In a comment to "Coding with a pen," Tom Clarkson shows his Developer Input Panel in action:
http://www.orangeguava.com/inputdemo.wmv
Nice video.
One twist would be to think of the input panel as actual buttons. You could either tap to select (sequencing through states possibly if there are multiple symbols per key like on a cell-phone) or ink over them to directly select or invoke one of its symbols in its symbol set. But even inking over the Ctrl/Shift, etc keys is interesting in itself. That's a great shortcut.
Tom, how about trying the approach to differentiating AutoCAD commands? Most heavy users are keyboard short-cut experts and the current TIP is too large and cumbersome to be competitively efficient. Maybe a smart-floating custom TIP window, similar to you Developer TIP, might find a nice market here. I know my brother sure could use something.
Using Ink and tapping on the same area doesn't work particularly well - you can't tell if the user is writing "." or just trying to select the button. What I was going for is simplicity, letting the user do everything with one or two strokes - having to find both the ctrl and letter key from a large number of very small buttons makes shortcuts somewhat less effective.
I'm not an AutoCAD user, so I wouldn't know where to start in putting together something specifically for that. However, it may be worth trying out the developer input panel, since writing code in one language isn't too different to another - especially if the buttons are customized.
Posted by: Tom Clarkson on December 6, 2004 06:24 PM> Using Ink and tapping on the same area doesn't
> work particularly well - you can't tell if the
> user is writing "."
Sure, periods, commas, apostrophes, and others would have to be handled carefully--though you'd only have to disambiguate between a comma, etc and the current, active (or default) state of the button if the two were different. If the active state of the button is a period, a tap and a handdrawn period yield the same result. If a period and a comma are on the same button, you'd have a problem. So a good layout would have to segment the characters to produce the best recognition.
As with most raw ideas, who knows if it would all work well.
And in terms of writing over the "ctrl" key, I agree, this is faster. Nice idea. Notice, that the user semantics are slightly different between writing the letter C over a ctrl key to perform a copy (meaning hold Ctrl key down and simulate C key, versus, writing a C over a "letters" key and simulating a C key. This suggests that you might want to add some UI hint that indicates which way a particular key is handled. This would probably be useful especially if the key layout is user configurable where some keys might generate macro events (like the ctrl-C) rather than literal key generations--such as with the AutoCAD features you indicated.
Posted by: Loren on December 7, 2004 10:58 AM