Monday, January 4

Update on TypeMatrix progress

QWERTY 2030 USBImage by balise42 via Flickr
This is pretty much the last update on this.  It has now been a solid two months since I received my TypeMatrix keyboard and I decided to update based upon something I noticed the other day.  Very simply, I noticed that I was consistently and accurately finding all the keys, including the symbol keys, and that my typing speed has nearly returned to normal.  Just to verify, I went through the typing tests in gtypist and found that my speed was consistently hovering around 95 wpm.  My previous speed was 102, so I am 93% of my previous typing speed... those speeds include symbols.  Considering that I have started going back and forth between traditional keyboards and the TypeMatrix again, that is not bad.  I am continually progressing in speed, so I believe I will very quickly overtake my old speeds.

In my opinion, this makes the move to TypeMatrix complete.  It's been two months and several thousand lines of code, emails, Facebook updates, and what not... this does not seem promising for my ability to learn a completely new layout(moving to Dvorak), which is a bit disappointing.  Given that key locations are only modified on the TypeMatrix, Dvorak may just be a project for my kids rather than myself.
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2 comments:

Peter said...

Have you made the switch to Dvorak yet? It took me about two weeks to be up to a reasonable typing speed again. The first day was horrible, I was down to 4 wpm and it was frustrating. But slowly it got faster and faster.

Since you know the TypeMatrix by now (I use one too) the switch to dvorak will be a lot easier than making both transitions at once.

I'm a programmer and still think that Dvorak is superior. It is a bit annoying though how focused around qwerty most IDE:s/editors are.

Michael Nishizawa said...

It only took you a couple weeks? That's astounding. I still hit the enter button on the TypeMatrix instead of the b sometimes, so the idea of a completely different layout is something I haven't been willing to tackle. Although my overall speed and accuracy is better with the TM vs a regular keyboard. My biggest problem is switching layouts all the time from my laptop keyboard to the TM. If they made a version that I could replace my laptop keyboard with I would buy it in a heartbeat.