ADIOS QWERTY?
Excellent New York Times piece by Virginia Heffernan on how the Qwerty keyboard may be on its way out
Among the 20th-century activities our muscles can’t forget is typing on a qwerty keyboard. And though most people who type now don’t know the meaning of a typebar jam — much less the inky aggravation — the configuration of characters that begins with the row q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p, first marketed for typewriters in 1874 to reduce such jams, is still the most common configuration in the world for English-language keyboards.
For 136 years, then, typing in English has meant making certain neurological associations. Words exist in our minds and on our tongues, but they also live in our hands and fingers. Anyone who types envisions and feels words in space, and for English speakers who use technology, this space is defined by the qwerty keyboard. Who knows what qwerty has done to the language — even to modes of thought — by attaching meaning to certain constellations? Deep in our typist-minds, G and H are centrally located and somehow siblings; X and Z are southwestern outliers; and Q is always followed by … W.
But maybe qwerty is finally on its way out. This will be good news to many designers who believe that bullheaded commitment to qwerty is holding up a revolution in interface design that should have started with the touch screen. The trusty layout still appears on nearly all English-language typewriters, computers and smartphones with hardware keyboards, but smartphones and tablet devices with touch-screen keypads (like the Android and the iPhone) now default to a layout that looks like qwerty but doesn’t work like qwerty at all.
I first discovered the implications of a gut-renovated qwerty while using Google on the iPad. When you’re about to enter a search term, an abbreviated keypad that features the qwerty configuration of letters appears. But instead of the word “Return” or “Enter” on the big key midway down the right side of the keypad, the key reads “Search.” That’s quietly amazing. The keypad changes under your fingers. The same is true when you type in the “To” and “Cc” field of the iPad’s Mail program. Suddenly the @ sign is prominent on the keypad, as well as the hyphen and underscore, two symbols common in e-mail addresses. Similarly, when you’re typing into the address bar of the Safari browser, the custom keypad that comes up features no spacebar — spaces don’t go into Web addresses — and there’s a new, freestanding “.com” key.
The iPad keyboard, like other touch-screen keyboards, is also elaborately “chorded.” Press one designated key, and the whole keyset changes. One board has qwerty letters and first-tier punctuation (comma, period), a second board is numbers and second-most-used punctuation (semicolon, parentheses) and a third is important symbols (dollar sign, percent sign).
Skills with qwerty won’t help you with such sophisticated chording; you’ll have to learn to type again. In fact, the chording produces so many possibilities and the keys are so shape-shifting that the technology press produces guides with names like “71 iPad Keyboard Keys You Probably Didn’t Know Existed.”
