29 November 2008
RETYPE the text in your iPhone
RETYPE is a new concept for text input in touchscreen phones/devices. Instead of that huge QWERTY keyboard, which wastes massive amounts of valuable screen estate from your small screen, it relies heavily on gestures. Each key can be used to enter three letters; tap, swipe up and swipe down. It also seems that they have done some optimization regarding the letter positions, the most common letters you can simply tap, the not so common letters you have to swipe.
One potential problem with the concept though: whenever optimized letter positions come to play, the whole keyboard becomes heavily language specific. Now, of course you could optimize the layout for every language but it’s a quite big amount of work. Nevertheless, it’s a intriquing concept.
Check the video from full post
This is an interesting concept. I will try it out on my iPhone.
Btw, I designed a language-specific keyboard layout concept for small devices back in 1994. It is published in my master thesis (1995) as well as in my books Baumann+Lanz (1998) and Baumann+Thomas (2003) about UI design of electronic appliances.
The keyboard layout uses a portrait format 5×6 matrix and has the most frequently used key – the space key – in the centre. It was intended as an alternative to alphabetically aligned keyboards as used e.g. in logistics handling appliances at that time. The problem with these keyboards was originally described by Donald Norman (1988, 1989) in his very inspiring book: The design of everyday things.
Feel free to ask me for more details: konrad.baumann(at)fh-joanneum.at