Posts Tagged ‘Killer’
As Mobile Devices Morph Into Wearables, Keyboard Maker MessagEase Wants Your Fingers To Settle On Its Qwerty Killer
Author: Stefanie Jenkins
The touchscreen text input space could be heading for some serious disruption. If Apple drops its API guard a little more to allow developers to create system global keyboards that could open the floodgates to real keyboard innovation on iOS. (I for one hope so.) That’s not to say novel keyboards aren’t already out there — they are — but uptake is limited on Apple’s mobile platform by how siloed these apps currently have to remain. There are now signs Apple is preparing to be a little more open on that score, which could give alternative keyboards some serious uplift.
That limitation does not exist on Android, of course, where developers are free to replace the system keyboard with their own software. But the barrier to entry here — and generally – remains how accustomed people are to Qwerty layouts. Better the devil you know, especially if the newcomer is a new-fangled layout that looks confusing and initially makes texting much slower. (See, for instance, the Dvorak keyboard.) Little wonder that the likes of Swype have done well by disrupting the input method but leaving Qwerty order as it is. Cutting the link with the Qwerty past requires other, bigger stuff to happen with devices themselves.
Yet there are signs those changes could be coming. Wearable technology is waiting in the wings to put new demands on text input technology. Sure you can talk to Google Glass but what if you want to send a message without dictating it to the room? And what about an Apple iWatch? A wrist-mounted screen is going to be highly space constrained — and no one wants to go back to the days of alphanumeric repeat-tap keypads. So it’s pretty clear there’s going to be pressure for keyboards to evolve, for layouts to get a lot more flexible to keep pace and fit the new places we want to put devices.
The most striking change is already evident: gesture-based text input is helping to breakdown our old tappety-tap keyboard habits — with software like Swype and, more recently, a startup such as Minuum. But both still lean on the Qwerty layout, even if Minuum has squished the space it takes up. There are others that don’t though. Meet MessagEase: an alternative keyboard that uses a mixture of taps and gestures combined with a radically different keyboard layout designed to speed up text input by minimising the movements typists have to make to reach the keys.
MessagEase’s method compacts the keyboard space required into a small square — which could easily fit on a wrist watch, say, or even enable a Glass wearer to type in the air with minimal finger movements, once they have the muscle memory to do so.
The MessagEase keyboard software has been more than 10 years in the making — the earliest version was created for the now defunct Palm back in 2002 — but its creator, Saied Nesbat, reckons the technology landscape is finally starting to catch up with his idea. ”MessagEase’s invention was inspired by a vision of the time when QWERTY would have to be abandoned. But 2001 was not that time, nor was 2005. I believe we are nearing that time as touch and gesture input become more pervasive,” he tells TechCrunch.
Nesbat, who has a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford where he specialised in Design For Test, says the keyboard’s design grew out of his frustration with texting on “old style cell phones” — so long before the rise of smartphones — but he also says he foresaw that small touchscreens were going to create a real pain-point for Qwerty. “So I set out to redesign the keyboard going to the basics,” he says.
“I used my expertise in exhaustive testing, exhaustive simulation, and letter frequency statistical analysis (used in coding and encryption) to create a new, efficient letter assignment such that the finger movement is minimized and the speed is maximized (this is the same principle used for Dvorak keyboard). The other principle that I used was to reduce the number of keys to 9, arranging them in a 3×3 matrix, use drags in addition to taps, and make each key bigger. The analysis of this design using Fitts’ Law (the fundamental UI “law” that quantifies UI speed based on key sizes and distances) shows that this design achieves superior speeds. Plus, it enables entering up to 162 characters using only 9 keys!” he explains.
The basic mechanism of the MessageEase keyboard involves taps for the most commonly used letters (ANIHORTES), which get pride of place on the grid to comply with Fitts’ Law, and then directional drags to reach the rest of the keys — either up, down, left, right, up left, up right, down left, down right and so on. “With these nine keys, you can enter ALL letters and about 80 special/punctuation characters,” notes Nesbat.
Capitalisation is done by circling a letter or swiping up on the R key once or twice to lock caps lock on and reversing the gesture to return to lower case. Additional keyboard layouts that add in punctuation and numerals can be accessed by swiping up over the space bar or via a toggle key. The flexibility of the MessagEase keyboard extends to customising its language, shape and layout, plus the ability to create macros for particular word combinations — for example you could preset “td” to expand out to write “Today’s date is Sunday 2 June”.
MessagEase’s keyboard software is available on Android, iOS, Windows, Pocket PC and Palm OS. The Android version of the app includes word prediction and the keyboard can be resized, reshaped, recoloured or made blank – Nesbat says the latter option is “for our advanced users who don’t need to see where the letters are; they find it distracting!”.
Despite this software being a decade+ out in the wild, MessagEase clearly hasn’t stolen Qwerty’s crown yet. Nesbat says it’s had more than 500,000 downloads and has “tens of thousands of dedicated users now” — which just goes to show how hard it is to get people to change ingrained habits. Albeit, says Nesbat, that’s with “almost no money spent on marketing” — he therefore argues that MessagEase’s adoption rate is much stronger than other non-Qwerty input technologies such as Snapkeys and 8Pen.
Of those MessageEasers that have put in the time to learn — getting fast (40-60 WPM) takes several days of practising 10-20mins per day, concedes Nesbat — a few are very fast indeed, with the current champion setting a world record typing speed equivalent to 84 WPM. Of course most users aren’t going to achieve anywhere near those speeds but with around 50 WPM being around the average speed of 10 finger typists using regular keyboards MessagEase’s method looks reasonably impressive — assuming you’re willing to put in the hours to reprogram your fingers. And there’s the rub really: reeducation of typing muscle memory remains the biggest barrier to any Qwerty killer.
Setting aside its radical new layout, MessagEase’ most salient feature is how compact it is — allowing one or two fingered typing on very small screens — which, more so even than potential fast speeds, may be the USP that allows it to gain a foothold as screens shrink and morph to fit new physical locations. On the training side, to help new users get to grips with its grid, the company behind MessagEase, Exides, has created tutorials and built practice games into its keyboard apps to help users make the switch. That’s a start — but it’s still a steep learning curve to expect people to climb on their own. The imperative created by new types of devices may prove a more compelling climbing aid.
Exideas is not currently profitable but it does have licensing deals in the works. “We have several licensing deals in the process, but none we can disclose now,” says Nesbat. “(One, more advanced one is re: Internet TV/ Set top box/ remote.)” He won’t disclose Exideas’ funding or backers but says it’s not currently looking for external capital. Since its apps are free to download to mobile platforms, licensing is clearly where it sees a profitable future for its patent-protected technology.
“We will make money by licensing our technology,” he tells TechCrunch. “MessagEase is applicable to a range of classes of applications/devices, from smart watches, to smartphones, tablets, Glass, gesture-in-the-air, Internet TV, to car nav systems. As these devices are commoditized — everyone having a shiny surface, running more or less the same apps, doing more or less the same things — we provide a distinct, unique, efficient, and WYTIWYG (i.e., no disambiguation or autocorrection needed!) full text input technology edge to differentiate one company’s device from all others.”
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Daily English News – UN calls for global moratorium on ‘Killer robots’
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http://www.youtube.com/DailyEnglishNews Daily English News Plz Subscrib for Latest News The United Nations Human Rights Commission released a report calling …
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Killer Robots Rage Against The Machines
Author: Tech Blogger
Killer Robots: Rage Against The Machines Scientists say killer robots fighting ground wars “is only a matter of time” – unless there is a global agreement to…
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Campaign Calls For Ban Of Autonomous Killer Robots
Author: Tyler Evans
In agreement with last year’s announcement by Human Rights Watch, an initiative created by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (an actual organization I didn’t start myself) urges policy makers to ban the development and use of autonomous robots that can kill without human intervention. In a statement that sounds straight out of my personal diary, the organization calls the development of killer robots “repulsive” and “the leading factor of my erectile dysfunction.” Okay, so that last bit actually was out of my personal diary.
…organisers of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots – a global effort being launched on Tuesday – say advances in robotic technology mean it is only a matter of time before fully autonomous “human-out-of-the-loop” systems – capable of firing on their own – are developed.
