iLiad chord input

[axel77]

I just had recently reflected about the iLiad. While the stylus is a good pointing device, it still fails on getting efficiently "ascii" text into this device. Hitting the onscreen keyboard with the stylus works for me as bad as the builtin handwritting recognition. For both it takes a small eon to get a sentence into the device (like a description to a file)

So a nice new possibility would be a chord keyboard to enter text. Yes of course this comes with the disadvantage one would have to learn how to make chords, and is not "intuative" in the way we were teached to output data in elementary school. But especially on the iLiad I think one could get within a fairly short time at least to a point where you'd easily outperform both Stylus input techniques for text (both keyboard map hitting or handwriting recognition). I know the iLiad is not going to be a stenotypists favored recording device, but it would allow us to enter text data a bit more easier when needed.

Alternatively to put anything on the USB port, I wonder now the iLiad has 4 Buttons on the front, this might do already! The question for the devs: can the iLiad recognize when several buttons are hit at once, or is its motherboard limited a one button recognition? Where the second case would be a real early showstopper...

What do you think?

(The idea came a few days after I've seen in a documentation where they presented a new generation of stenotypists working for deaf people, they had some big chord keyboard with I guess 12 buttons or so, where a trained typist could do over 200 syllables(!) (yes syllables not just letters) in the minute. Thats not what I reach for to do with the iliad, but some more easy textual writing (when trained) would IMHO be a big deal)