gHacks technology news » text software http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:45:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Dasher Offers An Alternative Text Input Method http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/23/dasher-offers-an-alternative-text-input-method/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/23/dasher-offers-an-alternative-text-input-method/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:33:45 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14662 microsoft windowsThe majority of computer users use a combination of a computer keyboard and computer mouse for text input. Some make use of lesser popular and specialized text input methods that include touchscreens, motion capturing devices, tablets or joysticks. The software program Dasher adds another very interesting albeit specialized data input method that can be used with one or even no hand at all. The fastest way of using Dasher is by using the computer mouse but it is also possible to make use of a motion tracking device to use no hands at all.

Data, that is text mainly, is entered in Dasher by moving a pointer to the appropriate chars that appear on the right side of the application’s screen. The developers claim that experienced users can write up to 39 words a minute when using the computer mouse and 29 when using a motion detection device. It is probably better to visualize the way it works, below is an animated gif explaining the concept.

dasher

Dasher has been designed for situations like these:

  • when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse;
  • when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker);
  • on a palmtop computer;
  • on a wearable computer.

It basically works by moving the pointer on the character boxes that appear on the left side. Dasher is using language predictions to determine the most likely and less likely chars giving the most likely chars more space in the interface. The program will also learn over time so that new words become easier to write the next time.

Users who want to try out Dasher should know that they need to spend quite some time before it becomes easier to work with the software program.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/23/dasher-offers-an-alternative-text-input-method/feed/ 0 Remove Unneeded Text With Text Trimmer http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/05/remove-unneeded-text-with-text-trimmer/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/05/remove-unneeded-text-with-text-trimmer/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:01:52 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=8067 Removing unneeded text from a text document can be a speedy or slow process. It’s relatively easy if the text that has to be removed is not linked to other text that should not be removed, say paragraphs of text. It becomes difficulty if the text that should be removed is merged with text that should say. One classic example is a html link list. Extracting only the urls of the links would mean to cut the beginning html tags and the end tags from the text document which would mean some work in a text editor. The find replace function could be helpful but it still means a time consuming process.

Text Trimmer (via Shell City) is a text editing tool that has been designed for that purpose. It comes with different modes that can be used to easily remove text from documents. It makes use of two modes Block and Mass that can remove unneeded text from documents easily.

The Block mode can be used to mark a block of text in a text document that can be removed, copied or moved. It would for instance be possible to remove the first 20 characters of text from every line in the document which is not doable in normal text editors.

Text Trimmer can do that with just a few clicks. The combination [ALT Left-Mouse Click] selects the upper left starting point for the block, the next use of the combination selects the lower right end point. Everything in between will be marked by the software program.

The Mass mode on the other hand is rule based which means it can be used to mark blocks based on rules defined by the user. It is for instance possible to mark all lines starting, showing or ending with the < char or trim all text from the beginning to a certain character.

The operations are easily accessible and it usually takes only a few seconds to define the text that should be trimmed and remove it from the document. Text Trimmer is a portable software for Windows.

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