The Fitaly Keyboard for Windows CE

Fitaly for the Pocket PC–CE

The Fitaly keyboard for the Pocket PC is an ergonomic replacement for the standard on-screen Qwerty keyboard. In addition, Fitaly offers a very powerful Shortcut Expansion Capability...

Fitaly letter diagram

The patented Fitaly key arrangement is optimized for pen entry: the letters ital ne dors and the space – together representing 73% of the keys used for normal text – are placed in a very tight central area.

Adding the letters ch and um brings this frequency to 84%. Remaining keys are never more than two keys away from the central area and each key is placed near the keys most likely to follow it in English text.

The effect is to minimize pen travel. In addition, the layout practically eliminates hand movement when typing text. This means that you can type with your hand rested on the lower area, moving only the fingers holding the pen.

Only Fitaly offers...

The Fitaly keyboard is started with the keyboard icon and appears as shown in this example on the left. (What you see is version 3.5 of the keyboard; the earlier version 3 uses a black & white keyboard.)

Fitaly is the only keyboard giving access to more than 600 characters of the Unicode character set. You will see that most of these characters can be entered with only two taps or even less, with a tap followed by a slide.

Getting all possible characters is achieved with the use of several toggles that are described below. The first and most obvious is shifting with the Shift or Caps lock key. As expected, this produces upper case letters. In addition, it provides alternate keys in the punctuation panel, on the right of the main letter panel:

Fitaly shifted

We can also switch to numbers by a tap on the 123 key.

The Left Panel and the 123/abc Toggle:

The left panel includes the 123/abc toggle to alternate between letters and numbers as shown below. A tap on 123 brings up the number pad and a tap on abc brings the letters back.

Fitaly with numbers

Fitaly with letters

While on the subject of numbers, they are shown here configured as on a phone pad but if you prefer to have them as on a calculator, you can set the proper option. Note also that the number panel also shows the other characters most likely to be used in conjunction with numbers: Currency symbols such as $ ¢ £ ¥ € ¤, the degree ° and mathematical symbols. The punctuation panel on the right of numbers conveniently shows symbols such as – ( ) which you may need to enter phone numbers.

Numbers shifted

Shifting the numbers displays other more rarely used symbols such as ½, ‰, the non-breaking space, superscripts ¹ ² ³ and the ellipsis…

You may not use these symbols every day, but if you need them, they are on the Fitaly keyboard. Actually, Fitaly is the only input method that allows entry of these characters on a Pocket PC.

The Right Panel and the Side Bar:

The Right Panel – the one with the Escape and Tab keys – appears initially with the arrow keys: Fast Left, Left, Fast Right, and Right. A tap on Fast Left moves the cursor to the beginning of the line and each further tap move up one line. Similarly, a tap on Fast Right moves to the end of the line and each further tap moves down one line.

There is another variation of this panel that includes four accent keys: acute, grave, umlaut, and circumflex. Switching between the two is done with the key at the bottom of the side bar:

Right panel with arrows

Right panel with accents

A tap on the key on the blue side bar displays accent keys on the Right Panel. A tap on the double arrow key brings back the direction keys.

Later we will review the other buttons of the side bar but for the moment we will concentrate on what we can achieve with the four accent keys.

International Variations and Symbols

We can conjugate the letter and punctuation panels with the four possible accent keys: A tap on any of the four accent key modifies the letters and produces accented keys and other keys of the Latin1 character set. For example, tapping the circumflex accent ˆ followed by e produces ê. This means that each accented key can be produced with only two taps. — Actually, later on, you will see that they can be done even faster with sliding...

We now review the four accent variations, along with their effect on the punctuation panel.

Acute Accent:

The acute accent changes the vowels to vowels with acute accents. It also changes c into ç and C into Ç (in shifted form). The punctuation panel shows all currency and legal symbols.

Acute panel

Shifted acute panel

Grave Accent:

The grave accent changes the vowels a e i o u to forms with the grave accent. It also changes the letters d t into the Icelandic ð and þ. Similarly, D P are changed into Ð Þ. The Punctuation Panel includes the Danish å æ and ø, the French œ, and the n-dash – and m-dash —.

Grave panel

Shifted grave panel

Circumflex Accent:

The circumflex accent changes the vowels as expected. But see also how it changes the letter s and S into š and Š. The Punctuation Panel offers two-tap access to any of the brackets.

Circumflex panel

Shifted circumflex panel

Umlaut Key:

The umlaut key changes all vowels to vowels with umlauts. In addition, the letters m n s become µ ñ ß and N becomes Ñ. The Punctuation Panel includes useful keys such as @ and the bullet •.

