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OffTopic > Wishlist Entry: Dasher for DS

#32355 - Foma - Tue Dec 21, 2004 9:48 am

It took me forever to find its web site; I couldn't for the life of me remember the thing's name:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

It's called 'Dasher,' and it's character/word-prediction software which zooms in on possible next characters as you select them with a pointer or other input method. The site has a number of animated GIFs which demonstrate the concept quite nicely. It's worth poking around the Dasher site to see the awesome ways they're exploring the implementation, especially for people with very limiting disabilities. One idea they're looking into is controlling Dasher by breath (a sensor determines how much air you have in your lungs, which moves the cursor up and down)!

Anyway, this would be awesome for the DS as part of a hacked chat program: Dasher on the touchscreen with the conversation on top. Dasher is already running on PDAs (similar hardware-interface) and to Linux (which should be ported to DS at some point) so it should be pretty straightforward once we can muck around with homebrew and wireless.

#32360 - Vince - Tue Dec 21, 2004 11:11 am

Hiya,

Very nice program indeed. Thanks for the site. I knew GNOME dasher (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/dasher/) but the original site is much more interesting.

Would be great to see that on the DS. I was also thinking about some sort of Graffiti (as seen on PalmOS devices) but dasher seems even cooler !

Vince

#32371 - Abscissa - Tue Dec 21, 2004 2:55 pm

That's really cool :)

#32375 - identitycrisisuk - Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:20 pm

That is indeed a very funky program, good for prompting semi-stream of consciousness jumbles as it half suggests words to you. I started seeing the colours around text on the forum after I used it for quite a while :s
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#32425 - Foma - Wed Dec 22, 2004 5:52 pm

Yeah, it can get pretty trippy. You can fool around with the settings a fair bit, too, like how much emphasis it puts on predicting which letter you want. It's surprisingly annoying when you set it to 100% uniformity and all those useless letters take up the same amount of space on the screen...