Am i the only one that gets extremely irritated when comradekingu arbitrarily fabricates 'collective preferance' i.e. "I don't think people care for the pyra/fire connection" and slips these into his arguments in an attempt to seruptitiosly brainwash the rest of us.
God help me, but it makes me livid!
I don't see why you would get upset, if you want to focus solely on one statement, singeling it out makes it totally void. Who cares what I think, you do, and that provokes you..? It is as interesting to the discussion as you getting angry about it. Did you miss the I think so part?
Well now we have at least someone stating they like red/orange Fn-labels, atop what removes it from an esoteric argument, and a case of it in-the wild. Thats a whole lot more than nothing. If you looked at the argument I presented, without the newly presented information, the safe bet would be to assume people don't like it. I'm ok with being wrong. Me being wrong, provoked what evidence there was to the contrary. Fire Fn it is. Personally I dont like Fn labels, so its still a case of (slightly less) guesswork on my part as to what the community prefers. And how wb landed at his decision. Lets try to be rational about things.
To discuss the position of space, shared by the great majority of keyboard designers, to be preferable in the singlewide variety.
The poll asking for a space-
bar, without further clarification, didn't have any explanation of what that entails.
It is easy to make that mistake, and before i looked into it, i sided more with dualwide space.
Deciding blindly on a functional layout matrix, and then putting labels on it, is error-prone and decidedly the wrong way around if you want to have all the information available to make decisions.
With the proposed layouts in this thread, its directly the difference between having a compose, and having only a meta-compose. With less typing-keys otherwise, you need a compose more. Easy upgrade.
With everyone pointing at eachother in the matter throughout, I asked ED what he thinks.
What made most sense to me, that he said, is that
if you have a problem hitting the keys, you will be moreso able to hit space, which considering its frequency, will supposedly improve the overall accuracy. The argument is fair, but that is crutch-design. A keyboard should be made with preference for people who can use it, not for the ones that cant.
If you cant hit the keys, there is no helping that. The size of each individual key becomes the issue. Unless you are typing " "
There are a number of problems with the argument of bigger spacekey improving accuracy.
For the sake of efficiency, you will forever be aiming the leftmost part of the key, giving you only the extra space on the right to benefit. However this means the key depresses/actuates unevenly, and it feels wrong. So in the case of someone having a problem hitting the keys, now they have less feel for the thing too.
Learning that one key should depress differently, for no reason, from the others, doesn't help.
For everyone else, there still is the case of efficiency over feel, which for everyone means you loose efficiency by hitting the less central middle bit, or that you depress it unevenly, which may or may not cause it to wear out more quickly.
Given only the two thumbs, it gets worse quick, there are also efficiency lost in hitting a different key in sequence with space.
Considering comma space and period space it all it does, you lose efficiency there aswell. It also messes up efficiency by arbitrarily setting restrictions on where enter and shift can go.
For the people who care about looks, it is unsymmetrical. For the people who think you wont be able to find space, this is also a misnormer. I have tried it on countless people, and it is never a problem, for any level of proficiency. There are many devices in the wild to put credibility to this claim.
For the people who aren't English, or use advanced layouts, it is also crucially important. I like it because im used to it from the pandora, is a lesser issue here.
Think about what kind of users exist, and what you want to adapt them into doing.
At one point in time, there was a lot of mechanical typewriter typists. Loud and precise machines. The first electronical keyboards meant to replace them, and I have one, feature a speaker underneath that can amplify the sound of typing electronically, to make the adjustment more smooth. Because nobody would ever type on, -what did you say, im typing here TATAKTAKTATATA.
By todays standards, even without the electronical amplification, these keyboards are very loud, and it very soon stopped being a feature. Mobile keyboards haven't reached their final form yet, and if they don't improve, they might go extinct before that happens.
People having different sized hands, and being able to extend the pinkey-finger to the extremities on the keyboards from any position given by the rest of the fingers (doing the typing) is the reason the enter/return backspace and shift are longer keys on a desktop keyboard. Same goes with some mobile keyboards. However they are not on the pandora. One way in which it is better than its competition.
Big space/shift/enter looks more like a 10 finger ordeal, but it doesnt carry over the actual functionality.
What it does do, is deprive those keyboards of keys, and with anything mobile, thats not ideal.
When your fingers span across the desktop keyboard, your thumbs will always be positioned above the space bar, that is the reason for it to be a bar key, reaching it with both thumbs.
None of that translates to two thumbs. Here your position is given by each thumb, there are no extra fingers in the mix. (the only case where this is a concern, is if you want to use the two in conjunction, which should be streamlined in case of sequences, and not mandated in case of shift and altGr type things (they should be sticky, because that doesnt tie up everything))
That leaves us with the question of legacy familiarity over function.
Since I wanted to know what people prefer, I asked the question:
How it works vs how familiar it looks at first glance.
- Functions more like a 2thumb keyboard, looks less like a 10finger desktop keyboard? (27 votes [71.05%] - View)
- Looks more like a 10finger desktop keyboard, functions worse as a 2thumb keyboard? (5 votes [13.16%] - View)
- I dont know. (6 votes [15.79%] - View)
