Dvorak Simplified Keyboard gets a mention on the Wall Street Journal

Monday, September 28, 2009

You can see the article here - it's about Dvorak keyboard users (of which I am one) angry at Apple (a user of which I am not, for reasons like this among others) for only providing Qwerty for the iPhone. The article has a nice interactive image showing the difference in letter frequency compared to the position on the respective keyboards.

As expected, the discussion is very partisan with people both saying that the keyboard is better than Qwerty while others cite an article (it's always the same article, the one from 1996) claiming that it isn't. You can tell when an article is stretching when it takes 18 pages to make the case against a simple keyboard layout. I can provide proof for the opposite with a single link - here you go. Let's use this post to compare the two layouts:

Typing distance: 20.03 m with Q, 11.26m with D
Same hand (lower is better): Q 33.12%, D 23.11%
Same finger (here too lower is better): Q 4.006%, D 1.540%
Home row: Q 30.6%, D 66.71%

There you are, and I didn't need to type up an 18-page article to do it.

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