zenith-steven@cs.yale.edu (Steven Ericsson Zenith) (05/09/90)
I have had an Agenda for about six months now. If you want something
for writing notes, reports etc.. which you can put in your pocket,
then I can highly recommend this machine. The key chord system is
easy to use and learn and speeds get up really quick. I sometimes
use the machine as a keyboard for the PC, generally after an extended
period of using the Agenda, and have written quite substantial pieces
of text on it. It's great for use on a 'plane or train, since the
key chord system remains quite usable when in motion (at least to a better
degree than a conventional board).
However, as a calculator it sucks, and the diary system is usable .. but
only just. It's fine for storing telephone numbers and other such data,
and the RAM "drives" are useful for storing this kind of data. Backup is
easy, to either a PC or RAM card. The built in rechargable battery works
well with a long life, and the machine has never lost data when the
battery has been allowed to run down. The built in RAM is either 32k
or 64k, but the RAM cards are 32k, so a 32k machine is fine for working
store with the cards as support.
So, a great machine if you do a lot of writing (as I do). But I am now
thinking of getting a Psion or IQ(nee Wisard) for my other needs. I just
couldn't do any volumn of text using these either of these two.
. .
Steven Ericsson Zenith * email: zenith@cs.yale.edu
Department of Computer Science | voice: (203) 432 1278
Yale University 51 Prospect Street New Haven CT 06520 USA.
"All can know beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness"garyf@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Gary Friedman) (05/10/90)
I've just finished evaluating the AgendA for about a month, and am
rather impressed with it. The following is a writeup (without
figures, photos, etc. alluded to) I prepared for internal publication.
Notice that this is not a rosy sales pitch; I found several
fundamental problems with the human interface but champion the
original Microwiting concept in new applications.
-Garyf
------------------------------------------------------------------
One-Handed Text Entry
with the AgendA
by Gary Friedman, JPL
Introduction
As computers continue the trend of shrinking in physical size and
growing in raw CPU power and memory, a new problem has been
thrust upon designers within the last 5 years: traditional
keyboards dictate that the unit must retain the minimum physical
dimensions of the keyboard, lest the keyboard becomes unusable
and the packaging becomes the machine's own I/O bottleneck.
Hewlett Packard's calculator division was famous for introducing
small, incredibly powerful computers with such inadequate
keyboards and screens, severely curtailing access to an
uncharacteristically powerful operating system. Many attempts to
attack the problem of general keyboard inefficiency have been
made in the past, most notably from IBM who developed a new
method of text entry for the stenographer. In addition, voice
recognition, handwriting analysis, and several variations of the
DVORAK keyboard have all been studied.
These developments are good news to those who recall the origin
of the standard QWERTY keyboard: its layout was made
intentionally inefficient to prevent typewriter keys from
jamming. Most of these new keyboard alternatives do not address
the newest technology problem: how to insure that a computer's
accessibility is not proportional to it's size.
A Unique Solution
Microwriter Systems, plc, is a small company in the UK which has
developed a solution to this problem: a one-handed, 7-button text
entry method, in which the five fingers press different
combinations of buttons to access all ASCII characters, editing
and formatting commands.
Ideas such as being able to capture thoughts on the fly, without
looking, no matter where you were and with only one hand became
very appealing, and new uses for such a system quickly sprang to
mind. Typing memos in the car while still concentrating on the
road, capturing ideas on a leisurely walk, or even typing in bed
while lying awake and staring at the ceiling would provide a
method of capturing ideas which routinely leak out and are lost
forever. (On-the-fly idea capturing has traditionally been done
by microcassette recorders, but not everyone works well with this
medium.)
This article is mostly about the Microwriter keyboard and how it
might be applied to other computer systems. First, a brief
overview of their product is presented.
Product Overview
Microwriter's AgendA, the second product to incorporate the
microwriter scheme, is being targeted to compete directly with
the Sharp Wizard, an electronic "pocket organizer" which is
selling quite well despite its poor user interface. The AgendA
incorporates an appointment book (with alarms), a memo writer, a
diary function, telephone directory, and a global search feature
which can find any given pattern for instant information
retrieval. Communications packages with special cables allow it
to swap information with your PC for further refinement or for
backup, and allow complete programmability from the PC.
