Nerderland

Swype: the future of typing?

Bart — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:44:49 +0000

Touchscreens are getting increasingly popular in the smartphone market, but although the popularity is rising, the usability as a typing-utility for touchscreens didn’t grow. Once there was a time that a smartphone with physical keys totally outperformed a touchscreen one in typing speed, but that was until there was Swype.

Swype is a very innovative utility (keyboard-addition to be precise), that allows a user to ‘swype’ long texts in a very short amount of time, that is compared to other handheld devices. Of course the speed of writing a text with a normal compter-keyboard is still much higher. I can assure you everyone who knows where the keys on his/her virtual keyboard are can type pretty fast with Swype.

That’s because it’s so easy to do. The only thing it requires you to do is to make your fingers touch/go over the keys of the letters in the word you want to write. As you then don’t need to lift your finger from the digital paper, writing goes very fast. For your information: I wrote this text in about 5 minutes on my Nexus One. You should try that without Swype!

Admittedly, I used my computer eventually, but that only was because I needed to add a video and link.

The best viral ever: Liquid Mountaineering

Bart — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:44:30 +0000

Let me just admit this: When I saw the Liquid Mountaineering video for the first time, I was impressed, very impressed. I was so impressed that I actually thought it is possible to walk on water. And why not? Mankind has managed to reach the outskirts of our solar system, we can go to the moon, etcetera. Why couldn’t we walk on water?

Well, unfortunately I found out later on that it was a viral video for Hi-tec. Very disappointing that was. But besides the fact that it is disappointing I want to congratulate the people that created the video, simply because they did an amazing job. I think they’ve managed to give this video just the sufficient amount of credibility it needed. It’s not at all overdone, just the exact amount of credibility is put into it.

After seeing this I honestly still think it is possible. I think it’ll just require other kinds of footwear. There already are buggy’s driving over water, so why wouldn’t we be able to walk over water?

Bike traffic in the Netherlands

Bart — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:51:51 +0000

Today I had a talk with some exchange students about the bike traffic in the Netherlands. They were all very amazed by it, its effectiveness and especially because of the amount of people that actually rides a bike. Normally I don’t feel really proud of my country – except for the moments we win a worldcup football – but for this once I was really proud.

Actually I think it’s kind of strange that we don’t really focus on the things we are good at. We usually speak about the public transportation when talking about durability, while there actually is something way bigger in the Netherlands: People that use their bikes for transportation. It’s not that riding a bike is more handy than going by public transport, but it should at least deserve a little more attention.