They argue that giving machines the power over who lives and dies in war would be an unacceptable application of technology, and would pose a fundamental challenge to international human rights and humanitarian laws.
Campaign leader Ms Williams, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work in bringing about a ban on anti-personnel landmines, told BBC News: “As people learn about our campaign, they will flock to it.
“The public conscience is horrified to learn about this possible advance in weapons systems. People don’t want killer robots out there.
See, now this is a hard one. It’s like, who do you trust to f*** up less: a human, or a robot. Because I would 100% trust a human to screw up before a robot. It’s called human error. That said, I still don’t think we should be creating autonomous killing machines, because they’re not the answer either. Love — love is the answer. I’m talking that really deep kissing that makes other people feel uncomfortable if you do it in public but you don’t care because you are IN THE LOVES. So much so that you forget where you are and the kissing turns into a little under-the-shirt bra rubbing too then you open your eyes and you’re at my friend’s dinner party last weekend and they’re asking you to leave. Oh I’m sorry, JUST BECAUSE YOU AND YOUR BOYFRIEND DON’T LOVE EACH OTHER. You readers know what I’m talking about — those friends who won’t let you be happy because they’re not happy and you’re kinda dry-humping on their couch in the middle of Scattergories.
Thanks to Peter, Clawi and Farlander Bob, who agree nothing should be autonomous, not even soft-serve machines.
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Editorial: iWatch app speculation is filler, not killer
Author: Tiffany Shoman
Advancement is problem-solving. Radical development is seeing normalcy as problematic, and fixing it. That level of invention, which addresses a normally unrecognized trouble to create a brand-new item classification, or user experience, could be tough to acknowledge in the conceptual phase. A far-reaching concept could appear insignificant if it addresses routineness. Often it takes the item itself, the manifested experience, to show exactly how to rise above the customary. E-mail fixed postal mail, which died an additional incremental death last week by revealing a proposal to end Saturday letter deliveries. Cellular phone resolved the separate in between phones and the walking-around life. Mobile apps addressed the space between computer systems and cellular phone. Perhaps HTML5 will address apps.
So forgive me if I’m being small-minded, but Bruce Tognazzini’s speculative manifesto about an Apple iWatch fails to make a convincing futurist case for the envisioned gadget– regardless of whipping up a whirlwind of attention. Exactly what is the future of wearable computing?
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Shenzen New Degree’s Touch Panel Tech Doesn’t Mind The Rain And Still Delivers Killer Input Detection [Video]
Author: James Cliff
Shenzen New Degree Technology was one of the companies showing its stuff in the Eureka Park portion of CES 2013, and this China-based hardware startup had some impressive tech to show off related to touch input. Combining capacitive and resistive touch-based input with a means to make it work even on solid stainless steel surfaces, Shenzen New Degree hopes to pave the way for a wide range of new products with built-in controls that are highly durable, retaining their touch sensitive abilities even after considerable wear and tear.
The interesting thing about Shenzen New Degree’s tech is that it can provide both the levels of accuracy and sensitivity it manages while still also remaining durable enough that you can pour water on it, as the company showed me at their booth in Eureka Park. The environmental toughness of this implementation means it’ll be able to be used in a wide range of applications where touch devices would be exposed to the elements, like in kitchen appliances, outdoor digital keypads and parking meters, and the high sensitivity will make for a much better user experience than the resistive touch tech generally used in most commercial-grade touch panels.
Another benefit, as you can see in the video above, is that the panels can detect not only standard number sequence codes, but also the degree of force used to press, meaning that if someone wanted to not only have the numeric entry, but also the force with which it was entered as a secondary security measure, they could easily do that. All in all, it’s a pretty amazing component technology that I’m sure we’ll see picked up by a lot of OEMs fairly quickly.