The AgendA (pictured in photo 1) has a 4x20 supertwist LCD screen
and 7 microwriter keys which are capable of accessing every
feature of the unit. Complementing these keys are a full set of
tiny alphanumeric and command keys placed there by marketing for
those who don't wish to learn a new method of typing.
The Microwriting entry scheme is easy to learn; the basics are
presented in Figure 1. It took me 1/2 hour to memorize the
alphabet, and in a few days I had absorbed most of the editing
and formatting commands. Well-designed mnemonics make for easy
learning, and characters can be "rolled" in (kind of like playing
an arpeggio); it all has the mark of being designed by a user.
Building typing speed takes time; after about a month of use my
typing speed was up to 15 1/2 words per minute.
[Figure 1: Microwriting Overview]
PC Link and Mac Interfaces
Software is included in the Agenda to allow the microwriter keys
to act as an extension keyboard for an IBM PC or a Macintosh.
This was tried in the FIST lab with success; all the ASCII keys
and cursor commands worked flawlessly. Other essential keys for
IBM programs, such as CNTRL-{anything}, the function keys or PgUp
and PgDn, are not documented anywhere, but seemed to be actuated
all the time when typing mistakes occurred. (There was no time
to go back and try every combination to see what caused what;
because there also exist 2-stroke microwriter sequences, there
are actually 3 * 2^7 = 384 possible combinations...)
The PC software allows captured notes and scheduled appointments
to be easily uploaded to a PC or a Mac (The Mac version creates a
nifty HyperCard stack), and is rather slick.
Problems with Implementations
[Photo 2: (Shot with agenda in car): Extremely light key pressure
on the AgendA will keep scenarios like this one from becoming a
reality.]
Needless to say, I was very impressed with the thoughtfulness
that went into the product concept and the details of its
implementation. I'd even go as far to say the unit is 98%
perfect. (Few products I've ever looked at, consumer or
professional, rank this high.) HOWEVER, the other 2% was
perceived as being so inhibiting as to overshadow the machine's
attributes and make it nearly unusable for my imagined
applications.
The keys, although properly placed, require little to no pressure
and provide almost no tactile feedback. Although this does
provide for silent operation, it is ill-suited for note taking
away from a desk. Blind typing requires being able to sense the
"home" position with your hand without looking; and the light key
pressure turns this essential activity into lots of extraneous
characters. Microwriting in the car produced so much "noise" due
to vibration that the text was unreadable.
Typing on the Agenda's keyboard while in bed, an essential
activity for a handicapped workstation (proposed below), proved
awkward as well. The light key pressure still tended to create a
high signal-to-noise ratio. One of the keys kept sticking in the
closed position, a state impossible to detect without looking.
Worse than confining you to a desk, some of the editing and
navigational commands require the thumb to press two and
sometimes three keys simultaneously, a difficult task requiring a
double-jointed thumb and slight repositioning of the hand to
press the required combination. This is a definite hindrance to
blind typing.
Left-handed people are almost left out of Microwriting by
design. Even if a left-handed keyboard were to be developed, the
mnemonics involved would have to be changed around, since some
patterns are easier to type with the right hand than with the
mirror image of the right.
Nitpicking
Although my main emphasis was evaluating just the microwriting
aspect of this computer, I must also mention some other faults
that I found with this unit.
- No security feature for data protection was implemented; a
stranger finding your lost AgendA has access to everything.
- There should be an internal counter that tracks how long
the unit's been on. A user-resettable version would be
handy for determining when it's time to recharge.
- Small screen sizes on word processors tend to have the
subconscious effect of shortening the author's sentences.
This is a human factors concern, and not unique to the
AgendA.
- Standard Microwriting for long periods of time can induce
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, a known fatiguing position caused by
the wrist resting on the table at a level lower than the
fingertips. (This is a danger more commonly associated with
standard QWERTY keyboards.)
- Electronic appointment books in general tend to be a real
pain to use. In a paper notebook, as with paper appointment
calendars, you are able to look at a week or a month at a
time and browse through all your text in order to find
information. The Agenda, although excelling at finding
known information, makes it difficult to browse. Paper and
pencil, in this case, are better in every respect except for
speed of information extraction.
It might be easy to blame these implementation problems to those
in marketing/manufacturing, since Microwriter's first product
introduced about 8 years ago didn't suffer from most of these
problems.
Not willing to write off a great idea, there are still some
practical uses for this text entry scheme which no other system
can handle. A few ideas follow.
