Word: keyboarding
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...STEP 2: RECOGNIZE THE SYMPTOMS. Dry eyes, back aches, wrist cramping and numb fingers are signs that you are spending too much time at the keyboard...
...trusty stylus still has a future; it's better for navigating menus and playing games. Even the keyboard version of the Treo comes with a stylus. But I prefer Graffiti the way it comes on the new Clie. Its screen records characters exactly the way you write them, helping me nail those pesky gs and 9s. Maybe someday I'll even write as fast...
...faith is collapsing, largely because Palm founder and Handspring co-founder Jeff Hawkins has converted to the new religion of thumb keyboards. You have probably seen these things on Blackberry e-mail pagers; they are tiny raised keys in regular qwerty order, the whole keyboard not more than a few inches wide. Handspring's popular Treo ($399), a combination cell phone and organizer, comes in either Graffiti or keyboard flavor. The new Sony Clie PEG-70V, a $599 organizer, is similarly agnostic. It offers Graffiti on the color screen, but flip that around and there's a thumb keyboard underneath...
Without doubt, the mini-keyboard was the winner of the first two challenges. My thumbs were able to navigate the keys easily by touch, though surprisingly they did a lot better on the Treo's keyboard than on the Clie's (the Treo's is smaller, but the keys aren't quite so flat). The text raced across the screen fast enough for me to take dictation, and I soon needed to hit the delete key only once a paragraph or so. It made me realize how regularly I make mistakes in Graffiti--every other g comes...
What's truly novel about this project is the way the rat controllers issue their instructions. By tapping a keyboard, they send signals via radio waves to electrodes implanted in the animal's brain: a mild jolt to neurons that sense the right whiskers means "turn right"; a zap to the left-whisker neurons means "go left." The surprise was how easy this was to do. Neurophysiologists have long dreamed of building artificial limbs with tactile feedback that would be sufficiently sensitive to tell a user when a hand is grasping a barbell tightly enough to keep it from falling...