Techcrunch Dotsies coverage

[Craig Muth]

Hey all,

One of my crazier projects, dotsies.org, is on the techcrunch home
page today! Check it out - you thought my emacs stuff was out there
:)

The article mentions me being from Columbus:)

Comments? Ideas?

--Craig

[Len Jaffe]

Optimized for reading. LoL!.

--Craig

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[Len Jaffe]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Craig Muth <craig...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all,

One of my crazier projects, dotsies.org, is on the techcrunch home

Congrats!

Any magic smoke leak out of your server as a result?

L.

 

[Chris Nelson]

It's completely ridiculous!  I love it!

[Len Jaffe]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Craig Muth <craig...@gmail.com> wrote:

Comments?  Ideas?

How did you decide on your encoding of the front of the alphabet as fewer keys, versus Morse Code/Huffman Coding style of more frequently used letters as fewer keys?

Len?

 

[Matt Jones]

On Mar 16, 2012, at 7:05 PM, Len Jaffe wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Craig Muth <craig...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Comments? Ideas?
>
> How did you decide on your encoding of the front of the alphabet as fewer keys, versus Morse Code/Huffman Coding style of more frequently used letters as fewer keys?

I had that same question - the "design your own" page gets into some of the issues with a purely frequency-based encoding:

http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/

In the standard version, frequent letters like 'e', 'a', 't' and 'r' seem to help establish the top and bottom of the bounding box, avoiding mis-alignments that could render the text unreadable. For instance, in the maximally sparse encoding "ate" and "oat" are both an ascending sequence of single dots, fairly easy to confuse out of context.

Note to self: figure out how to find the longest words that can be misunderstood in this fashion, given an input alphabet...

--Matt JOnes

[Craig Muth]

> Any magic smoke leak out of your server as a result?

Fortunately the site is just apache and javascript :)

> It's completely ridiculous! I love it!

Thanks! That's my favorite type of reaction :) Here's a sample of
the gammit from twitter/facebook so far:

> #Dotsies.org : biggest space saver font ever :D
> Someone re-invents Braille, heralded as innovation on TC.
> True innovation after sometime...Introducing Dotsies: the space-saving font
> So much for "crazy innovation". Perhaps more "blind faith" in the effect of hype.
> awesome innovation!!
> I dare you to find a more asinine start up idea
> um. can i just say that i love this?
> Bad idea.
> J'adore le concept
> FAIL!

:)

--Craig

[Craig Muth]

>> How did you decide on your encoding of the front of the alphabet as fewer keys, versus Morse Code/Huffman Coding style of more frequently used letters as fewer keys?

Matt's reply does a good job of describing some of the important
factors. A balance between sparse and dense, but tending toward the
sparse seemed to be optimal to me for reading. Also having an
easy-to-remember mapping to the alphabet was high on my list, for
adoption, etc.

With typing, optimizing typing the space character is a pretty big
payoff, so there's an option for that.

A special message to my cbus peeps:

http://dotsies.org/m/#!thxnhsfwk+sfx+ynxna+jrth

--Craig

[Len Jaffe]

I ha

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 8:57 PM, Craig Muth <craig...@gmail.com> wrote:

A special message to my cbus peeps:

 http://dotsies.org/m/#!thxnhsfwk+sfx+ynxna+jrth

I had to hit ctrl-+ like 12 times to make it big enough to decipher :-) 

[Craig Muth]

I had the same experience at the beginning. Probably the same dynamic
as why kids start learning the alphabet with giant letters. After
having read a couple novels with it, the font size on the bottom-left
of http://dotsies.org is fairly comfortable.

--Craig

[Jonathan Hogue]

how has it impacted your reading speed?

[Craig Muth]

I'm up to like 150wpm. It's far short of my normal reading speed, but
I'm steadily speeding up over time. Will be interesting to see what
happens.

--Craig

[Len Jaffe]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Craig Muth <craig...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm up to like 150wpm.  It's far short of my normal reading speed, but
I'm steadily speeding up over time.  Will be interesting to see what
happens.

I love that there were a couple of commenters who took a staunch anti-dotsie position.  

 

[Craig Muth]

> I love that there were a couple of commenters who took a staunch anti-
> dotsie position.

Lol. I got hammered a lot worse than that on the hacker news thread :)

I can relate though. In general I'm pretty cynical myself. Dotsies
does seem a bit ridiculous at first, largely because it's such a
simple thing. If you throw away the constraint of having to write
text by hand there are probably many simple ways to make it denser /
less busy (albeit there's a chance it'll be hand-writable anyway).
It's no giant mental leap to pick a binary code and make a font and
stick with it - just something someone should do IMO.

My larger impression is I'm impressed by the people who get it right away.

--Craig

[Eric Floehr]

Craig,

Very cool and a very interesting concept.  Dotsies seems to me to end up being more logographic, in that you don't parse individual letters, but rather, the dot-words end up making abstract pictures.  You mention that yourself in that some combinations of letters end up making similar looking words, just "shifted", etc.

