>One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense...
I doubt common sense comes into play into such complex matters as determining keyboard layout performance. Without testing between different options, using control groups and working on some specific domain (e.g performance for programming vs prose writing), common sense is useless.
(Not to mention that even in programming common sense can be both right and irrelevant --e.g. common sense might correctly assume that some function can be optimized to perform 3x faster, but fails to that it takes only 0.2% of the total running time in the first place so the win would be negligible).
>You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization*
I never argued against alternative keyboard layouts, or that qwerty is the best. Just that Dvorak is not worth it (and mostly, badly tested placebo solution). I've read the mwbrooks article in the past, the points he makes are not really worth it -- mostly a hack job.
In any case, if we need a future keyboard layout standard, it would have to take into account use cases (e.g programming vs journalism, etc), modern typography and extended glyphs, and of course since this is 2012, international language switching (I, and billions of other people, alternate between english and my language layout).
I doubt common sense comes into play into such complex matters as determining keyboard layout performance. Without testing between different options, using control groups and working on some specific domain (e.g performance for programming vs prose writing), common sense is useless.
(Not to mention that even in programming common sense can be both right and irrelevant --e.g. common sense might correctly assume that some function can be optimized to perform 3x faster, but fails to that it takes only 0.2% of the total running time in the first place so the win would be negligible).
>You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization*
I never argued against alternative keyboard layouts, or that qwerty is the best. Just that Dvorak is not worth it (and mostly, badly tested placebo solution). I've read the mwbrooks article in the past, the points he makes are not really worth it -- mostly a hack job.
In any case, if we need a future keyboard layout standard, it would have to take into account use cases (e.g programming vs journalism, etc), modern typography and extended glyphs, and of course since this is 2012, international language switching (I, and billions of other people, alternate between english and my language layout).