Frog Pad.

After my last post I decided to try out a frog pad. It's a one handed input device consisting of 3 rows of 5 keys and 5 additional 'modifier' keys. There is one primary 'modifier' key used to extend the basic key set, and 4 that primarilly toggle the current input mode.
The basic layout is relatively intuitive, and even with the cording I was able to hit 10 words a minute inside an hours practice. However I haven't gotten much faster since, I suspect this is a result of not using it exclusively. I'm going to give exclusivity a shot this week.


Even without the week of practice, it's fairly obvious the frog pad will be a lousy input device for programming, both numbers and symbols are accessed via mode changes. Where as the normal shift key returns to a normal input state after a single additional key press, the symbol and number keys toggle in and out of the modes. While this makes some sense for numbers since it is common to type more than one, I fail to see where this is the case for symbols, either in regular text input or while programming.