Dasher, text input methods

Dasher is a new input method which uses an ngram language model to predict the next letter you want to enter but lets you select it by ‘flying’ through regions of the screen approaching from the right. They have a tcl download demo version. I managed to enter some text without trauma. A neat idea but how useable would it be on a palmtop since it takes up most of the screen real estate itself.

I remember being impressed a long time ago with chord keyboards, someone demonstrated a five finger keyboard in Edinburgh and I was able to type within a few minutes, surely there’s scope for combining that with a palmtop to do better than the qwerty thumb keyboards that are coming out now.