Dasher

FAQs / Vitenka's diary

• I seem to be unable to use it with any ease.  Tips?  How do you undo a bad letter, even?  --Vitenka
  

Drag left, and back out of your stream, IIRC. --CH

• Nifty.  Ok - now, how do I get it to offer me the symbol I want?    It refuses to offer a space between words!  Its text prediction is, however, damn good.  --Vitenka
  

Space is always white and shown as an underscore. Select the "English Alphabet with lots of punctuation" from the Alphabet option. Capital letters are then in yellow, punctuation and numbers in red and green (which way round depends on the version you have), and space is always in white at the bottom.  --AlexChurchill

Ah, handy; that's amuch better selection of punctuation! This paragraph is being completely Dashered, including the tricky double square bracket needed for that link. I do seem to have missed a space back there, though. Ah, well. --CH

• Argh.  Clipping through the corner of a letter causes that letter to activate.  I think I'm getting the hang of which colours mean shift and Ctrl though.  Operating at about 6 wpm right now.  --Vitenka (Goodness knows whether this will be usable for code)
  

Clipping corners only activates the letter if you stay in it.  --CH

• Hmm.  Well, it takes different language dictionaries, so it shouldn't be so hard to add symbols.  The prediction is really very good, and I'm starting to get the hang of the metaphor it uses.  This would make quite a good game, really.  It is not perfect but it has one major advantage. It spellchecks as you go.  or at least helps you do so.  That last bit was written in Dasher.  --Vitenka
  
• If you're planning to use it for coding or other not-really-English dialects, import a large chunk of training text to set its predictions more sensibly. Oh, and one last thing: don't let a crazy woman come over and write the word "Blark" with it several hundred times, as every capital B you type from then on will suggest "lark" as following letters --AlexChurchill (whole para typed in Dasher, it's recognising my -- signoff now)
  
• Hmmm... well, it certainly takes a bit of getting used to. My typing speed improved noticeably over the course of a few minutes, but I still suck at punctuation. I suspect a bigger screen / higher resolution would help.. - MoonShadow
  

Well, there's a limit to how fast you (I) can track spinny letters and the prediction only becomes useful about two letters in. It's the start of each wiord that slows me down - aswell as the occasional back track. I guess that more training will help as right now it is almost impossible to choose other than it wants you to. It makes its guesses so very huge that I can't (easily) find the alternatives.  --Vitenka (It's good if you don't want to use complicated words though)

If you're really finding the prediction too strong, go to Advanced Options and increase the Degree of Uniformity a bit. Don't overdo it though - the prediction is one of Dasher's strongest features --AlexChurchill (who is currently Dashering with uniformity increased to 10 from the default 5)

It's not that the prediction is bad, but when it is wrong it can be almost imposisble to see the alternatives.  I changed it lower, but I still can't get above 10wpm or so.  Wrist strain or not, I can't take such slowness.  --Vitenka (I wonder if dragon-dictate has gotten any better in the last few years?)

Increasing the uniformity makes the boxes differ in size less - so the most likely letters will be smaller and the less likely ones bigger. I find the slowness frustrating too. But when I can't use keyboard Dasher is by far the best option for me. I preferthe speed set to 5, where the homepage suggests an "expert" at Dasher may use 4... I guess I'm around 20ish wpm, but I really don't know. But if you've not actually got wrist strain then being sensible with your keyboard should be just as fine as using Dasher.  --AlexChurchill

The breakthrough for me was realising you don't usually have to backtrack - you can leave the boxes through their top and bottom edges and go to the correct choice just by going up or down, even if several incorrect letters have been selected. - MoonShadow

I got that - my problem is that the unselected ones get so tiny so quickly.  I think the fish-eye effect is overdone.  I'll give it another try with higher speed and uniformity settings, but I don't find it as natural as typing.  If typing can be said to feel natural.  --Vitenka

No, me neither - I much prefer the keyboard. I can see myself getting used to it if I had to, though. - MoonShadow

• My Dasher appears to have no pound signs! -- Senji
  

Nope, neither does mine.

 <s d="&#x00A3;" t="&#x00A3;"/>

Ooo... much better, thanks! -- Senji

Wow - its learned -- Senji already! -- Senji

• It's disorientating to look back at the real world after you've used it to type for any length of time. --Angoel
  

Hello, Security? We have another RealWorld fanatic in the building... You're sending it round now? Excellent. --AlexChurchill

When security arrived, I pointed out that they were part of the RealWorld.  They promptly arrested themselves and frogmached themselves off to the cells.  --Angoel

Pavlovian Blarks

So why did you let her do that? -- Senji.

When dealing with ObstreperousFemale?s, if their activity isn't actively DestroyingTheWorld? then sometimes the best solution is to just smile, leave them alone, and tidy up afterwards. I could reset its learnt letter frequencies, but I'm not that fussed.  (It's only really after "Bl" or "Bla" that it gets silly.)  --AlexChurchill

OK, then, so why did she do that? -- Senji

Ah, WhyDidSheDoThat.. - MoonShadow

Who is the ObstreperousFemale? in this instance, will she forgive me for using the term, and do you have any small inkling of WhyDidSheDoThat? --MJ

She will probably be no less inclined to forgive you than previously - in fact she probably delights to be called obstreperous at the moment. The word "Blark" itself only acquired meaning (to the point of being a recurring joke) when we were walking around American cities to gether, which as we all know are divided into BLARKs... --AlexChurchill

Ah, ABC --MJ

Random Walks

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Random Praise

Damn - how on earth can you get a sustained character recognition rate of 1/2 a second, let alone the 1/4 you are proposing?  Is there a trick to it, and if so, what is it?  That fast would be usable for me.  --Vitenka

It seems I can Dash at about 50 words per minute (280 characters per minute) under the rare circumstances when I've planned out precisely what I want to say so that I can test pure speed, but this suggests I'll be up at 20 or30 taking into account backtracking for typos etc. This is with speed at 5.5, which is quite high. It's also worth noting that the sooner you steer towards the letters you want, the smaller that steering has to be; so when you're InTheZone, you can write whole paragraphs with only the slightest movements of the mouse, as long as you're concentrating. The surprising thing is that this still feels slow compared to typing to me: I wonder if I actually touch type at 60-70 or more, or whether it's just psychological? --AlexChurchill

I've been touchtyping at a sustained 80wpm since secondary school, and get up to the 120 range for short bursts.  OTOH, I don't often think at 80wpm, and the more I'm thinking the higher my error rate goes up too, so there's a negative feedback effect -- Senji

I don't try to recognise individual letters, just 'where the word is' in the alphabet, especially if it's a common word. Having fed a scientific report in as training text, it tends to make the terminology I need occur in the largest boxes - and so I only need to concentrate on what letter it is on the rare occasion when the box is too small to see. I think that Dasher happens to think in the same way I do about language, so that helps a lot. My only gripes would be that it ought to go faster in reverse than in forwards, so you can correct typos as fast as you could with a keyboard, and that it tends to crash when used to input to Messenger and other Microsoft gunk. --Requiem