Announcing Fitaly 4 -- Final version

We are pleased to introduce the final version of Fitaly 4, which you can download from the link at the bottom of this page.

Fitaly is recognized as the most efficient keyboard layout and this has been demonstrated in several speed contests.

In earlier vintages of Fitaly, together with Jacques Turbé, we invented the concept of sliding and perfected it. Our dilemma was to be able to enter more than 255 different letters with a matrix of just 30 keys (6x5).

This required being able to assign more than one letter to a given key, for example, á, à, â, â,å to the letter a, and to distinguishing the letter generated on the basis of the direction of the slide. We accomplished this in version 2 and later expanded the concept in version 3 by allowing other strings to be attached with slides, in particular, unicode slides.

After completing Fitaly 3, we had the impression that we had reached a logical end for what could be achieved by a keyboard, with no obvious next step. The next step ended up being Fitaly 4 and it was set to achieve several goals: handle color and VGA screens, handle alternate screen sizes, provide powerful user-defined slides and macro expansions.

Visual improvements for VGA devices: The keyboard is often felt to take too much space in conjunction with the oversized tool bars adopted by Microsoft. Fitaly 4 offers a choice of 3 sizes: The large one is the one introduced by Fitaly 3.5. The small one comes from using the QVGA bitmaps on the VGA device; it is probably too small for most users but we've seen users who like it after installing it by mistake. The medium size is likely to be adopted by many Fitaly users on VGA devices.

As you will see, Fitaly 4 is all about powerful macro expansions, triggered by slides and it is amazing what you can do with them. You can now define slides for all keys. You can even define several slides for the same key and the same direction. The new Slide Editor lets you customize your slides by letters, special keys, or by directions.

Macro capabilities: A very important goal of Fitaly 4 is to allow slide expansion to do everything that you can do with the keyboard or more generally on a Pocket PC. This means obvious expansions such as ‹Ctrl C› and ‹Ctrl V›. This also means that if it makes sense, an entry could expand to ‹wideleft› ‹right›. Expansions can also include metakeys that are not on the keyboard itself. For example, ‹Up› ‹Down› ‹Home› ‹End› ‹Pageup› ‹Pagedown›. To our knowledge the only other program approaching macro expansions on a Pocket PC is Phatware's Pen commander. Macro expansions with Fitaly are easy. With a simple slide on any of the Fitaly keys you can:

1. expand any key, letters and special keys, to whatever you want it to be with a preview of your customized definitions
2. change an option in the Fitaly menu like changing the size of the keyboard from medium to large or changing to digits direct
3. change to one of the other panels of the keyboard like the accent or the number panel
4. use metakeys to execute functions like launching a photo, a document, typing today's date, editing documents ...

You can customize your keyboard to what you need it to do and be faster than ever.

Fitaly 4 sells for $29 with an introductory price of $25 until December 31, 2006. Upgrades from Fitaly 3.5 to 4 are free (same registration code), otherwise the Upgrade price is $19 with an introductory price of $15 until December 31, 2006.

We will be happy to see your comments on our Pocket PC Fitaly Forum,

Jean and Emmanuel Ichbiah