter...
Noone should still be forced to use these crappy Key alignments...
May the "Querty" designer rot in the same hell as all the following keyboard designer still relying on this crap...
Sorry but i am not really happly with QWERTY..
P.S: Thanks for the Blog
B.
Actually, that's true. I forgot about that part, but it not getting the keys jammed was part of the speed thing.
I think if you just do things like practice typing:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
without looking, over and over and over whenever you get a few minutes, you will find that your loathing for QWERTY evaporates. There are usually little bumps on the F and the J keys to tell your index fingers where they are, and so even if you can't remember where the keys are, your fingers start remembering for you.
Just a little effort for a few weeks and, bip bam, happy typer....
The QWERTY apologists will come up with all sort of contrived ways to justify what is the greatest usability FAIL of all time. If QWERTY is so intuitively fabulous, why did they need schools to teach it? Why can you learn to speak fluent Hungarian faster than it takes to master QWERTY?
And it's an even bigger fail on touchscreens.
QWERTY's taken 150 years to garner 2 billion begrudging users like myself and "B". There's another keyboard that's far more popular - taking less than 20 years to gain 5 billion users -- the T9 number pad on your old mobile phone.
It too is a bit of a fail in the touchscreen era.
I got so frustrated with both of these systems, I designed my own - called "dextr" - especailly for touchscreens. In beta right now and only available for Android, but would love to hear your feedback.
Post a Comment