- not everybody can buy like Jeff all the new devices and get rid of the ones that don't stick, that's rather a special way to choose devices.
- I like Jeff's reasoning with the upsides and downsides of a lack of keyboard: the keyboard sort of gets in the way to do spontaneous things but for now the non-physical keyboards are not good for writing and editing long chunks of text. So it makes me wonder: wouldn't a tablet with a stylus and some good hand writing recognition software beat? After all, you can see a touchscreen as a better mouse - an evolution of the mouse, if you want. And if you want to write some text, like an email, doing it with your hand writing doesn't look too bad. Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese (disclaimer: I can't write yet in those languages). Of course if you want to use those devices to write code, it will be damn hard to implement the equivalent of the keyboard shortcuts for an hand-writing system.
> Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese
It seems very unlikely, at least with Japanese. In my experience, a typical Japanese native speaker (who is accustomed to the computer) can enter text with a keyboard an order of magnitude faster than they can write it. The difference becomes a bit less stark with tiny keyboards on phones or whatever, but even there, most people these days are a bit shaky when it comes to writing complicated kanji anyway... ><
Writing has other benefits of course, e.g. that you can easily enter a character which that you don't know the pronunciation of (which is why it's commonly supported for dictionaries), so it's a useful feature to have even if it's not the primary input method.
- not everybody can buy like Jeff all the new devices and get rid of the ones that don't stick, that's rather a special way to choose devices.
- I like Jeff's reasoning with the upsides and downsides of a lack of keyboard: the keyboard sort of gets in the way to do spontaneous things but for now the non-physical keyboards are not good for writing and editing long chunks of text. So it makes me wonder: wouldn't a tablet with a stylus and some good hand writing recognition software beat? After all, you can see a touchscreen as a better mouse - an evolution of the mouse, if you want. And if you want to write some text, like an email, doing it with your hand writing doesn't look too bad. Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese (disclaimer: I can't write yet in those languages). Of course if you want to use those devices to write code, it will be damn hard to implement the equivalent of the keyboard shortcuts for an hand-writing system.