touchstream

By anders pearson 31 Jan 2003

just to make sure it was firmly established that she is the coolest girlfriend in the world, lani got me the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/ST_product.html”>Touchstream keyboard</a> that i had been yearning for.

the touchstream is a unique device. it is a combination of keyboard and mouse in one unit using something similar to a trackpad for the entire thing. there are no keys. the surface is totally flat and it uses a microprocessor to figure out where your fingers touch the surface and maps those to keypresses or mouse events.

there were basically three things that make it an attractive device: 1) it requires essentially no force to hit a key (since nothing is being depressed) which makes it very easy on your wrists. with practice, it is also potentially faster to type on than regular keyboards because your fingers don’t have to move as much. 2) you can use the mouse without moving your hands away from the keyboard; your keyboard and your mouse are always right below your fingers, you don’t lose any time switching between them. and 3) it also supports gestures. the onboard processor detects certain motions and converts them to multi-key sequences like Control-x or Alt-backspace.

i’ve only been using it for a few nights now and not that heavily (the docs recommend not using it more than an hour or two a day for the first few weeks because apparently, when you are learning to use a new interface device, you tend to tense up and that can lead to RSI). my impression so far has been largely positive.

first, the learning curve for being able to type on it is just as steep as you would imagine. without tactile feedback, you basically have to learn to touch type all over again. on a regular keyboard, i can probably type a nice moderate 40 words a minute without looking at the keyboard or making too many mistakes. after playing with the touchstream for a few days now, i could probably get about 30 wpm but with about a 30% error rate. i have to slow down considerably to eliminate mistakes. if you have any imperfections in your typing technique, the touchstream basically amplifies them into mistakes. eg, using the touchstream has made me notice that i have a bad habit of hitting the ‘c’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than my middle finger. similarly, i reach for the ‘p’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than using my pinky like i should. on a regular keyboard, i’m probably just barely hitting those keys. the touchstream is less forgiving and those and a dozen other bad habits i’ve learned to compensate for over the years just don’t fly. you also have to be really good about keeping your hands in the proper position hovering over the home row, just like typing instructors keep telling us is necessary for fast typing. all in all, using the touchstream is like having the ultimate fascist typing instructor scrutinizing your every keystroke and not letting you get away with anything. it’s slowing me down right now, but i can feel that if i keep at it, it will improve my typing overall.

for as much time as i spend on the computer, i’ve been pretty lucky with RSI. the only thing that really bothers me is using the mouse for long periods of time. because using a mouse hurts, i’ve gravitated away from GUIs and instead rely more on text and console applications. the bash commandline, emacs, ion, and mozilla/phoenix’s type ahead find are my bread and butter. once you get efficient with keyboard driven interfaces though, you start to become painfully aware of how inefficient most mouse driven interfaces are, especially the overhead of switching from mouse to keyboard and back all the time. the most appealing aspect of the touchstream to me when i was just drooling over pictures was that it would basically eliminate that overhead and make it possible for me to actually use the few mouse driven applications i need to deal with as efficiently as the key driven apps i’ve been spoiled on.

i was mistaken though. yes, having the keyboard and mouse both right there and having no overhead switching between mousing and typing has made a lot of applications easier and faster to use. but the killer feature of the touchstream turns out to be the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/touchstream_gesture_guide.html”>gestures</a>. unfortunately, they are awful hard to describe. the multifinger gestures start with the shift key. since drift can be a big problem on a keyboard without tactile feedback, stretching your pinky out all the time to hit the shift key is not such a good idea. instead, on the touchstream, you can just drop all four fingertips of one hand on the home row and that acts as a shift. control and alt are similarly easy. dragging the four fingertips of your right hand up or down will scroll up or down like using a mousewheel. there are also very intuitive gestures for back and forward in web browsers, cut/paste, and most of the common emacs commands. my favorite though is probably the cursor control. if you slide two left hand fingertips around, it will move the cursor around through text like it was a mouse pointer and you were using a trackpad. it doesn’t sound very impressive but it only takes about 3 seconds of actually playing with it before you can’t understand how you ever used the inverted T arrow key pad before; having to hit different keys to make the cursor go in different directions seems downright primitive.

overall it has pretty much lived up to all my expectations. the only negative things i can think of to say about it are that it isn’t wireless so i can’t sit on my couch and use it with the projector, and it isn’t customizable or programmable; you change between a few different preconfigured modes (windows, linux, mac, photoshop, emacs modes, etc.) but you can’t enable or disable specific gestures or define your own new gestures.

the device even gets good marks for durable construction. there are no moving parts so hopefully nothing to wear out. if you spill your drink on it, you can just spray some windex on it and wipe it clean.

Tags: keyboard touchstream