Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones

Compare 1996's "FITALY":

"For the FITALY layout, we have obtained an average travel of 1.8, to be compared to an average travel of 3.2 for the QWERTY layout. (For prose, involving few numbers and symbols, the results are even better.)"

https://www.textware.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm

https://the-gadgeteer.com/1998/08/22/fitaly_review/

And closer to OP, "HexInput":

"Please use this idea! If you are a software developer, I urge you to consider adding this functionality to your product. My hope is that ten years from now, we won't have to laboriously tap out messages letter by letter, but instead will be able to zip them out quickly and efficiently with something like HexInput." -Sept2006

https://www.strout.net/info/ideas/hexinput.html

1996, 2006, 2026... Your turn?

We did a lot of experimentation with keyboards in Android - finding better ways to type and click is pure HCI dream work

The key challenge is:

- At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for most people, that means standardised layout across all their devices, and they won't consider phones that push them into other models.

- Only after they've mastered that standard layout do they start to care about speed, but by then they've gotten good enough at the basic system that swapping to anything else is too much of a regression

So I really do love the existence of third party keyboards that cater to the set of people that are willing to deal with that setback

I wanted to install it to give it a try, but in the playstore I saw the application roughly translated is "susceptible to share my approximative location with other enterprises or organization".

I must ask, what could the reason(s) for a keyboard have access to a location ?

> Keybee Keyboard increases more than double the keysize thanks to its hexagonal structure. No waste of pixels.

It may be efficient, but it's using more screen space; I'm not sure that's a win.

Percentage bars do not seem to work (FF Mobile), or your conclusion must be that the distance is exactly equal

The thing I dislike about smartphone keyboards is the amount of screen real estate they use. This keyboard seems to take more screen real estate rather than less.

If one could swipe through the center without inserting a space, it would be incredible instead of perhaps only great... There was a PalmOS 5 keyboard like this named myKbd(1) based on some IBM research(2) which was quite fast to use. the atomik layout was quite quick to use.

(1): https://palmdb.net/app/mykbd

(2): https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI172&3_4 https://blakewatson.com/uploads/2023/07/Performance_Optimiza...

Japanese have a flick-style keyboard, very similar to T9. Instead of pressing a key multiple times, you press one key then flick up/down/left/right to choose a letter on that key.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BhD6r8NKlmY

I find there's a lot more intention behind your actions and I make far less typos when I'm flicking in Japanese vs typing on a touchscreen QWERTY. Being a second language, typos are even more common because its not at recognizable at a glance you made them, so the flicking been a huge improvement.

I always wonder if English should have something like this. I guess "MessageEase" is the most similar thing...

I wonder what got them kicked from iOS. Alt keyboards in the app store definitely do exist...

I think the key to smartphone keyboards is something like Nintype, two-finger swiping. It's incredibly fast and doesn't require you to learn a completely new keyboard layout to succeed.

It's also a lot more comfortable for one-hand typing since you can do multiple swipes per word.

Funny that looking at their "number of touches" and "distance covered" checker, I've tried a few words and thinking in my head how it'd be in Nintype and it would score far better than Keybee.

Unfortunately I haven't seen anyone since Nintype (and the older Keymonk) to give it an attempt.

I'm a user of ClearFlow, a layout with similar design goals (and it's available on GBoard by default). Interestingly, ClearFlow is an ortholinear layout, but I'm not sure if that's due to a limitation of GBoard or the intention of its author.

Well, it’s interesting, but who is heavily working with text, which requires a lot of typing, and only has a smartphone? Phones are mostly for consuming. For creating, it’s usually easier and more comfortable to use a device with a keyboard (PC or laptop)

When I go to enable it I get 'may be able to collect all the data you type, including ... passwords'.

'may be able to'? How is this not knowable? Do I have to wait for effect systems to gain popularity before installations make sense?

This reminds me of what I did for Rad Type: https://www.tyleo.com/projects/rad-type

I didn’t fully optimize for touch but it’s based on the same idea that you want more buttons equidistant from where your thumb centers.

