Taking EkaPad out of the box, I could intuitively grasp the purpose of all the bits and pieces right away. I slipped the tutorial DVD in my PC, connected the EkaPad via the USB cable and started to play.
In a few minutes, after running through the intro docs (“Intro to EkaPad & Cheatsheet”, and the “Quick Start…” ) I had keyed all the letters, fumbling a few times to find the right position for the thumb holder and the right fit on my thumb. Next I tackled the first couple of tutorial sentences and reviewed the introductory materials on differing approaches to learning.
The “EkaPad Chording Book” turns out to be a key document. I didn’t find the titles and descriptions of the three “roads” to mastery very enlightening – or, at least, it took me several reads through to sort out which one fit me best. In the end I decided that the “Detail Accumulation” path is my way through. Who knows? maybe I’ll skip past bits and pieces along the way (although I doubt it) but I want to evaluate things and make the choice as I go.
Once I got past that minor hurdle, I enjoyed the humor and the layout of the document.
I decided that the right approach for me was to take many small lessons over a fairly concetrated period of time – say a day. Everything I’ve learned about how short and midterm memory works made this approach seem most plausible.
My hand felt akward, trying to find all the various keystrokes, and I wonder if the keypad isn’t a little small for hands like mine. Time will tell. I suspect that with practice, and after experimenting with various mounting and holding techniques I’ll feel more at home.
On the other hand, I had no trouble at all understanding and using the charts. The concept of the chording keyboard seems intuitively quite obvious, and the documentation seems pretty well thought out.
All this was a little over a week ago. This last weekend I was too engaged in out-of-house activities to dedicate sufficient time, so I made a conscious decision not to start. At this point I’m planning to start my chording training tomorrow morning and return to it periodically throughout the day. I aim to have a substantial number of the chords memorized by the end of the day. Once I reach that point, I”ll try actually using the EkaPad to write a post here and perhaps to code up a bit of Java.
Here goes!
Tags: EkaPad