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The Killer Mentalism Manuscript – Converts 1 In 15 – Proof Below
Author: Angela Stephens
The Killer Mentalism Composition – Transforms 1 In 15 – Proof Below
The Killer Mentalism Composition Explains Some Of The Most Devastating, High Influence Psychological Impacts In All Of Magic. One Of A Kind Item, Great Conversions – Associate Tools & Conversion Evidence At – Http://www.killermentalism.com/affiliates.html
The Killer Mentalism Composition – Transforms 1 In 15 – Proof Below
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Killer fail: how Romney’s broken Orca app cost him thousands of votes
Author: Jon Mitchell
A couple of days prior to the presidential poll, Mitt Romney & rsquo; s effort revealed what it wished would be its secret tool at the surveys. Dubbed Project Orca, it let volunteers make use of an internet application to look for and mark off voters as they left the polling place, then accumulated the information to make use of in projections or check which Romney proponents might require a call. “When the exit polls come out, we won’t pay attention to that,” Communications Director Gail Gitcho told PBS. “We will certainly have had a lot more scientific details simply based on the political operation we have actually established.”
Project Orca was created to replace the standard phone – and paper-based get-out-the-vote effort, producing a central system that could track voters and assign volunteers in …
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Here Comes The Nexus 4 Smartphone, 3G Nexus 7 Tablet, And The Nexus 10 iPad Killer
Author: Buck Howard
Google will throw down. At next week ’ s NYC Android event, the big G is anticipated to holler “ me too! ” and reveal a full line of Nexus gadgets. Watch out, Mr. Customer. These gadgets aren ’ t just for the nerds. Google is prepared to take the Nexus brand mainstream and supply legitimate options to the iPhones, iPads and Galaxy devices of the globe.
Nexus 4
In spite of the name, this is not a 4-inch gadget. The Nexus 4 is the 4th Nexus smartphone, which appears to have a 4.7-inch 1280 × 768 resolution screen. The LG-made phone, with all its specifications, was outed by UK phone retailer Carphone Warehouse (leak item page is not readily available). It ’ s said to pack a quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor and runs Android 4.2. Inside the 9.1 mm thin body resides NFC, 8MP camera, and 8GB of storage space.
No word on United States pricing but it could possibly be relatively inexpensive. Carphone Warehouse lists the SIM-Free variation of the phone at # 389.95; the SIM-free Galaxy S III is # 499.
Nexus 7
The little $ 199 Asus Nexus 7 tablet is a hot vendor and Google seems prepared with new variations. A 3G variation was lately revealed by the FCC database, which details the tablet with WiFi and HSPA + (3G) abilities. The tablet is anticipated to have 32GB of onboard storage space, however that spec is not detailed in the FCC papers.
Google is also anticipated to cease the 8GB version, drop the rate on the 16GB N7 and release a 32GB WiFi-only Nexus 7. This is Google ’ s answer to the iPad mini.
Nexus 10
The Samsung-made Nexus 10 might be next week ’ s big announcement. At this point its presence is almost confirmed thanks to a dripped individual handbook and sample pics from Google ’ s very own Vic Gundotra. The tablet is rumored to have a 10.1-inch screen like Samsung ’ s Galaxy Note 10.1. The dripped handbook suggests it will certainly recreation the common assortments of ports and cameras consisting of microUSB, micoHDMI, and dual-cams — no microSD card slot, though.
There are still a whole lot of unknowns with the Nexus 10. Will it undercut the iPad with an aggressive price. Will it be offered with 4G? Will the display have a PPI greater than the new iPad?
The Google welcome states “ The play ground is open. ” And with 3 brand-new toys all however verified, there will certainly be a ton to keep Android followers amused with the holidays and into the new year.
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HP Envy Spectre XT review: a sleek and speedy Ultrabook with a killer keyboard
Author: Jamie Colby
Even more Information
HP’s Envy 14 Spectre struck virtually all the right notes when we examined it back in March, thanks to its high-res display, sleek metal-and-glass design and brisk performance, however a rigid trackpad and the steep $ 1,400 rate were clear negative aspects. The brand-new Envy Spectre XT, a 13.3-inch Ivy Bridge-powered Ultrabook, has a thinner, lighter profile than its large brother, and a lower $ 1,000 price to match. That’s still not chump modification, though, so does the XT deserve a spot in the leading rate of Intel-approved ultraportables? Join us past the break for the full breakdown.
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