Christopher
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial"texting a message used to take a time approximately proportional to the sum of the alphabetical indices of the message's characters modulo 3" is one of those things that is absolutely true but also 100% sounds like a shitpost if you weren't around for that era.
nota@nota a funny detail here is that I thought "roughly modulo 3 because most groups are 3 letters, with some being 4", then calculated the actual modulus as 3.25 across all groups, but it turns out if you include space and use the naive mean approach then the modulus is exactly three (27 / 9)
of course this ignores letter frequencies and, as you said, re-use penalty.
Matt Hardy 3.11 for Workgroups@gsuberland @nota in practice for me, the seek time for the next button outweighed the number of times I’d have to press it.
twifkak@nota @gsuberland When Tom Petty sang, "The waiting is the hardest part", I think it was about this.
Chris Bohn@gsuberland When I designed this board for use in my class, was multi-tap text entry an assignment I had in mind?
Yes. Yes it was.
MostlyBlindGamerA red PCB with a RaspberryPi mounted to it has a 4 by 4 grid of buttons. The silkscreen labels them as the numbers 1 to 9 and star, zero and pound sign, including the phone keypad characters under the numbers, like A, B, C for the number 2. On a column to the right there are buttons for the letters A through D and math operation signs, making this board useful for typing hexadecimal numbers (star and pound are E and F), using it as a phone keypad and as a calculator keypad.
@MostlyBlindGamer @gsuberland Thanks. Sorry about forgetting the alt text this time
@DocBohn @gsuberland very cool design, I bet it’s a lot of fun to learn on.
Koen Hufkens, PhD@gsuberland If you were good you could text someone one-handed with your phone in your pocket, on a bike.
artemist@gsuberland gboard (google android keyboard) actually still supports a t9 pinyin input method for chinese. you need to select words out of a list anyway, so it's not too bad to make the input more fuzzy.
there's also a 5 button ime based on stroke, in that case the time used to type a word is related to how hard it is to write.
חנן כהן • Hanan Cohen@gsuberland I had to read the comments in order to understand you wrote about T9. so, yes.
Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️⚧️🏳️@gsuberland
Japanese input on a smartphone usually involves "flicking" on a twelve-key pad that looks like an old fashioned pushbutton phone keypad. You select the correct consonant by tapping a key, then immediately flicking your thumb in the correct direction to choose the vowel. Most Japanese today do this very quickly without even thinking. But in the old pushbutton days, you would tap repeatedly to choose your vowel. But my bestie can't flick, so she still taps furiously like it's 1999.
Japanese input on a smartphone usually involves "flicking" on a twelve-key pad that looks like an old fashioned pushbutton phone keypad. You select the correct consonant by tapping a key, then immediately flicking your thumb in the correct direction to choose the vowel. Most Japanese today do this very quickly without even thinking. But in the old pushbutton days, you would tap repeatedly to choose your vowel. But my bestie can't flick, so she still taps furiously like it's 1999.
SnoopJ@RachelThornSub @gsuberland it's kind of funny how reminiscent of T9 tap-flick input can be
I'm thinking in particular of repeated taps to apply dakuten/handakuten and the small pause required to repeat the same kana, although as you say, the old tap-only way is still there!
Tóth Gábor Baltazár@gsuberland
I thought this was about message transmission, not writing the message...
took me a bit to realize >.<
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)@gsuberland Sending APRS messages on amateur radio transceivers still feels like that.
Dan Hatton@gsuberland To be clear, that's the sum of (the alphabetical indices of the message's characters modulo 3), not (the sum of the alphabetical indices of the message's characters) modulo 3.
@only_ohm yeah, there wasn't a good way to phrase this
Sebastian Krzyszkowiak@gsuberland ...unless you used T9!