Talk:Touch typing

To avoid Redundant moderation
Note to self: When discussing the mobile game control problem on Slashdot, link to this post and/or this post. --Tepples 18:05, 4 September 2012 (MST)

Touch != Touch Typing
Right, because they use the word touch, there's an implied relationship to touch typing. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. (unsigned post by 24.21.81.185)
 * I'm aware that words have more than one meaning, but I hope you didn't mean "all puns are unprofessional". The use of a pun on the word "touch" was to introduce my actual thesis: in a market dominated by touch screen devices, how would you recommend porting an application that relies on an input method similar to touch typing? Perhaps you're right that I need a better lead paragraph. --Tepples 10:00, 15 September 2012 (MST)

But I *can* touch-type on a touch screen
Thanks for allowing me to respond directly in your wiki.

I've been reading your signature on Slashdot for a while, and the accumulated aggravation that I feel has finally hit the threshold that forces me to respond. I can so touch-type on a touch screen; in fact, I'm doing so right now on my iPad. The tactile feedback from a real keyboard would be nice, of course -- I can't hit 98 wpm on a touch screen -- but the letters on a touch screen are always in the same place, which is all I need for touch-typing. 19:00, 2 January 2013 (CST)
 * When you touch-type on your iPad, how do you tell whether or not your fingers have shifted half a key's width compared to the on-screen keys? --Tepples (talk) 21:36, 2 January 2013 (CST)
 * Please excuse that I am not the OP and don't do enough typing on my mobile devices to be authoritative, but: Why exactly does half a key's width matter when one can backspace away any errors that occur after further drift? Is the answer that most people don't proofread their message before hitting Enter? Or are you talking more about games where there is no backspace? --Eighty5cacao (talk) 23:12, 2 January 2013 (CST)
 * Both. Half a key's width from the center of the target is the minimum displacement needed to change one letter into another. An occasional error in a word gets auto-corrected until the whole hand has drifted by a half key width, at which point errors become uncorrectable. (Somehow my brain wants to make an analogy to how CD players ignore scratches, but I imagine that's precisely bass-ackwards to non-geeks: it'd be easier to explain CD CIRC to them in terms of glass-keyboard autocorrect.) But in a real-time game, in addition to a lack of backspace as you pointed out, gamepad (and virtual gamepad) input isn't based on "words" that give enough context for the correction algorithm; each command is a single "letter". --Tepples (talk) 00:09, 3 January 2013 (CST)
 * ...and I've deliberately disabled autocorrect on most of my mobile devices (as well as desktop word processors), which is why I didn't think of that aspect. Again, I don't do text messaging over the cellular network. Groan --Eighty5cacao (talk) 09:57, 3 January 2013 (CST)