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That looks crazy intuitive!

I’m gonna drop my HTC S710 and getting any device with a touchscreen right now

I know there is an iPhone application that does this. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of it though.

Very intuitive. However, his last line references that users should not have to learn a new input interface on each device they use. Isn’t this just adding another option in the mix? Definitely beats normal key-letter-typing on a cell phone, though…

The application for iPhone is called shapewriter. Haven’t tried it, but I think I’ll check it out.

Found that iPhone application. It is called Writing Pad.

Wow. Just wow.

Humm, they cloned IBM ’s SHARK ? http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/topics/virtualkeyboard.htm

This is an incredibly creative idea, although I think it’s something you have to see to understand. I can’t wait to try it though!

@lmjabreu

Notice the modified keyboard layout. Newest headline: Is QWERTY dead!?

I’d like to see an example of what happens when the word comes out wrong. It would seem to happen somewhat often, proper names, etc.

Awesome idea.

@josh

On the iPhone Writing Pad app that does the same thing, there’s a little bar above the keyboard that lists options of similar words you can scroll through to pick the proper match. If it’s not there you can type it out letter by letter and add it to the dictionary for next time.

Yup, that’s just like SHARK .

http://www.shapewriter.com/

http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2004/11/text_entry_epip.html

@Nathan Moore

The interesting benefit of this method is that you don’t have to give the user another “option” on screen. One can still hunt & peck or swipe on the same UI with different results. As Jason says, fascinating!

I still use my Newton MessagePad 2100 every day and only rarely have to go to the onscreen keyboard, but if it had the option to write, swipe, or peck I think text input would feel extremely fluid most of the time. At the moment, when I’m writing and have to make a correction that’s not quickly made using the provided gestures (and under Newton OS 2 .1, there are many and they’re very efficient), switching to the onscreen keyboard is like hitting the breaks.

I’d love to see this triad implemented in more touch screen devices (well, of tablet size, anyway).

Tried it with Writing Pad on the iPhone. It did a good job of getting the words right, but I didn’t like the feel of it. Still prefer to take notes with the iPhone keyboard.

Is it really faster or more accurate than tapping each letter? Doesn’t seem like it would be when you still have to home in on each letter. And if you hestitate to look for a key, does it misspell?

I’ve seen something almost exactly the same about a year ago but it was from IBM I think. Can’t find a link now… anyone know what I’m talking about?

Thought you’d like to know that it served the wrong video in Bloglines. I watched some awesome basketball shots, but I just couldn’t see how that was related to a “clever new input concept” :)

I was playing around with an iPhone app a while back that did something similar, ShapeWriter.

It was cool for a while, but I wasn’t nearly as fast with it as I was with the regular tapping keyboard. Still an interesting concept.

I saw this yesterday and I immediately I thought you’d write about it.

Always on the cutting edge of design. That’s why I read this blog.

I agree totally with you that the concept is very fascinating. Unfortunately there are allready two other companies that did the same.

On my blog I placed a video of all three (WritingPad, Swype and SlideIT). Spot the differences… I could not find them.

I bet the underlying algorithms are different, but this story is going to be continued when it comes to the intelectual property question.

I’m curious as to how accurate this approach is for an everyday user. Looks like fun though!

I remember meeting a T9 rep years ago before T9 became standard in mobiles. I was working for the Finnish state telephone company at the time and the guy was visiting our booth at CeBIT to get our support in convincing Nokia to include the software in their phones. The phone company and Nokia were working very closely with each other. So the guy shows off an early version of T9 on his own Nokia, and it was quite funny to see how people went from “I don’t get it, what’s the use?” when hearing his explanation about how it guesses words, to “Oh wow lightbulb just went on” when seeing it in action.

Very cool. But what about double-letters? I’ve been trying to figure that out. How would you swype Mississippi? I mean, he did it. But how?

amazing

Which came first: Swype or ShapeWriter? I tried ShapeWriter (a.k.a. Shark or Shark Shorthand) for the first time in 2004.

Sean: double characters are treated the same way as single characters. E.g. if you try to write “pet” and the word “peet” is also in the dictionary (strange word, I know…) both words will have the same probability given your pen trace.

Dictionary based text input systems (as T9 and swype/shapewriter are) will always run into problems when you try to enter words not in the dictionary. With T9, it is quite easy to understand that a word is not in the dictionary. But with shape writing, there will always be a word that has a shape which is closest to your pen trace. How do you as a user figure out that a word is not in the dictionary?

have a look at http://www.mobiletextinput.com/

Demo’s of SlideIT can be downloaded in many different languages, besides the sliding capabilities it offers also predictions and graffiti recognition, and it perfecly works. Nothing new..

So how does this differ from SlideIT??? The two methods seem identical to me! Check out http://dasur.co.il/Download.php