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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: April 28, 2002 Review: The amazing keyless keyboards -- "Many notebook owners have learned to use little touchpads in place of mice, but a company called FingerWorks is using large touchpads in place of keyboards as well. Instead of traditional keys, FingerWorks' touchpads have silk-screened diagrams representing keyboards: You simply touch the area marked "Space", "Enter", or "8", for example." (Comments: This reminds me of the Atari 400 that my family once owned. It also had a flat keyboard, which I thought sucked pretty bad.)
Reader Comments...
Well, the technology here is a bit different from the membrane keyboard your old Atari had -- one big difference is that software is now doing most of the work, while the functionality of the keyboard used to be literally hardwired into the device. In both cases, though, touch-typing is impossible, making this type of keyboard impractical for any sort of extended use. But I could see this sort of device being adopted for kiosk or public terminal applications, where the lack of moving parts means lower maintenance costs, and extended use is fairly uncommon anyway. Posted by: jjg on April 28, 2002 05:05 PM
A note on tactile feedback.. I think that it is important to have tactile feedback and a lot of people do have prblems with touch-interfaces not being able to give feedback. i.e. a simple button being able to "feel" that you pressed it, vs. a flat touch plate Posted by: emp on April 29, 2002 04:50 AM
Do you remember the older ATMs? They used to be like that, and you'd never know if you pressed the right button or not or even if you've actually pressed anything...
John, why were you typing on your Atari 400 keyboard? The only input device you needed was the joystick. (And oh boy, four joystick ports! Asteroids was never the same after that.) Posted by: Jack Schonchin on May 2, 2002 02:00 PM
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