RE: Chording for iGesture Numpad

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

	From what I can tell, having spent a little time playing around
with the Fingerworks customisation software - MyGesture Editor, the
chording they do is based around the Gesture System not the 'Surface
Keys'.  So you can use different combinations of fingers but only
universally across the trackpad.  The Chords are not connected to a
specific set of keys.  This means you only have chords for your five
fingers - 24 chords max (Fingerworks actually only has 16 finger
combinations and then all the other 'chords' are movements of each
combination).  You could change a lot of these gesture chords to
outputting the alphabet, etc. but then you've lost most of the gestures
used for commands and macros.  If the chording could be linked to the
surface keys then you could have more than 16 combinations and they
could be independent of the gesture command chords.

	I noticed the Mini Keyboard they also sell but I think they have
fallen into the same trap that many other companies have.  A lot of
companies have tried to just decrease the size of a full QWERTY
keyboard, the most extreme being the keyboards on the front of some
PDAs.  It's a mad idea, keys need to be a comfortable size for the
fingers, the PDA keyboards can really only be struck accurately with a
stylus not multiple fingers.  This was one of the main reasons for
chording keyboards - lower the physical size of the keyboard without
lowering the size of the keys to being next to useless.  I admit the
Mini Keyboard isn't as small as some but it still looks uncomfortable
for two hands and a QWERTY keyboard is quite slow when used with one
hand only.

Ben

-----Original Message-----
From:  [mailto:]
On Behalf Of Steve Barr
Sent: 13 July 2004 01:25
To: Wearable Hardware Discussion List
Subject: Re: Chording for iGesture Numpad

Ben Roose wrote:
> However, recently I have been 
> looking at the Fingerworks iGesture Numpad 
> <http://www.fingerworks.com/numeric-keypad.html>. 

I'm interested in this sort of thing too.  This
looks closer to what you want:
http://www.fingerworks.com/mini_product.html

If you read more of their site it is clear they
support chording, but they may not have an
existing twiddler-like chording map.

Steve

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