Idea: Workstation Environment for the Bedridden
A healthy back is not required to operate a computer, yet a
computer operator with a bad back must restrict his or her use of
the machine while recovering from back injury. (This happened
recently to a fellow JPL member). Using a computer in bed often
requires propping up the head in a stiffening position to see the
screen, and placing the keyboard on the stomach to allow typing
at incredibly fatiguing angles.
A more natural position is illustrated in Fig. 2. Here the
patient lies face up, with the hand at the side. At the
fingertips lies the microwriter input device, allowing text entry
while staring at the ceiling. Visual feedback can be provided by
a new piece of technology offered by a different firm.
A new device from Reflection Technology (Cambridge, Mass.),
allows a person to see the computer screen no matter what
position the head is in. Called the "Private Eye" (Figure 3),
the device clips to the user's eyeglasses and projects a virtual
image of an IBM VGA monitor a few feet forward, allowing the
screen information to be seen even while lying down.
[Figure 2 Caption: Two new devices can allow a recovering patient
to be productive instead of bored]
These two devices can act as a friendlier man-machine interface
to an IBM PC. Further refinements can extend it's functionality
to work with a Macintosh (put the microwriter keys on a mouse;
work the entire Mac with one hand), and, if the Private Eye can
be adapted to something other than a VGA graphics board, perhaps
a UNIX -X Window environment.
Conclusion
My definition of a "dream computer" is one that combines
portability (can be used away from a desk), unobstructed power,
lots of I/O, is ready to use when turned on, and can be used and
accessed as quickly as a normal computer. (Unlike many people's
dream computers, these goals are quite realizable.)
My litmus test for usability is the 'photographer's companion'
scenario, as outlined below. If it can work this well out in the
field, it will shine in a laboratory environment:
- The ideal computer should be small enough to fit
unobtrusively in a camera bag and be able to capture ideas
faster and in more locations than can pencil and paper.
That includes long bus rides or standing in line.
- With the help of a pocket 1200 baud modem (which exists
today), it should be able to download your daily notes to
your trusty UNIX machine at headquarters.
- It should be easy to interface to the outside world. My
favorite application involves a little extra circuitry and a
small program which enables control of a camera for long,
timed-exposures with automatic bracketing in half-stop
increments. Takes the tedium out of such shots.
Although the AgendA meets most of these criteria (including the
'unobstructed power' in the form of a powerful programming
language), and although it is the first truly portable computer
to address the brain -> CPU bottleneck, it's few shortcomings in
implementation weigh so heavily as to nullify everything else
they did right. The concept is still a good one, however, and
there are many real-world problems which the microwriter method
can solve nicely.
--
Gary Friedman Jet Propulsion Laboratory - NASA
4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA. 91109 (818) 354-0410
Uucp: {cit-vax,elroy,psivax}!devvax!garyf
Arpa: devvax!garyf@cit-vax.ARPA -or- garyf@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOVmar@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk (Mark Rainey) (02/22/91)
I am student in UK. I have only just found out about this conference. Everything seems to talk about machines made by HP. Does anyone out there own anything else ? In particular, does anyone own or use a Microwriter AgendA, the portable organiser similar to the Psion but with the five keys for 'Microwriting'? Mark Rainey
bdb@cl.cam.ac.uk (Brian Brunswick) (02/26/91)
In article <1991Feb22.133356.25700@cm.cf.ac.uk> mar@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk (Mark Rainey) writes: > > ... machines made by HP. Does anyone out there own anything else ? > ... Microwriter AgendA, Yup, and I continue to read this in the faint hope that there might be some traffic about it. Lets start up a discussion. Has anybody else had experience with the Agenda crashing, and losing data? When I first got it, I got it into a tight loop by defining user key one to just the alpha symbol, which reinvokes user key 1 again. This then lost memory when I turned it off and on. (The power down was forced by the delay after two or three seconds, instead of know) I also lost memory by trying to download large amounts of data to it (in small chunks) Around about the 50K mark it just went into a continual housekeeping loop, and only respoonded to a hard shutdown, and again the data was gone. Since then I've only used it for manually entered data though, and its been completely reliable, even against being left in a batteries too flat to turn on state for a week or two. Brian.Brunswick@uk.ac.cam.cl Disclaimer. Short sig rules!