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Piotr Zieliński
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2D Dasher: efficient text-entry interface

Dasher is a graphical method for text-entry without using a keyboard, using a writing-by-navigation pagadigm. One of the few problems with Dasher the one-dimensionality of the text space: almost all phrases are displayed near the right-hand edge of the screen. At the same time, the rest of the input rectangle is barely used.

2D Dasher is a prototype of a two-dimensional version of Dasher. Instead of using a one-dimensional arrangement of letter, 2D Dasher distributes them evenly across the entire input square in the hope of better using the available display and speeeding up text entry. This is especially important for low-resolution devices (e.g., mobile phones) or for gaze-based systems.

I have written a prototype implementation of this idea, which is freely downloadable below. Feel free to experiment with it, send your suggestions, or improve the code. It might even be a good idea to rewrite everything from scratch.

Download

2D Dasher source code (GPL licence)

Use left-click to stop, right-click to backtrack, and the mouse wheel to change the speed. Only a limited amount of backtracking is implemented at the moment.

Requirements

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can install all the necessary prerequisites using 

apt-get install python python-gtk2 python-glade2

Prototype warning

This is a proof-of-concept prototype of 2D dasher, it absolutely does not qualify for production use.