Instant Text and The One-Finger Keyboard
A very efficient method for entering text with a keyboard or a pen.
From Pen Computing #7 December 1995
Dr. Jean Ichbiah is a lousy typist with a lot to write
about. As the creator and marketer of the computer language Ada, Dr. Ichbiah had plenty of
text entry to do. After years of frustration entering long repetitive words and phrases on
conventional keyboards, he decided to put his considerable talents to work on devising a
better method to achieve text entry using PC keyboards, pen-based computers, and handheld
devices. After years of researching methods of faster text entry, he founded Textware
Solutions in 1992 to market his two-pronged solution: Instant Text, and the One-Finger
Keyboard for pen devices.
Instant Text
Legal and medical transcribers often spend two hours revising for every one hour of text
entry. Dr. Ichbiah concluded that in these and many other specialized fields the same
words and phrases come up constantly. What is needed, he reasoned, was a "typed
shorthand" that used glossaries of common terms in specific fields. Abbreviations
have been used for years by common word processor software, but Dr. Ichbiah has something
more ambitious in mind than merely expanding an abbreviation into a whole word. To gain
true speed one would have to have a system that would not have to be laboriously trained
to recognize abbreviations for the whole lexicon. He rejected the whole-dictionary
approach as unwieldy due to the huge number of possible interpretations for most
abbreviations.
So he designed Instant Text to use up to eight concurrently open glossaries that can be
activated with a tap on a list. Additional glossaries can be maintained but opening them
incurs a short delay. Best of all, users can create their own custom glossaries simply by
telling the Instant Text application to look at a particular folder of text files and
compile them into a glossary. Users can then enter abbreviations and pick the appropriate
word or sentence from the list returned by the glossary. Instant Text then enters the
word, phrase, or sentence automatically into the document. For example, if you are writing
a contract and wish to enter the stock phrase "Consultant hereby agrees to perform
the following" you could type "chatpft", "chf", "chpf",
"chatpf", or "chat". You would not have to memorize any particular
abbreviation as the glossary compiler knows them all, prompting you in the Advisory list
so you can make your selection. If you then wish to type normally you do just that and
Instant Text passes the non-abbreviated text right through as you would expect it to. If
you want to enter a medical term, tap on the medical glossary and type your abbreviation.
Operators in fields that frequently use words such as "hexachlorocyclopenadiene"
obviously benefit greatly form typing "hxcp" instead.
A paragraph in five strokes
But Instant Text doesn't stop there. Additional phrases can be entered by using the
Continuations feature, which lists the next most likely word or phrase after the last one
you choose. For example, if you type "cc" and pick "covenants
contained" you could expand "cc" to be "cchaog" and get
"covenants contained herein and other good", whereupon another set of likely
phrases would appear in the advisory, such as "hao" for "herein and
other" and "haogav" for "herein and other good and valuable",
etc.
The Instant Text approach should initially find a welcome home in vertical fields where
the language is fairly dry and consistent. I wouldn't be surprised if the technology soon
shows up as a standard feature in regular wordprocessors. Instant Text, of course, is not
a tool for writing novels, but for text entry that can be "glossarized" it
significantly outperforms other abbreviation alternatives.
The One-Finger Keyboard
While Instant Text runs fine with a keyboard and a mouse, it really shines with a pen, the
ideal selection tool. However, when researching pen entry, Dr. Ichbiah's high powered
brain once again got into high gear: he quickly decided that using a floating QWERTY-style
on-screen keyboard makes little sense since QWERTY was designed for ten-finger operation
with human hands, not for tapping with a pen. When using a pen on a screen one would
ideally have to move the pen as little as possible.
Ichbiah's solution is the mathematically developed One-Finger Keyboard, also called FITALY
after the second row of letters. The FITALY keyboard arranges the letters in a box rather
than the conventional long rectangle design necessitated by the traditional placement of
two hands next to each other. Research indicated that 84% of text entry strokes can be
placed in a very tight pattern, with the remaining strokes never more than two keys away.
Compare this with the QWERTY layout: the word "paper" typed conventionally
requires a total travel of 26 spaces, while the FITALY keyboard requires only nine.
As is to be expected, using FITALY feels weird at first, but makes a lot of sense the more
you use it. It is a primary contender to become a standard for keyboard data entry on pen
devices.
Of course, Instant Text can also be used with a regular QWERTY popup. Either way, Dr.
Ichbiah's latest invention may well find lots of applications and save lots of people lots
of time.
For more information: Call Textware Solutions at 1-800-355-5251.
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