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Thestrategist.media – 16 April 2015 – Ray McEnaney has designed a new style of keyboard. His new keyboard assures him “the most efficient” manner of typing. He claims that no other typing school can give deliver such “feel good factor”.
McEnaney was literally frustrated with the layout of traditional “QWERTY” arrangements of letters on a keyboard. Thus, he spent almost a decade to develop a new design of keyboards that would satisfy his requirements of typing faster and efficient manner. The present allocation of letters in the keyboard “was designed in the typewriter age”, which has been universal up till now. The said pattern was “patented in 1878. Therefore, the long awaited due comes to an end now.
The unsatisfied McEnaney turned away from other existing typing options like Dvorak among the most prominent ones wherein the aim is to reduce movement and minimize the distance covered by the fingers. According to McEnaney, “the learning curve” involved in setting the fingers on such keyboards were a rather a steep one. Users need to practice with commitments to reach a certain level of efficiency.
Consequently, McEnaney gathered his inspirations from a bee to design his “BeeRaider” which is an “oddly shaped keyboard that resembles a bee in flight”. It keyboard has “two wings” on the either side of “a radial center” which contain the keys. Zara Stone writes:
McEnaney was literally frustrated with the layout of traditional “QWERTY” arrangements of letters on a keyboard. Thus, he spent almost a decade to develop a new design of keyboards that would satisfy his requirements of typing faster and efficient manner. The present allocation of letters in the keyboard “was designed in the typewriter age”, which has been universal up till now. The said pattern was “patented in 1878. Therefore, the long awaited due comes to an end now.
The unsatisfied McEnaney turned away from other existing typing options like Dvorak among the most prominent ones wherein the aim is to reduce movement and minimize the distance covered by the fingers. According to McEnaney, “the learning curve” involved in setting the fingers on such keyboards were a rather a steep one. Users need to practice with commitments to reach a certain level of efficiency.
Consequently, McEnaney gathered his inspirations from a bee to design his “BeeRaider” which is an “oddly shaped keyboard that resembles a bee in flight”. It keyboard has “two wings” on the either side of “a radial center” which contain the keys. Zara Stone writes:
“It’s a buzzy concept: The layout is larger, with the keys you need most at the center (which gives you less fatigue, McEnaney says). Keys that he considers “more useless” — including Q, K and X — are placed farther away.”
McEnaney assures that anyone can pick up typing on the BeeRaider in just twenty minutes because the keys are positioned relating to “mnemonic learning tools”. Zara Stone recalls from her experience that although in the beginning typing on the BeeRaider feels “weird” but within just five minutes or so, her hands were perfectly set into the keys. Moreover, the keyboard clubs the alpha characters together which facilitates “memory retention”.
However, cognitive neuroscience researcher from the Vanderbilt University, Kristy Snyder is still unsure as to whether the shape of a keyboard has anything to affect the typing speed in return. She experiments with the memories of typists wherein she found that majority of them remember only “half the keys they use daily”. She says:
“We think that it’s an implicit knowledge of where the fingers go; the motor system learns where the keys are, and that’s how you learn to type”.
According to her findings, Dvorak layouts of the keyboards “were unconnected to retention”. As a result, irrespective of how much time one devotes to typing in “QWERTY” arrangement system of a keyboard one remembers little about the key locations. Therefore, Beeraider has more chances of taking over the old system as one can always try and adapt to new ways as long as there is “no intrinsic recollection of keys”. Even though changing the key mapping could be difficult but in Snyder’s words:
“Using a new system could be better than QWERTY.”