No swyping and no autocorrect make it DOA

Very cool. The biggest questions someone skimming would likely be why the letters are in this order, and how this is consumed (eg ios app?). You may answer those details but they were not front and center to me.

Will you get this up on f-droid in addition to the play store?

Nice, but physical keyboards are making a comeback.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114412

Looking at the English keyboard and the English digraphs, it doesn't seem like the coverage is that well optimized. We are currently capturing 8.65% of the digraph weight, but just getting the top-5 would account for 5% by itself.

I also feel like distance travelled is the wrong (or an incomplete) metric. Change in direction seems like a good proxy for mental or physical effort. To take it to an extreme, I'd be very satisfied with a keyboard that had me move my thumb in a circle as on the original iPod, provided it just read my mind and inputted the right text. That's extreme distance but little effort.

https://pi.math.cornell.edu/%7Emec/2003-2004/cryptography/su...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewise

    +---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
    | Digraph | Frequency (%) | Adjacent? | Pair on Keyboard                    |
    +---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
    | TH      | 1.52          | Yes       | T is right of H                     |
    | HE      | 1.28          | No        | Separated by O and [Space]          |
    | IN      | 0.94          | Yes       | I is top-left of N                  |
    | ER      | 0.94          | Yes       | E is below R                        |
    | AN      | 0.82          | No        | A is bottom-center; N is top-right  |
    | RE      | 0.68          | Yes       | R is above E                        |
    | ND      | 0.63          | No        | N is top-right; D is bottom-right   |
    | AT      | 0.59          | No        | Separated by [Space] and S          |
    | ON      | 0.57          | No        | Separated by H and T                |
    | NT      | 0.56          | Yes       | N is top-right of T                 |
    | HA      | 0.56          | No        | Separated by [Space]                |
    | ES      | 0.56          | No        | Separated by [Space]                |
    | ST      | 0.55          | Yes       | S is below T                        |
    | EN      | 0.55          | No        | N/E are on opposite sides           |
    | ED      | 0.53          | No        | E is center-left; D is bottom-right |
    | TO      | 0.52          | No        | Separated by H                      |
    | IT      | 0.50          | Yes       | I is above T                        |
    | OU      | 0.50          | Yes       | O is below U                        |
    | EA      | 0.47          | Yes       | E is top-left of A                  |
    | HI      | 0.46          | Yes       | H is below-left of I                |
    | IS      | 0.46          | No        | Separated by T                      |
    | OR      | 0.43          | Yes       | O is below R                        |
    | TI      | 0.34          | Yes       | T is below I                        |
    | AS      | 0.33          | Yes       | A is below-left of S                |
    | TE      | 0.27          | No        | Separated by H and [Space]          |
    | ET      | 0.19          | No        | Separated by H and [Space]          |
    | NG      | 0.18          | Yes       | N is above G                        |
    | OF      | 0.16          | Yes       | O is below F                        |
    | AL      | 0.09          | Yes       | A is right of L                     |
    | DE      | 0.09          | No        | E/D are distant                     |
    +---------+---------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+

somehow , i get the sneaking suspicion, that while not perfect, qwerty actually works on mobile phones because it’s focused on not conflicting keys when typing (so tapping with thumbs work /better/ because of this).

for example, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” — < means left hand, > means right hand. you can see in a common phrase like this, you alternate sides more often. when you’re thumb-tapping, i think this is useful.

<t >h <e <q >ui <c >k <br >o <w >n <f >o <x >jump <s >o <ver t >h <e >l <az >y <d >o <g

For me, as a two thumb typer, I feel like if you had kept the letters generally on the same side (left/right) as Qwerty, even if nowhere near the same location, I could adapt to it much more quickly.

I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.

Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.

I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.

It's interesting but I wish I could still Swype on it

"Like a Blackberry," I read the headline and thought. Then I looked and thought, "I'm old."

This is gonna be like Dvorak where eventually we all figure out that it’s not significantly faster and you had to re-learn how to type just to figure that out.

I submit the idea that for most smartphone users, distance traveled and layout are not the limiting factor for typing speed.

If Steve Jobs when he introduced iphone, added this keyboard and said this is how we should write, everybody would do it.

Just sayin'...

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