I decided to try writing an entire post in Dasher just to see how easy it was to
use. Dasher is an alternative way to enter text on the computer. It is mainly
geared towards use in small devices where a keyboard would take too much space,
or for people with a disability which prevents them from using a keyboard. The
Dasher program included with Gnome 2.6 consists of a text box at the top
showing what you have typed and the Dasher input area at the bottom. Dasher is
controlled simply by moving the mouse cursor. Letters appear on the right side
of the screen in colored boxes. These boxes are scaled in proportion to the how
likely you are to choose them.
Typing in Dasher feels a bit like playing a video game. As you move the mouse,
you sort of steer towards the letters you want to type. The boxes containing
the letters grow as you move towards them and boxes for following letters
appear inside the existing ones. Since Dasher uses a language model to predict
the probability of each subsequent letter, the word you intend to type begins
to appear on the right side of the screen. This feature seems to work quite
well since it doesn't just look for any word that begins with the letters you
have typed,but it also considers the context of the sentence you are writing.
Dasher even seems to learn as you type. For example, the first time I wrote the
word "Dasher" it took a little tricky maneuvering, but the subsequent times it
became much easier to type.
Dasher even helps you spell words since the letters for the correct spelling
will appear much larger. However, I don't knowhow quickly Dasher would learn an
incorrect spelling that would throw it off in the future. Once you get used to
the navigation in Dasher it feels quite natural and you can turn up the speed
it moves at to type at a quite reasonable pace.
Of course, Dasher is not without problems. The most frustrating one is that it
will freeze up periodically on my computer. I have an Athlon XP 2000+, so it's
much faster than the handheld systems the software is supposed to be usable on.
I'll have to look into this to see what's going on.
Also, it would be useful to have Dasher operate in a way that it could be used
to input text directly into any program. Users can copy text from Dasher into
another program, but if text could be input directly into a word processor the
user would be able to take advantage of other features such as the real-time
spell checking.
I should also note that Dasher includes training text for a variety of
languages, so users that don't speak English will be able to take full
advantage of the software right away without taking time to train it
themselves. I may try training it on Python, or HTML to see how easily it
adapts. Although I had never written anything in Dasher before writing this
post, I can already type fairly fast in it, but it would probably be quite
difficult to code in it since my thoughts don't really tend to flow as linearly
when I'm programming and Dasher isn't particularly well suited towards jumping
around and editing text. However, I will admit that it was much more fun
writing this post in Dasher than it would be typing it out normally. It feels
kind of like the computer is reading your mind when you can see the words you
were thinking of appear on the screen before you even begin to enter them.
