Now that I’m running a T5, I can use Fitaly again. (Actually, so can you Zod users, since Fitaly for the Zodiac came out just weeks after I ditched my Zod for the T5.) For those of you that haven’t tried Fitaly, it’s a replacement keyboard with a layout designed for a single stylus rather than ten fingers. The most commonly used letters in the English language are clustered in the center of the keyboard, with N and E in the very center along with a spacebar on either side. Letters get rarer as you get closer to the corners, with the four least used letters in English, Q, K, X and Z, sitting out on the corners themselves. I think the record for Fitaly speed is 85 words per minute, but most people settle around 30 to 60 wpm. Frankly, that’s about as fast as I touch type, so if I can get up to that level (right now I’m faster than Graffiti 2, but still slower than I type on my foldable keyboard), I’ll be much more “mobile” and won’t need to unfold or even carry my keyboard as often.
The Fitaly learning curve is substantial but once you learn it, no form of pen input is faster. I have a few suggestions to get Fitaly speed up quickly. One, play the FitalyLetris game that comes with the Fitaly installation. Unless you’re trying this on a Zodiac, which seems to crash running this otherwise completely tame program. It’s a simple game, but if you stick to it for 30 minutes a day or so, you’ll start to see your speed go up. As you do that, start to visualize the patterns words make on the keyboard and you’ll start typing by word rather than by letter. Ever notice (those of you that remember the days before speed dial and dialing by name) that sometimes you remember a phone number not by the numbers, but by the geometric pattern it makes on the keypad? You can dial the number all day long, but you’re stumped if you run across a (now I’m really dating myself) rotary phone, or someone asks you the number? Fitaly works the same way. I’m already noticing that common words like “the” seem to type themselves, automatic muscle memory. Lastly, force yourself to write everything on your device with Fitaly for a few weeks. It might be tempted to open up a foldable keyboard or jot something down in Graffiti 2, but don’t give in. Once you’ve mastered Fitaly, you can go back to being flexible.
Another feature that will really help your Fitaly speed is sliding. Instead of just tapping on each letter, you can also tap, and then without lifting the stylus, slide the stylus point off of that letter before lifting it. Depending on the length and direction of the slide, you can make different letters than the one you tapped. The most common use for sliding is capitalization. By default, sliding off a letter makes that a capital letter instead of lower case. This in and of itself is much faster than hitting shift before the letter that you need to capitalize. But you can configure Fitaly to do far more than that. For instance, I have mine configured to that an North slide capitalizes every letter, but other directions do different things. A West slide off an A gives me a @. You can set this up pretty much any way that makes sense to you, and you can even set up macros on slide for commonly used words or phrases, like Palm OS shortcuts on steroids.
One last tip. If you haven’t installed a screen protector, put one on now. The older Fitaly Stamp doubled as a screen protector. It was a plastic sticker than you stuck to your Graffiti area. Needless to say, this doesn’t work for devices with 320×480 screens. Fitaly Virtual shows up as just another input method, replacing the “wide” 3-cell Graffiti area. If you practice with it enough, you’ll develop a distinctive Fitaly wear pattern on the screen consisting of small round dot smudges connected by smaller still vertical scratches (from sliding). This isn’t a big deal if you can just peel of your screen protector every three to six months and replace it, but it can be a real buzzkill to permanently mar your screen with Fitaly dots.
Wow. Practice, learning slide patterns, changing screen protectors… Fitaly sounds like a lot of work. It is, in the beginning. But it’s so worth it if you do any significant data entry at all on your handheld, and if you’re a writer, it’s almost a necessity. Even though I haven’t used Fitaly in about a year, it’s been like coming home.
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