The Salmon of Doubt

You can actually write on a palmtop computer, which is something I didn’t realise before I had tried to do it on a Sharp Wizard, but it wasn’t possible because the keyboard was laid out alphabetically, which is hopeless. The principle behind the decision to have an alphabetical keyboard is based on a misunderstanding. I believe that the idea is this: not everybody knows qwerty (it’s an odd feeling, actually typing qwerty as a word; try it and you’ll see what I mean), but everybody knows the alphabet. This is true but irrelevant. People know the alphabet as a one-dimensional string, not as a two-dimensional array, so you’re going to have to hunt and peck anyway. So why not use qwerty and let people who know it have the benefit? I also tried the larger Sharp Wizard, the 8200, which does have a qwerty keyboard, but no word wrap. Can you believe that? Even Etch-a-Sketch has word wrap these days.

Now, this raises some interesting questions. (Well, interesting to me. You can please yourselves.) What about this input business, then? I am, of course, as out of my mind with excitement as the next person about the prospect of voice input and pen input, but you know and I know, and anybody who has fooled around with a Caere Typist or the like will know that things rarely work as smoothly in practice as they do in theory, or at least not yet. Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us. The days when you can say, “Open pod bay number 2, Hal,” and be confident that Hal understands that you want to be stranded on the outskirts of Jupiter are still a way away. And I suspect that it will be a very long time before I am able to dictate an article like this and for the result to be even decipherable, let alone accurate. We’ve all seen the old sketch in which a secretary writes down absolutely everything the boss says, including the bit where he says, “Don’t write this bit down,” or “Cross out that last sentence.” I think there’s going to be a lot of stupid-secretary-type grief to go through before we get it working smoothly. As for pen input devices, well, as I said above, ten years of word processing has meant that my handwriting has deteriorated to the point where even I can’t read it, so what chance a computer stands I really don’t know. Can I be bothered to tease out the irony involved in all that? No. So for the moment that leaves us back with the keyboard input, and keyboard input, for the moment, means qwerty. But qwerty, as we know, was originally designed to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam.

It’s deliberately inefficient. However, all attempts to replace it with something more efficient, like the Dvorak keyboard, have failed. People know qwerty already, and they don’t have any pressing incentive to change. Dvorak et al. may be better, but qwerty is, or has been till now, good enough. “If it ain’t busted, don’t fix it” is a very sound principle and remains so despite the fact that I have slavishly ignored it all my life.

I think, though, that we might finally have arrived at point at which there is a strong incentive to reinvent the keyboard. Palmtop computers are where all the new action is. Apple and Microsoft and everybody are suddenly beginning to get revved up about personal digital assistants and stuff, and, having been using this Psion Series 3a for a few hours now, so am I. It’s terrific technology, and this is just the beginning of that crucial moment at which something stops being just an entertaining new toy and starts being something you can seriously use in the bath. We’ve all known for years that qwerty isn’t good. I think we’ve now got to that important point where it isn’t even good enough. The point where it isn’t even good enough. (Yes, this is exact copy typing!) I hope that systems designers have not been put off by the failure of the Dvorak keyboard. I hope they are carefully studying the way that people hold palmtop computers, where their fingers naturally fall and fit and how the whole idea of how a keyboard works can be rethought. I would very much like it if my thumb joints were not now stiff and aching. I’ve proved it can be done, but, like Branwell Bronte, I’m not expecting to do the same trick again tomorrow.

We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.

Little Dongly Things Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I’d ordered a new optical disk drive from an American mail-order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called “Foreign,” and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.