★ APPLICATIONS ★ DIVERS ★ IANKEY : TWO FINGERS TO TOUCH TYPING CONVERSION COURSE|Amstrad Action) ★ |
| Iankey : Two Fingers to Touch Typing Conversion Course | Applications Divers |
Typing tutors Typing skills are useful – even essential – for almost all types of serious or hobby computing. Has Arnold got what it takes to teach you touch-typing? The central idea behind lankey is the avoidance of letter drills -" asdf asdf asdf... "and the like - in favour of meaningful words. The passages to be copied are (airly long, and occupy three or four widely-spaced lines in the central screen area. Your efforts appear immediately underneath this text, word-wrapping so that each line of input fits directly under the corresponding line of the original. Mistakes are marked as they are typed in, different markings distinguishing the common sorts of typing error - transposition. substitution etc. lankey's error recognition is very strong, though quite how useful this is I'm not sure. After all, most people can distinguish between different kinds of error for themselves -assuming they're interested in the first place.
The statistics panel at the top of screen gives details of your typing speed and accuracy. Iansyst make a big fuss about the program giving you this data, continuously updated, while you're typing each exercise. Personally I found this at best unnecessary, and at worst a distraction - if you're concentrating on your typing, you probably won t have time to look at it. Still, it's there if you want The big problem with Iankey is its excess of on-screen instructions. Rather than moving you swiftly on from one test to the next, it treats you to a series of helpful little messages detailing its error-marking system and explaining typing posture etc. This, combined with the redraw time for the keyboard display and statistics panel, kills off Such pace as it might otherwise have. To be fair, lankey does place the emphasis on relaxing while learning, but all the waiting between tests can be extremely frustrating. The general style ot lankey seems to be to bombard the user with information, not all of it particularly useful. This might be praiseworthy in an everyday applications program, but in a tutor it's rather undesirable. Your first impression may very well be that it is complex and confusing - the last thing you need, given the difficulty of the learning task itself. A lot of this confusion could be removed by the use of a less cluttered display - there is a wholly inappropriate emphasis on decorating the screen which you pay for in both time and clarity.
|
