Get an AlphaGrip on Your Keyboard

I love when developers reach out to explain what they’re thinking. The following response is from Mike Willner after he saw the AlphaGrip unboxing on YouTube. Pay particular attention to his second point!

Thanks for playing with yoaur AlphaGrip on YouTube. I can see why you have a lot of fans – you’re very funny. I wanted to address some of the questions/issues that came up in the video:

• You should have received a set of decals in the packaging that you could affix to the handles on the front of your Grip. They let you see which characters are located on which back keys so you don’t have to turn the Grip over to try to locate them when you are typing. It makes learning to use the Grip much easier. If you didn’t receive them, I’ll send you a set.

• I’ll gladly send you a couple of Grips as giveaways if you’re interested.
• While you can’t achieve typing speeds of 120 wpm on an AlphaGrip AG-5, if you want to lean back away from your desk while comfortably surfing the net or typing an email or document, the trade-off in speed may be worth it – at least once in awhile. Certainly if you have a PC connected to your flat panel TV in the living room or at the foot of your bed in your bedroom, using an AlphaGrip while leaning back in your recliner or lying on the sofa or bed is the way to go – much better than balancing a keyboard on your lap or leaning over to use it on a coffee table or on the bed. Of course, it will be even better when we produce a wireless adapter for the AG-5 or a wireless AG-6. An optical trackball would also greatly enhance the product – especially for gaming. As it is, in order to play a game, there must be a way to speed up the AlphaGrip’s trackball. Speeding it up with your operating system’s “mouse properties” controls usually doesn’t work once you open a game. Usually, the game itself must provide a way to speed up the trackball.
• I only type about 60-70 wpm on a keyboard, so using an AlphaGrip is a no-brainer for me because it is so much more comfortable. It’s also much easier to learn to touch type on an AlphaGrip than on a keyboard. With a keyboard you must take a course to learn which fingers have to be moved off the home row keys to generate many of the most common letters, which are located on the rows above or below the home row. By contrast, once you grasp an AlphaGrip, your fingers naturally fall on practically all the keys you need for touch typing. Granted, you have to memorize where the letters are located, but you don’t have to learn which fingers have to move to which keys. I think it takes about 4-6 months to learn to touch type at 40-60 wpm on a keyboard – it takes only 1-2 months with an AlphaGrip and you can teach yourself. So for people who have not yet learned to touch type on a keyboard, an AlphaGrip may be a better choice – easier to learn, more versatile, and more comfortable. And, if modified to fit your particular hand size, it may be the most ergonomic human/computer interface available on the market today (please see our “Modify Your Grip” page: www.alphagrips.com/modify.html).
• We call the letter layout on the AlphaGrip “Enhanced Qwerty” because there is a 65% finger-to-character correlation between the AlphaGrip letter layout and that of a keyboard. The “Enhanced” term comes from the fact that we moved the more common letters, like “e” and “i” to the AlphaGrip’s home row – they are not located on the keyboard’s home row, but they are generated with the same fingers as on the AlphaGrip. That’s the case with all the AlphaGrip’s back keys. For example, when touch typing on a keyboard you generate the g, t, f, and r with your left index finger; the same as on the AlphaGrip AG-5.
• We didn’t put all the most common characters up in the thumb area for a couple of reasons: First, you don’t generate many characters with your thumbs on a regular keyboard and we wanted to get as close to Qwerty as possible; and Second, you can type faster by going from one finger on one hand to one finger on another hand. It is slower to generate consecutive characters with the same finger. For example, it’s much faster to generate the letter “t” with your left index finger and then the letter “i” with your right middle finger than to generate both of them with your left thumb. You see, when you are touch typing the word “time,” your right middle finger is already moving toward the “i” key while your left index finger is generating the “t”. If they were both generated with the left thumb, however, your thumb couldn’t start moving toward the “i” until it had already finished generating the “t.”
• I notice you were holding the Grip up on your desk. That was great for letting your audience see it, but ideally you would rest it in your lap while leaning back.
• An application of our technology that’s even more compelling than comfortable computing, is an AlphaGrip smart phone or Ultra Mobile PC. I’m certain we could incorporate our technology into a smart phone that would fold up into your pocket for transport and unfold for 10-finger, touch typing. Today’s smart phones have thumb keyboards that only let you type 10-25 words per minute – about the speed of writing with a quill pen. With an AlphaGrip smart phone you’d type 2-5 times faster. That means you wouldn’t have to get to a desk to get real work done. You’d be able to compute productively from any location, in any position.

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