Toolkit

Story: Another challenge to QWERTY's dominance

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Those used to a QWERTZ (German layout here) keyboard will always find it difficult to switch to a new style. I switched to an ergonomic design, it took a week or so of slower typing and mistakes until I got used to it. Then I carried the keyboard around with me everywhere I went, so that when I was working on customer sites, I had a comfortable keyboard.

The way to introduce a better concept - if it can be proved to be better and/or gives health benefits - is to train up the next generation on it, if it generates the same key codes as the existing keyboards, it is just a plug-and-pray operation.

People would then just bring with them to a new job the layout of their choice - or the company would offer a choice of keyboards when ordering a new machine...

Those that still worked better with QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY etc. would stick to the old style keyboards and those that prefer the ABC would use theirs, gradually you would see the rise of the ABC layout and the decline of the traditional layout.

The problem will of course be that to start with, because of limited demand, the ABC keyboards will probably not be cost-effective compared to a traditional layout. It will be interesting to see where the umlated and accented keys are in his layouts for non-English languages.

Having worked in several countries with several keyboard layouts, I've found it relatively easy to adjust to slight differences in layouts, I look forward to seeing if this design will bring any advantages - if it brings all accents and umlauts etc. for a standard western alphabet with it, it may be a hit a bigger hit as you wouldn't need to swap keyboards for each country or language...

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