This page contains answers to several questions about You'll Soon Be Typing.
Softwrights believes that nothing beats a good human typing teacher ... Their watchful eyes and personal attention keep students on the right track ... Just like a football coach or a violin instructor does. But many people do not have the time and/or money to have a personal tutor or to take a class.
The next best thing is a good computerized typing tutorial. The big advantage of a tutorial is that it's self-paced ... So you learn at your own rate. And it automatically computes your typing speed and accuracy too. The disadvantage is that a tutorial cannot watch you like a teacher does to make sure that you're using the correct techniques ... So the best that a tutorial can do is to demonstrate and continuously promote correct techniques ... You'll Soon Be Typing is the only one that does that.
Nope! ... It's hard to believe ... Most other tutorials do nothing (or little) to promote correct techniques. They typically ignore or gloss-over important basics ... Like how to sit correctly and how to adjust your equipment (ergonomics), how to put your hands on the keyboard, how to tap a key properly, how to return to home position, when to push for speed, when to push for accuracy, and how to stretch, curl, and anchor your fingers around the keyboard.
Other tutorials typically force-feed groups of several keys on the user with little or no guidance about correct techniques. Their so-called "lessons" are actually just typing drills with little or no guidance ... You'll Soon Be Typing throroughly covers correct basic techniques then continuously promotes correct keyboarding techniques ... including real-time technique instructions ... Even while typing practice drills.
The erasing of text as you type and the pacer line in practice drills creates a bit of a racing game atmosphere. But there is no separate game ... For good reasons. The author had several game ideas. All were far less entertaining than the dozens of great, widely-available, non-typing games on the market.
Furthermore ... Like most games that supposedly help you learn how to type, they didn't really help you learn how to type. The ability to recognize words and characters shooting all over a screen does little (probably nothing) to help you learn how to type. Typing games are better at training fighter pilots than typists ... They have nothing in common with real life typing conditions ... Like copying pages of text that sit still! ... Most typing educators hate typing games because they do not promote correct typing techniques ... In fact, the unsupervised playing of typing games can contribute to the development of hard-to-break bad habits!
The author decided not to waste his time, and yours, by throwing in some flashy, harebrained disk/RAM-wasting game to spice up program advertising materials. Instead, he focused on helping you learn how to type faster, and more accurately. If you need a break, Softwrights strongly recommends that you get away from your computer instead of playing a computer game. Get some fresh air. Take a walk. Communicate with a human being. Take your dog for a walk. Or if you must, play one of the many good, non-typing, games available ... One that you really enjoy!
Professional keyboarding/typing educators know why. Others assume that this is bad, until they look at what the purpose of a typing tutorial is. During early learning stages, educators ensure that their students keep their hands on the keyboard in correct position. So the use of a mouse in the middle of a typing course is detrimental to learning ... So there are good, sound educational reasons that You'll Soon Be Typing does not support the mouse ... Ask any professional typing educator. They'll verify Softwrights' student-driven no-mouse philosophy.
Also, in typing activities, the use of the mouse is generally more inefficient than keyboard key alternatives. Taking your hands off the keyboard to manipulate a mouse wastes a lot of time. You have to remove one of your hands from the keyboard, move the mouse to the correct position, tap the mouse button one or more times, then put your hand back into home position. This program was designed to give you plenty of hands-on experience with the keyboard for typing, as well as, entering commands and selecting menu items. That's why a mouse is not used for anything in this program.
An early goal was set for the main menu. Like a book, it had to let you easily use the program in sequential order. It also had to let you browse through, and access, the contents of the entire program. Browsing had to be quick and easy!
The side-by-side Table of Contents (main menu) with descriptive words and the structuring of the program into Sections with each section having several lessons met the goal. It proved better than other design alternatives that were considered, including pull-down menus or icons.
Pull-down menus could have been used with the Sections listed across the screen. But descriptive names for everything, in readable-size text, like Section 2: Learn the Basics, will not fit across the screen. Icons, selected by pointing at them, can be effective, especially in drawing programs. But look at the Table of Contents (main menu of the program). Try to design easy-to-recognize icons to represent descriptive words such as, Lesson 7: How to Type Drills. If you manage that for all 112 lessons, you're an artistic genius! But do those icons really describe the lessons better? And ... How do you squeeze all those 112 icons on the screen?
Pull-down menus & icons are not as easy to use for typical users of You'll Soon Be Typing. Most users go through most of the program in sequential order. Softwrights' side-by-side menu auto-highlights the last lesson taken & marks all lessons taken. So it is very easy to see which lessons have been completed and to go to the next or previous lesson. But every time pull-down or icon users choose a command, they must re-orient themselves. The correct menu must be pulled-down. Then the desired lesson (menu item or icon) must be searched for & selected.
In the Table Of Contents (main menu) the arrow (cursor) and Tab keys let you highlight any Section or Lesson. TheS key can also be used to highlight a Section. The SpaceBar key can also be used to highlight a Lesson. Here's why:
Beginners may not be familiar with the arrow keys. But the intro screen points out the SpaceBar. And the S key is pretty easy to find. Furthermore, it is not very easy to confuse these keys with other keys. Beginners may think that non-cursor keys that have arrows on them, like tab & backspace, are cursor keys.
You can tap S and Spacebar without moving your hands off home position. So you don't have to move your hands as far.
Good question! Walk into nearly any office, school, or store and ask the same question. You'll probably get a response similar to these: "What's a Dvorak keyboard?" or "Not in our company! Why should we retrain everybody?"
The standard keyboard often called QWERTY for its first 6 letter keys, is the only keyboard covered in this program. You'll find QWERTY nearly everywhere. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is the one-and-only keyboard to learn.
A Dvorak keyboard has an entirely different layout. The most commonly used keys are in easier-to-reach locations. So it does make sense. And it is more efficient. How much more? Nobody agrees! As of 1996, with few exceptions, this decades-old design just hasn't caught on. Industry standards die hard. Most people don't like to drop old habits, especially if they're already productive "enough!"
History is full of similar stories. The metric system (in the U.S.A.), dome homes, and Beta video recorders were other technically superior designs that never caught on, or lost the marketing game. So far, the Dvorak keyboard has a similar fate.
If you want to be compatible with the vast majority of keyboards (computers and typewriters), use You'll Soon Be Typing to learn how to type on a standard keyboard. If you want to be able to type a little faster (possibly) and don't care about compatibility, you may want to take another course to learn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard.
Earl (the animated, seated character in the program) was designed to demonstrate important topics and provide humorous breaks. His personality is a mixture of several people fictional and real.
He is named after the author's last corporate boss who bears a slight resemblance to the character in the program ... A fact that dawned on the blood-shot-eyed author at 4:00 a.m. as he put the finishing touches on the character in his custom-made drawing program. The name, Earl, is also short so it doesn't waste precious screen space!
The screen keyboards (12 layouts) were tediously created in the C programming language. Custom programming displays the keyboards very fast, and allows all the layouts to fit in an extremely small amount of memory.
All 12 layouts are also intelligent ... That is, besides drawing the keyboard ... The program can quickly highlight any key, highlight the correct key if it has to be held down, draw a line from the center of a key to the center of its correct home key (which isn't always the same from layout to layout), draw the correct key-top label (which isn't always the same from layout to layout), draw the correct key size and shape (which isn't always the same from layout to layout), and display the correct finger-technique text (which isn't always the same from layout to layout).
All other graphics were created with the author's custom-made drawing program. No, his drawing program isn't as fancy, easy-to-use, or as comprehensive as other drawing programs. But it does something unique ... It produces extremely compact graphics data that can be displayed very fast and can be inserted right inside of a program ... No graphics files to clutter up your disk, or slow down the program!
CGA (640 by 200) is readable, but looks crude. EGA (640 by 350) looks quite a bit better. VGA (640 by 480) look very good (for this program). Text is crisp. The on-screen keyboard looks great. The flexible, programmable palette provides attractive custom-mixed colors. And, most computers made in the last several years have enough memory to use the Special Effects Buffers that make the program more attractive.
For this program, the difference in appearance between VGA and Super VGA would be slight and display time would be slower (a lot more information must be put on the screen) ... Little or no value added ... It isn't worth it!
