The QWERTY keyboard we use on all of our devices today was designed 140 years ago with specifications that met the needs of typewriter users. The placement of the keys helped ensure that the most often-used keys wouldn’t get stuck and interfere with your typing. But modern keyboards don’t need the special placement; we just keep using the layout because it’s convenient and familiar.

Swiss startup icoaching wants to shake up the whole world of typing with its honeycomb-like keyboard layout. They call it WRIO, and it’s supposed to be a whole lot faster for typing on your mobile device than the traditional setup. The larger keys and unique letter placement let your thumbs move around faster than on the typical flat keyboard layout, and the size of the letters makes it harder to fat-finger an unintelligible sentence.

The letters’ positions aren’t really changed too much, but they are arranged on five levels rather than three and situated around two central space keys.The most commonly used special characters are right there on the main layer so you don’t have to push an extra key or two to get to them. The company is developing autocorrect software that is user-guided, so slang words and unusual contexts won’t constantly prompt annoying and inaccurate corrections.

WRIO also includes gestures to make texting and typing even easier. A swipe to the left is like hitting backspace, a swipe to the right adds a space (if you prefer to avoid the two space keys) and an upwards swipe acts as a “shift” key so you don’t have to go looking for it. For all of the wacky keyboard redesigns people have come up with over the years, this seems like one we would actually use and like. The designers say that after a couple of months, WRIO will become like second nature and you’ll never want to go back to a standard keypad.

The post Write-O! Redesigned Keyboard Makes Mobile Typing Simple first appeared on Gajitz.

Typing on mobile devices with on-screen keyboards sucks. Even the portable Bluetooth keyboards for your tablet aren’t great – particularly for people with fingers too big for those miniature keys. AirType could be a crazy useful new way to type without the need to carry around a separate keyboard.

AirType is a pair of cuff-like devices that fit around your hands to detect the movement of your fingers. The premise seems to be that you make the same hand movements that you do when using a keyboard and the AirType cuffs register those movements as alphanumerical input.

For those who never learned touch typing, it seems that the AirType could prove more problematic than an actual mini-keyboard since there is no option to hunt and peck. But the creators say that the device learns from you, adapting to your personal typing style and habits.

The accompanying app includes dynamic text prediction and real-time correction, which could mean that your tablet computer typing experience is about to get much, much easier. Or it could mean that auto-correct disasters are about to get a lot worse. Either way, we’re intrigued to see what the AirType team brings to the table in the coming months.

The post Wearable Sensors Are the Invisible Keyboards of the Future first appeared on Gajitz.

Have you ever wondered why the keyboard has to be such a standard, boring design? Different shapes and form factors are available, but the keys are always in the same configuration. Until now, that is – designer Wan Fu Chun has totally rethought the way keyboards work by inventing the Puzzle Keyboard.

The Puzzle Keyboard design lets you remove the keys you don’t use often, move the keys you DO use into more convenient locations, and altogether customize your typing experience. The shape of the keyboard can be shifted to accommodate a more ergonomic design, as well.

The Puzzle Keyboard could not only make things easier for people who use their keyboards constantly; it could also help to make typing possible for people with certain disabilities. Those who have arthritis or hand injuries can arrange just the keys they need in the most convenient setup for them. The creative Puzzle Keyboard was a 2012 Red Dot Design Award winner.

The post Get it Together: Puzzle Keyboard Has Endless Configurations first appeared on Gajitz.

The touchscreen on your iPad might be easier to type on than that of an iPhone, but it’s still a touchscreen – which means it’s still a pain in the neck. Designer Austin Yang wants to bring back the old-school satisfaction of a typewriter’s click-click-click, so he created a typewriter-style dock. The dock holds an iPad and allows you to hunt and peck away, just like you used to on a typewriter (if you’re over a certain age) or a physical keyboard.

The idea is actually really fun, but the actual product is not as great as it could be. The keyboard doesn’t have the QWERTY setup we’re all used to, and things like the space bar and punctuation look to be located in odd places. Still, if you don’t mind hunting and pecking for what seems like a really long time, the cool dock does give you the satisfaction of pushing physical buttons to type, something the iPad just can’t offer on its own.

The post Typewriter iPad Dock Blends New Tech + Classic Style first appeared on Gajitz.

On a lot of laptops, the numeric keypad is usually the first thing to be sacrificed in order to save space. For those of us who just can’t get used to using the numbers above the alpha keys, this concept is a stroke of genius. It’s called Number Pad Film for Touchpad – despite the cumbersome name, it’s a really clever object + program that makes it simple for even laptop users to enter long lines of numeric data.

The Number Pad Film is a small piece of plastic film that fits on over a laptop’s touch pad. Accompanying software maps out locations of the virtual “keys” on the touchpad. Switch to the number input with the use of hotkeys and math away to your heart’s content. Another activation of the hotkeys sends the touchpad back to its original function.

The virtual keypad lacks the tactile feedback of a physical numeric keypad, but people who do plenty of touch typing on numeric keypads might not mind. They’ll probably just be grateful to have the freedom to compute stuff without hunting and pecking on the top row of the keyboard.

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