I’ve just been playing with the latest version of the HTC Android phone and thinking about how devices like this, (incl. the iPhone and iPad etc) are changing our ideas of how we might interface with such devices. The age of touch typing is certainly coming to an end it would seem – especially when I view the video above which provides an introduction to “Swype“, an application which, when installed, provides a radically different approach to text input on screen! Instead of having to touch each key in turn, Swype allows you to simply trace your finger across the keys. A key advantage to Swype is that there is no need to be very accurate, enabling very rapid text entry.
In the illustration above, the word “quick” was generated from tracing the path shown above in a fraction of a second, by roughly aiming to pass through the letters of the word.
I’ll certainly be interested to see how accurately this works when the product is actually launched – and I’ll be interested to see how it is used by school-aged youngsters. Could this actually change the way we write?
This approach reminds me somewhat of how I was taught to write shorthand many moons ago mentally moving between consonants but obeying the quirky spelling rules. Typing this on my dinky iPhone keypad it would certainly be an improvement on the user interface level if it works better than predictive text.