The traditional QWERTY keyboard was
designed for typing with ten fingers. Typically, a
professional typist maintains fingers on the so-called
home keys (the keys asdf
for the left hand and
jkl; for the right
hand) and typing letters will either be on this home row
or involve a move to some adjacent keys, one row below
the home row, or one or two rows above. Consequently,
there is no significant finger travel.

The situation is quite different on a pen computer
or a computer with a touch screen. In these situations
(and also on miniature keyboards found in some personal
digital assistants), input is done with a single finger,
or with an electronic pen or some equivalent device. The
same finger has then to travel to successive keys one by
one and this ends up involving considerable finger (or
pen) travel.

Besides finger travel there is the issue of
hand travel. For example, when typing
transpose, the move
between the letters a
and n is too
large to be accomplished just by finger travel. It
requires a full movement of the hand, which is much less
precise than a finger movement and significantly
decreases input speed. The same is true for the
transition ns and
also sp and
os. 

For these reasons, the QWERTY layout is very
inefficient for on-screen keyboards. It forces the pen
to wide left-and-right sweeps like the head of an old
dot-matrix printer. This inefficiency comes from having
extrapolated such keyboards to a context where the
requirements are quite different.

The Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard minimizes pen or
finger travel as well as hand travel

Click here to see more information about why the Fitaly
layout is much more efficient for one-finger usage.

Figure 1:
The Fitaly keyboard shows up in the software input panel
menu and behaves just like any other Windows Mobile
software input program. It supports both QVGA and VGA
screen resolutions

OPTIONS

The Options dialog is where you’ll find all the
customization features in the Fitaly keyboard.

Figure 2:
This dialog deals mostly with customizing the behavior
of the symbols panel (the grey/yellow area of the
keyboard) which offers both punctuation and numeric
digit input.

Figure 3:
The Sliding tab of the options dialog let’s you define
the behavior for when you tap a letter and then slide
the stylus across the screen.

If you have this set at
"Customization", that will enable the sliding macros
which you can set up and customize in the slides dialog.

Figure 4:
The "Visual" tab lets you customize a few interface
related features of the Fitaly keyboard.

You can change
the keyboard size to "Large" if you are using a VGA
resolution display as well as change the numeric keypad
layout, side bar position, and capital letter shifting.

Figure 5:
The Operations tab lets you change at what point the
keys are generated at. I’m not sure why this would make
much of a difference.

The other option here is to set
the startup input method (not the startup instant
messenger). This feature did not work well on previous
versions of Fitaly when installed on Windows Mobile 5.
Luckily this has been fixed.

SLIDES

In previous versions of Fitaly, you could set up macros
that would automatically insert preset text after you
typed in a shortcut and then pressed the macro button
(the fish icon). With Fitaly 4, this feature is no
longer available. The fish icon is still there, but it
doesn’t do anything. Instead, you have directional
slides which open a pop-up menu of preset customizable
text sets that you can quickly choose to insert. It’s
similar to the macro function, in previous versions
except you have to choose one letter for the text set
and you have to choose it from a menu.

The Slides customization dialog is accessible via the
plus icon (+) on the Fitaly Keyboard.

Figure 6: The first screen in the slides dialog
shows you the direction abbreviations for each keypad
button slide.

As you can see the "N" slide direction
abbreviation means you’ll be sliding upwards from the
key button in order to activate that slide customization
macro.

Figure 7: Choosing the "Define Special" button lets you
add custom slide functions to special non-alphabetical
characters.

Figure 8: Choosing the "Define Letter" slide
customization button lets you enter any number of custom
slide text presets for any slide direction.

You can see
on the left there are multiple words set for the North
direction slide on the letter A.

Figure 9: In the Slide editing dialog, you can
choose a slide direction for the selected letter and
then input below whatever you want that slide command to
insert as text.

Figure 10: Back in the regular text input mode.

If
you tap the letter a and slide it north (up), a pop-up
menu will appear showing all of the "North" slide
direction choices that have been added for that letter.
You then have to slide more until the choice that you
want is selected.

One thing I don’t like
about the new slides customization feature is that I
often slide too far, when all I want was a capital
letter. Luckily this can be fixed using the options
dialog or by removing all other non-desired slide
customization options.

FITALY LETRIS

To help with learning the new keyboard layout, there’s a
free downloadable game called Fitaly Letris. The concept
is that you have to type the words as they fall from the
top of the screen in order to get rid of them before
they hit the alligators. The speed of the falling words
increases as your skill improves.

Figure 11:
Fitaly Letris is a great way to quickly learn how to
type with Fitaly. It’s also excellent for refining your
speed.

PURCHASING

A free trial version of Fitaly 4 Pocket PC can be
downloaded

here. You can order the full version direct from
the

Fitaly website
for $29 USD, however a special $25 Introductory
offer is available until December 31, 2006.

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PROS

• 
  
  Much faster and easier to type than with an onscreen QWERTY keyboard
• 
  
  Slides offer quick shortcuts to longer word sets
• 
  
  Upgraded to work with Windows Mobile 5.0
• 
  
  Doesn’t take up much memory

CONS

• 
  
  Takes a while to master
• 
  
  Fish icon on keyboard does nothing
• 
  
  Old macro interface is gone

OVERALL
IMPRESSION

I love using Fitaly. I used to switch frequently
between Calligrapher and Fitaly, but have since
switched to using Fitaly exclusively for my Windows
Mobile input method preferences. Fitaly takes up
much less memory and processing power than
Calligrapher, which is pretty important since many
of the latest Pocket PC Phone devices use slower TI
OMAP processors.

However, many of the newer Windows Mobile devices also
include a space-hogging hardware keyboard. These are
often miniature versions of the two handed QWERTY
keyboard layout intended to be used with your thumbs.
Not many people have noticed that these QWERTY
thumboards are actually a very poorly designed text
input method.  It’s probably because people are
used to the QWERTY layout and they think that’s the only
way to do things. Personally, I’ve used the thumboards,
and FITALY on a smaller touch-screened device is much
faster and easier.

I wish the macro feature was still in Fitaly 4, and I
don’t much like the slide-customization that replaced
it. Therefore, I give
this product the following score: