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Dvorak keyboard in the WSJ
For over ten years I've typed in the Dvorak keyboard layout - a much better arrangement of keys on the keyboard than the standard Qwerty layout. I even wrote about it in my book Bit Literacy.
Now Dvorak users are complaining that the iPhone only offers Qwerty. Although it's nice to see Dvorak get coverage in a major media source, handheld devices are not a big deal for keyboard layout. Most people type on iPhones with a thumb or two, while the benefits of Dvorak are really meant for ten-finger typing on a full keyboard.
The article also mentions the VHS/Betamax fight, where the better standard lost... but misses the point that Dvorak is a unilateral choice, which makes it uniquely easy for individuals to switch to. You can type just as easily in Dvorak when writing to Qwerty users. (Not so with Betamax, where users needed an entire market to support the standard.)
Even more entertaining are the comments on the story - including "debunkers" linking to the old Reason article and several Dvorak users giving enthusiastic testimonials.
Personally I think the Dvorak zine is the best single description and defense of Dvorak out there.
How many people do you know who touch type using two hands on the i-Phone's keyboard? Do you really need a Dvorak layout on an i-phone keypad? Gimme a break.
Do you NEED a Dvorak layout on an iphone? No. But given that all it would take is a software solution, why doesn't Apple allow an app for it? What would they lose by allowing it?
"An app" probably can't change the built-in API-level keyboard. Thus the need for a jailbreak mentioned by the article. Apple doesn't want to let every app modify the keyboard, probably because it's so important to using the device, and thus to user experience. And that's why they're not going to modify their API to allow it, just to make a few Dvorak users happy.
Don't like it? Don't buy an iPhone. Apple won't be angry with you.
Or better yet, go back in time and take that time you spent training on Dvorak and train on Qwerty instead, to get the same benefit.
(The "debunkers", despite the quotes, seem to have the stronger case, given the Reason article, which despite being "old", still seems factually accurate, and is after all a distillation of a scholarly article from the Journal of Law and Economics.
Our host might think Dvorak is "much better", but if you expand that to "for people who aren't already devoted to and self-trained on it", the science doesn't seem very supportive.)
Never used Dvorak, probably never will. But the argument for including it is obvious and has nothing to do with increased touch-typing efficiencies. Simple put, people who use Dvorak on a daily basis will be more comfortable with and thus will react better to a phone keyboard which provides them with the layout they are used to.
Given that all Dvorak users probably know QWERTY well enough to get by, due to encountering it everywhere with frequency, this isn't quite as bold a shift as when American's have to use European keyboard and have to deal with a couple transposed keys, but it's still a fairly obvious thing: provide a service for a handful of users, shut up some loud naysayers, and the other 99.9% of the world will go forward without ever noticing.
(Which is, of course, why they haven't implemented it yet. Serving .1% of users isn't much bang for the buck, so the priority of such a fix isn't floating close to the top.)