Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

One of my clients humorously lamented the fact that using T9 on a mobile phone for texting was becoming a lost art since they’d got an iPhone and started using the little on-screen keyboard.

I am slightly amazed by the lack of outrageous ideas in the iPhone, especially in the area of typing text. I would have expected Apple to at least re-invent text itself, just so the demos were really, really, really cool… “We call it iNglish!” .

If anyone remembers the Palm Pilot there is, somewhere out there a version of iPhone Graffiti, which I remember with a certain fondness although I’m not sure I’d like to meet up again any time soon. What interests me about text input, is that people, in the past, have tended to use their phones for T9 text entry and yet the iPhone seems to lends itself to two-fingered and two-handed typing, which also sort of means you need to put the thing down in order to type. I’ve tried using my thumb to type and I just can’t see the keys, I need a transparent thumb.

I started thinking about all the other ways you could, if you wanted, enter text onto a device that accepts, tapping, gestures, multi-touch, shakes, rattles and rolls. For example, would it be possible to build a Chord keyboard, something I’ve always liked the sound of, or maybe one that takes the “fits like a glove” approach? What I’d like about this is that at least I could type whilst walking or standing at the bus queue.

The thing that really interested me, was, if a system of text entry could let me type on my iPhone at the speed of thought, it wouldn’t matter how crazy it was, people would learn it. Not everyone would learn this new system, but perhaps writers and reporters would. It would be a text-logging tool, in that you wouldn’t want to edit or craft anything using this method, but it would be great for idea-capturing, or transcribing, or stream-of-consciousness type writing. Despite the clunkiness, I quite like the GKOS demo movie, which seems to be a keyboard with only 2 keys and works a bit like a motor-bike gear-shift… up down, down, down up.

I’m surprised that there isn’t a separate keypad to go with the iPhone, like the Frogpad, but having an additional keypad kind of defeats where I was heading with this because… what would an input method that made the most out of the iPhone’s features be? This is a bit like making a purse from a pig’s ear except that I’m sure that at some point somebody told the inventor of T9 that it’d never work. The Easy Egg Alphabet looks crazy enough a writing system for anyone.

And then I started look at shorthand and discovered there are loads of different shorthand systems, surely one of these would work, especially if you can imagine the iPhone screen area to be slowly scrolling by as you write, or zooming into the distance perhaps. Or how about a tool like Dasher for the iPhone? Although the Mac Beta crashes when I get to the second letter of a word I want to type/dash, I still have a soft spot for the lunacy/genius of this approach to text entry.

And then I had a eureka moment.… To create a fast textual input system, that took advantage of all the iPhone features, why not use Braille? So I started thinking about how you would enter dots on an iPhone (I think it can only take two fingers at a time but would handle strokes very well… ahem).

I then thought, if you added type-ahead scrolling (perhaps like Dasher), and showed people the letters (something that you can only do with a big screen area) then maybe you would have a flicky-tappy-strokey™ input system that is kind of designed around what you can do with two fingers rather than, like a regular keyboard, do with two hands. So,

I started having a go at making a simple iPhone application to play with some of these ideas. I didn’t get much further than what you see to the right.

I then realised that not all eureka moments are what you’d call “any good”… Ah well.

I still think that we’ll see some beautiful and maybe crazy textual input tools quite soon that do take advantage of what the iPhone or iPhone3.0 has to offer. In the same way as Tetris stormed computer games, but actually was very, very simple… and the same way that the Rubik’s cube was was a few squares of plastic and a heap of genius… I think someone somewhere will have a eureka moment about the way we write text.

Until then, I eagerly await a copy of MessagEase on the iPhone which looks a lot of fun.