As to why…

…I left off my explorations a year ago: I simply got too pressured in a project which involved a whole lot of GUI interaction mixed with long stretches of textual typing, and my use of the Comfort Keyboard system seemed adequate.

…I’m taking it up again: Now I’m starting back into a project which has the mix I was more used to during much of my professional career. I want to revisit and complete my evaluation, giving the Ekapad a fair chance in a production setting.

I tried, but kept mentally re-reversing the keypad. For instance, I found myself reaching for the i key in place of the a key. It is as if the physical learning of  ‘curl finger’ was trumping the visual orientation of  ‘left side’. I wish there were a setup option for simply swapping right and left when swapping hands.

I’ll stick to left-handed keying for the time being.

At this point I need the smaller of the two cheatsheets for ready reference, but increasingly I find myself verifying what my fingers have already remembered of their own accord.

I usually have a high tolerance for cryptically dense summary sheets, but find the larger of the two reference cards to be confusing. I`ll put it aside for the time being.

My concerns about the size of the keypad have lessened somewhat, even if the sizes of my fingers haven`t.

I have problems settling on the best position for my hand and the EkaPad. Right now I`m steadying the keypad with my right hand and keying with my left. Obviously that is not an optimal solution, but I`ve been having trouble with hitting the right keys on occasion because the relative position of the pad shifts a little.  It`s a chicken and egg problem. I`m starting to see why resting the hand against the chest or belly might be a good idea. Meanwhile, this compromise lets me focus on perfecting my keying. Later, I will experiment with using the holder and different positions.

Another thing is that I occasionally have a hard time coordinating the pressing of two keys, producing, say, an `o` on my way to a `b`.

That is all I have time for at the moment.  So far, so good.  

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!

Otherwise, ergonomically, I’m in the process of switching to the Comfort Keyboard System having given up on the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard as too flat, and I remain unconvinced that any of the emerging glove keyboard technologies will mature soon enough. (The best of these looks frail and inconvenient, and isn’t on the market yet.)

I’ve also purchase a very good chair, and started using Wellnomics Workpace software to force me to take regular pauses and breaks. All of this is paying off.

My expectation is that EkaPad may prove to be a useful addition to these other tools. If I like it well enough I may adopt it for more and more of my keyboarding.  We’ll see.

In the context, I was intrigued when I heard of the Exatetra EkaPad. A one-handed chording keyboard sounded intriguing. The attractions included

• the ability to hold the mouse in one hand while typing with the other
• freedom to position my hand anywhere and change positions often, because the keypad travels with the hand
• the possibility of switching hands readily

All of this sounded pretty good. I had already learned the value of changing postures during long periods of work. The thought of changing keying techniques seemed a natural extension.

When I first investigated, I was put off trying the EkaPad by a few considerations:

• The money – normally this wouldn’t have been much of a consideration, especially with a money-back guarantee, but, at the time it had been over three months since I’d seen a paycheck.
• The difficulty of learning a new typing system. This is the same thing that’s kept me from switching to dvorak key arrangement. (Unlike the dvorak system, however, I realized I could carry the EkaPad around with me and use it on any system I worked on.)
• I was also put off by the fact that the demo video showed what seemed to me to be a relatively slow rate of typing.

After some discussion with an EkaPad evangelist and reflection on my part, I have to admit that this third concern, even if it holds up (and it might not) matters less than it might seem. Although I’ve clocked my self copying text at almost 60 words a minute, most of the time I’m at the keyboard I’m NOT copying text, and acheive far, far less than that rate of raw word production.

When I’m coding or writing, I spend much more time thinking, and often pause, backup, reconsider. My effective word rate is much lower. In fact, at the moment I’m only acheiving about 20 words a minute. (I just did a rough calculation.) I suspect that my highest rate, when I”m writing up already-well-thought-out material, rarely rises above about fifty words a minute. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that it is lower still when I’m struggling to find words and organize my ideas.

The monetary considerations were swept aside when I was offered  an EkaPad in exchange for making an honest and open record (this blog) of  my experience learning it, and my reaction to it.

I’m pre-disposed to be open about my reaction to technologies and want to share experiences anyway, so accepting the offer seemed a no brainer. And, even though I’ve had a paycheck now (fortunes change quickly at times), and have the option of merely buying the EkaPad instead of writing this blog, the idea appeals to me.

So here goes. I’m beginning my exploration of the EkaPad chording keyboard with a little trepidation and more hope. I’ll be recording my experiences as I go along. At first, I’ll be typing by keyboard, of course, but eventually I hope these entries will all be done by EkaPad.

Hi ho!