The human brain does this to some degree with relatively phonetic writing (like English)... Yuor bairn has the alitbiy to raed tihs snetacne eevn tguhoh the mdlide lteetrs are out of plcae.

So, I wonder if readers of logographic writing systems can read faster than readers of phonetic writing systems, and where a proficient reader of Dotsies would fall in that?

I also wonder if misspellings would jump out more, or less.  I also wonder, if Dotsies really does end up being essentially logographic, if it is "better" than a pure logographic system because it has pronunciation "baked" in... since new "dotsie word-pictures" could be parsed into a pronunciation by looking at the individual elements.  Many Mayan, Egyptian, and Chinese logographs often were radical-phonetic compounds where one part of the picture indicated meaning, the other pronunciation, but Dotsies makes it complete.  The picture ends up being abstract, but the pronunciation is always contained within.

Anyway, quite fascinating!

-Eric

[Craig Muth]

> Dotsies seems to me to end up
> being more logographic, in that you don't parse individual letters, but
> rather, the dot-words end up making abstract pictures.

Indeed. I find I hesitate much less on certain words after
encountering them many times (even short words with uncomplicated
letters). This seems to suggest your brain has to build up a memory
of the new word shapes. I suspected there'd be a tendency toward this
but it's more pronounced than I'd have guessed.

> The human brain does this to some degree with relatively phonetic writing
> (like English)... Yuor bairn has the alitbiy to raed tihs snetacne eevn
> tguhoh the mdlide lteetrs are out of plcae.

The way letters in dotsies words are smashed together gives a little
more emphasis to the first and last letters. The whitespace next to
them helps their contour stand out a little more so than the letters
in between (where with latin text all letters have a bit of space on
both sides). There's probably a decent chance this complements taht
pehnomeonn.

> So, I wonder if readers of logographic writing systems can read faster than
> readers of phonetic writing systems, and where a proficient reader of
> Dotsies would fall in that?

That's certainly a hope, and seems possible. I'm up to about 150wpm
and improving steadily. Some have posed the counter-argument that the
bottleneck with reading speed is usually more related to comprehension
speed than your max possible reading speed. I can read normal text
around 400 wpm if I really try, but am usually under 250 when reading
comfortably in practice and sometimes much slower when reading
something thought provoking, which kind of supports that argument.
But I'm still optimistic that some factors (more recognizable shapes,
more text being discernible at once, less movement required by your
eye) could perhaps improve your max as well as the speed you're
comfortable at.

> Anyway, quite fascinating!

Thanks!

I feel like I'm getting dangerously close to sending too many non-ruby
emails to a ruby mailing list, so I'm attaching an image of some Ruby
code in Dotsies. I've only spent a small amount of time trying it
out. It would let you see twice as many files on the screen at once
without wrapping (though has some obvious draw-backs). Not sure how
practical this will be, but fun to think about. :)

--Craig

[Ed Jones]

Hey, Craig, Fascinating.

So, I like the idea of the small Ruby footpring, but I'm wondering
about books.
>> How much better is it?
>> It is significantly more horizontally condensed than normal fonts, letting about twice as much fall within the area of your field of vision that perceives fine detail at any given time.

As I recall, the typical reader reads best with ~56 characters per
line (much as dotsies.org is laid out). How does this play out in
dotsies?

ed

> > On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Craig Muth <craig.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> > I love that there were a couple of commenters who took a staunch anti-
> >> > dotsie position.
>
> >> Lol.  I got hammered a lot worse than that on the hacker news thread :)
>
> >> I can relate though.  In general I'm pretty cynical myself.  Dotsies
> >> does seem a bit ridiculous at first, largely because it's such a
> >> simple thing.  If you throw away the constraint of having to write
> >> text by hand there are probably many simple ways to make it denser /
> >> less busy (albeit there's a chance it'll be hand-writable anyway).
> >> It's no giant mental leap to pick a binary code and make a font and
> >> stick with it - just something someone should do IMO.
>
> >> My larger impression is I'm impressed by the people who get it right away.
>
> >> --Craig
>

> >> On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Len Jaffe <lenja...@jaffesystems.com>
> >> wrote:
>
> >> > On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Craig Muth <craig.m...@gmail.com>

> >> > wrote:
> >> > I love that there were a couple of commenters who took a
> >> > staunch anti-dotsie
> >> > position.
>
> >> > --

> >> > lenja...@jaffesystems.com   614-404-4214
> >> > Proprietor:http://www.theycomewithcheese.com/- An Homage to Fromage

>  Screen shot 2012-03-18 at 4.00.12 PM.png
> 8KViewDownload

[David Anderson]

I always wondered what the heck they were reading on the screens in 'The Matrix' - now I know!  :)

- Dave

[Len Jaffe]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, David Anderson <eym...@gmail.com> wrote:

I always wondered what the heck they were reading on the screens in 'The Matrix' - now I know!  :)

Dotsies + Flux Capacitor = Skynet 

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lenj...@jaffesystems.com   614-404-4214
Proprietor: http://www.theycomewithcheese.com/ - An Homage to Fromage