Photo-realistic graphics look great in Super VGA. But programs, like this one, with line drawings don't look much better ... A similar effect can be seen on printers. Most people can't tell the difference between text and simple drawings printed on a 600 dpi (dots per inch) printer and a 1,200 dpi printer. But everyone can tell the dramatic difference between photos printed on the two printers.
Photo-realistic graphics are pictures that look like photographs ... Complete with subtle shadows and hundreds, thousands, or millions of colors. This type of graphics is useful for programs that require exact-looking pictures.
But in a program like You'll Soon Be Typing, the costs are not worth it. If photo-realistic graphics were used for the 12 screen keyboards and other graphics this program would take up more than 20 times the amount of disk space. Computers with CGA, EGA, Hercules, and even standard VGA graphics equipment, could not use the program. The program would have to pause frequently to read massive graphics files. Animations would be slow ... It isn't worth it!
Furthermore, line drawings can often be more instructively effective. For example: The animated line drawing of the side-view of a finger tapping a key in this program helps you to focus solely on correct position and movement ... A photo-realistic view of the same thing would contain distracting shadows and other unnecessary details.
All graphics were designed to be instructively effective, to not waste RAM or disk space, and to be fast. Special programming made it possible to fit all graphics in RAM (computer memory) ... No annoying time delays to read graphics files!
Most software companies ... including many educational software producers ... don't worry about supporting older computers. But many schools, homes, and corporations still use older computers. And many other people inherit old computers from others who have purchased new computers.
In other words, there are millions of older computers that are used by people who may have a need to learn how to type. That's why our product was designed and developed to run on old computers ... But with the ability to automatically adapt to ... and take advantage of ... the enhanced capabilities of newer computers.
Softwrights abhors the attitude of most software companies who don't care about squandering your resources like RAM and hard disk space. In other words, they could care less about software quality or performance ... or you, the customer!
In the 1970's American automobile manufacturers had a similar attitude toward their customers. Unfortunately, it took the success of the Japanese imports to send a wake-up call to the American auto companies who have finally caught up with their foreign competitors. Until customers had high-quality cars to compare to the junk that was being produced in the 1970's ... most people weren't aware that better cars were possible. The software industry is like that now. Unfortunately, most people have gotten used to software that is poorly designed and programmed.
The auto companies learned that it is a better to build quality into a product from the start, rather than later. Softwrights does the same with its software ... that's why it runs fast and is compact from the start. This results in a higher-quality product than the plethora of rush-to-market, sinfully bloated, slow-running junk that is all-too-common today.
If you happen to have a computer with an old 80286 (about 10 MHZ or faster) or an old 80386 processor with VGA graphics, try running You'll Soon Be Typing on it. After you see the graphics screens being displayed faster and getting response to your input quicker than many modern programs do, on modern computers, you'll see what we mean. Softwrights doesn't really nit-pick, we just work hard, design & program the best we can, and don't just pay lip service to our customers.
Then take a look at all the disk space that many programs hog and how numerous files litter your hard disk ... and consume more space than necessary. More often than not, this is a result of poor and/or rushed design and programming ... instead of technical necessity! You pay in terms of time wasted while waiting for hourglass icons to disappear and having to needlessly purchase a faster computer or a larger hard disk ... you deserve better!
This is normal if you have old CGA or Hercules video hardware. Hercules monochrome hardware cannot display color. Certain modes of CGA hardware can display color. But to display graphics and industry-standard 80-column text, this program must run in the high resolution, 640 by 200, two-color CGA mode (which can't display more than two colors). The low resolution, four-color CGA mode (often used for games and many educational programs) is too coarse to display 80-column text. And the 16-color CGA text (character) mode cannot display graphics (except for crude ASCII characters).
Upgrading your older computer to EGA or preferably, VGA (or better), will let you run the program in color (providing you also have a color screen). The program will also run in black and white if you start the program with one of the black and white, Video Mode Startup Options (CGA, EGA2, VGA2 or Hercules). If you are color blind, you may prefer to run the program in black and white. For more information, see Startup Options.
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