29 April 2007

Dasher part 2

Now back to Dasher. This is too fun not to play with! Okay now onto some work with this program.
Yesterday I started using this program just as a thing to play around on, now I'm finding that I almost prefer to use it, when I compare it to a regular keyboard. While I can't get the words out as quickly I do like it for the following reasons:
1) It feeds my natural geek.
2) I seem to make fewer spelling mistake than when I use a normal keyboard (because I can see each possible word in front of me and the most probable spellings are the largest things on the screen, rather than having to guess how it needs to be spelled)
3) It's fun to feel like you are driving a word.
4) I can use while holding the cat in my lap.
Time for me to explain a bit about how the program works. Imagine a racing game where you know approximately where the next turn was going to be, but that the track was all was changing - now imagine that the track has an infinite number of possible routs for you to follow, but only one will get you to where you want to go. With me so far? I didn't think so , it is rather difficult to explain - though if you try it everything I just wrote will make perfect sense. Here try it: http://www.dasher.org.uk/TryJavaDasherNow.html Iknow that it is a bit small but it should give you some idea of how Dasher works.
I'm sure you are asking yourself how anything like that could ever be useful to anyone, but just imagine that you broke your arm, this would provide a quick way for you to be able to quickly type out long documents with very little practice, now imagine that you had a more debilitarting problem this would be an absolute lifesaver.
This could almost be the first step towards that 3D computer environment that sci-fi writters like to write about, a guy can dream.
Yes I only used my mouse and Dasher to write this post.

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