sharing programmer-to-programmer. please enjoy. pages are formatted for landscape tablet, laptop, or monitor.
petal, artistic text entry
greek, kloris-nympha (the flowering)
proof of concept, experimental
petal is a artistic, touch-based, rapid text entry system which uses short, organic, curving stokes for individual letters to simplify learning while still being much quicker and more accurate than handwriting recognition.
while not my preferred approach, which is gregg shorthand, petal is a high-value experiment into something with a much shorter leaning curve and a realistic replacement for something akin to the popular, old-time graffiti.
center ring. all normal stokes start by touching down in the center, white ring. touching and lifting resets, but creates no letter.
inner eight. space, backspace, and the six common letters are just a swipe from the center to an inner point. quick. efficient.
outer eight. next sixteen most common letters are just swiping through an inner point then either left or right to closest outer point.
edge eight. another sixteen letters/punctuation are by continuing from the outer eight further left or right to the closest edge point.
states. going directly from an inner point to the closest edge point allows eight states — shift, mode, control, alt, hyper, super, etc.
navigation bar. quick press for prev desktop, prev window, shift, help, mode, next window, next desktop.
short-cuts. two-letter short-cuts are activated by stroking inward (from final point to center) and then outward on the second letter.
NOTE. this is a proof of concept which allowed me to learn very valuable tracking and displaying concepts in a lower complexity environment.
90 second nickel tour
working, semi-transparent
source code is GPL3 licensed, https://github.com/heatherlyrobert/petal