331–340 of 365 posts
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Meanwhile we adults are still occasionally trying to Ctrl-Z real life.
I understood that as suspend. It still works! Who wouldn't want infinite time for video games/hobbies while time was stopped.
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Holy Crap. MessageEase is the keyboard I didn't know I wanted. It's like Minuum but smarter. <3
I've used MessageEase for years now on Android and it was really worth the time investment. I only switch back to Gboard occasionally to get at its far superior emoji input system, but I don't use a lot of emoji in most of my text entry so that's not a massive deal. I can type accurately without having to wrestle with autocorrect all the time, and that'll do for me! And although the letter frequency distribution isn'…
IIRC you can swap out (or add) any of the side/minor triggers, but I don't recall if it's possible to change the big nine major keys.
It is great though, I abhor word prediction when I'm trying to write (the smarter the predictions, the more viscerally disturbing I find it), and ME has been the only way I can keep up a comfortable pace.
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This is definitely a big factor. When you look at a Japanese computer keyboard [1] you might see lots of Japanese characters on the keys. Almost nobody actually uses these to type. Instead, if you want a か(ka) character then you type k,a on the familiar qwerty keys. These phonetic characters then get converted into the more complex Chinese-origin characters as you go along, allowing you to disambiguate homophones. Th…
> Cast your mind back to when you first encountered a computer keyboard. Does an IBM cardpunch keyboard count? :-) Anyhow, I took a 2 week class in 8th grade to learn to touch type on a mechanical typewriter. It's paid off handsomely ever since.
The first example provided in the article (indeed the first sentence) is “How do I double click?”, and I want to focus on this. As a kid in the 90s, I just took double clicking as a necessary evil. But after many many opportunities of trying (mostly successfully) to teach it to both the elderly and to kids, I've gradually grown to hate it. It's such a horrible gesture, difficult to perform, complicated to reason abou…
(Jobs also stuck us with the invisible fragile clipboard in place of the Star copy/move pattern.)
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>Is the video representative of texting speed, or is this the fastest human in the world? From what I understand, he's on the faster end of the normal range. >Are they making choices that would take effort in a different system, or just clicking the next suggested letter? With Japanese kanji or Chinese hànzì, there's no practical way to directly input such a large range of characters. Users type a phonetic spelling,…
For Chinese hanzi, some people also use a stroke input method. You are presented with ~10 possible strokes that make up all hanzi, and by selecting them in the correct order you can write a character.
Do your children a favor and get them a "real" computer with keyboard and mouse, instead of a tablet. I've found it helps with several things. For one, I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces. Also, learning to use a keyboar…
When I was a kid (and by that I mean all the way into university), we had to go to the library (an actual physical place that wasn't our home), look in the card catalogue (an actual physical box of drawers with actual physical cards in them), then find the shelves with actual physical books on them. Then we had to look at the index in the book. Or just read it.
That took time and perseverance. There was no instant gratification. It took hours or days.
Are you advocating a return to that past and that much perseverance?
Typing a word into Google and clicking search is nothing. Trying to make it sound like it's so much better for character building is ridiculous.
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> By exposing them to something that doesn't react to the laws of physics, I fear they get a wrong first impression of the world, that at an early age they are not able to distinguish the difference between a book and a representation of one. I'm not friends with how you casually throw the word "wrong" in there, as if it was an unquestionable universal agreement. Transport yourself (by vessel of imagination) to a fut…
I work with a designer that has something like 20+ years of print experience. We make web sites. It's true that some habits are hard to break, like wanting pixel perfect shapes and alignments, which of course doesn't work too well with today's needs of responsive design, or mobile first interfaces. But, after a basic introduction to the fundamentals of modern web design, the guy has come up with some great ideas, ele…
Do your children a favor and get them a "real" computer with keyboard and mouse, instead of a tablet. I've found it helps with several things. For one, I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces. Also, learning to use a keyboar…
> And it may sound old fashioned, but making things too easy for kids makes them less independent and less willing to put in the effort required for learning. Yes, agreed. We're building a generation where even pulling your parking brake when you park is seen as "hard", not having a discoverable, hand-hold, guided experience is "inconvenient". Netflix even have a hard time making people update their cards when they e…
My parents say the same thing about my generation.
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> And it may sound old fashioned, but making things too easy for kids makes them less independent and less willing to put in the effort required for learning. Yes, agreed. We're building a generation where even pulling your parking brake when you park is seen as "hard", not having a discoverable, hand-hold, guided experience is "inconvenient". Netflix even have a hard time making people update their cards when they e…
I'm guessing I'm a generation older than you and I agree, my generation built a lazy, useless generation. My parents say the same thing about my generation.
Young people don't know what a VHS or vinyl player is and that is fine
Another thing is to think everything is solvable with a phone app, that everything is on Google or that everything is learnable through a step by step YouTube video and requires no effort.
That causes frustrations as well.