Umlaut panel

Shifted umlaut panel

More on the Side Bar

So far we have mentioned the arrow/accent button, which toggles between accents and direction keys. Let's review the other keys:


		The Close key closes the Fitaly keyboard.
		The Editor key opens the Glossary Viewer where you can add shortcuts and edit them.
		The Shortcut key is used to expand shortcuts. To expand a shortcut, tap its keys and then tap the shortcut key. For example, tap ilft to get "I look forward to"
		The Info key opens the information menu, which includes several options to customize Fitaly. For example, the position of the side bar can be customized and you can choose to have it on the left as shown below:

Type Even Faster with Sliding...

The sole purpose of Fitaly is to allow fast typing on a handheld device and most characters can be entered with one or two taps. But in situations in which upper case letters are frequent - as in addresses - repeated shifting can be cumbersome. Similarly, there are situations where letters and digits are intermixed as in product codes and Canadian postal codes. Then having to toggle the abc/123 key repeatedly can become inconvenient.

This is why Fitaly offers sliding: Sliding happens when you tap on a key and then move the pen sufficiently far before releasing it. When you tap a letter, you see it appear at key down. If you slide, a backspace is emitted followed by the revised letter at key up.

Sliding to Get Capitals:

Sliding any letter capitalizes it, regardless of the direction of the slide (up, down, left or right, or diagonal). Most likely, you will want to slide down from the top rows or up from the bottom rows.

If All Caps is on, sliding gives a lower case letter.

Sliding for Occasional Digits:

Sliding any of the punctuation keys produces the digit that appears in the lower gray triangle. The effect is as shown below and the direction of the slide does not matter:

Sliding for digits

Sliding to Backspace or Delete

If you think that the backspace key is too far, just slide one of the space keys. Sliding towards the left backspaces, and sliding towards the right deletes the next character. You can also delete with a slide on the backspace key.

Sliding for Accents

A very fast way to get accented letters is to use sliding. It seems quite natural to obtain accented letters such as à and á by sliding from the letter a in the direction suggested by the slant of the accent. This (patent pending) technique been extended to all diacritical marks as shown by the following diagram:

Accent slides

If you opt to use sliding for accents, you can use long slides for capitals or slides in other directions. As the example shows, Fitaly offers an easy solution that works for all major European languages.

User-defined Slides:

Fitaly allows user-defined slides for one or more directions: this is done by selecting the ellipsis … in the slide selection dialog, and pressing the button associated with that direction.

Custom Greek slides

You can then specify the effect of sliding for a lower or upper case letter to be one or more Unicode characters. For example, on the left we specified the letter ζ as a custom slide for the letter z, using the using the html code convention: κ

The definitions for a given direction are stored in a keyboard file. For example, a Greek keyboard file is provided.

User defined slides and keyboard files can be used to produce several hundred characters with the same basic Fitaly keyboard, as you associate different characters to different directions.

Simpler examples are the use for frequent characters and frequent strings. For example, you may want to produce @ by a left slide of a and your signature by a left slide of some other letter.

Concluding this Quick Tour of Fitaly

We have now finished reviewing the metamorphoses of the Fitaly keyboard to produce all 220 characters of the Ansi/Iso Latin1 character set, and we have seen how to go beyond Ansi to produce Unicode characters. But covering these character sets is but one of its benefits:

Error-Free 100% Accuracy:

You will find that you do very few errors when using Fitaly. This comes directly from having eliminated hand movement: Pen taps that do not require moving the hand are much more precise. – See the special section describing the logic behind the One-Finger Keyboard.

So doing tasks that require accurate text becomes very comfortable on a Pocket PC: Writing addresses and appointments, writing notes, answering email...

50 Words Per Minute On Your Pocket PC:

This is confirmed by thousands of Fitaly users on other platforms who use it to type long memos on their PDA. Actually, we said 50 wpm but a number of participants in the recent Dom Perignon IV Speed Contest were over 60 wpm and the winners reached around 80 wpm! — Watch them on video.

The significance of these speeds is that they are in the range achieved by many average typists on the full 10-finger keyboard of a PC. So the speed achievable with Fitaly combined with the convenience of the ubiquitous Pocket PCs offers a realistic solution for normal text entry.

The dominant direction for ActiveSync can become
from the Pocket PC to the PC.

And there is a good reason for that: after all, it is the Pocket PC that is always there with you!

Try the Fitaly Demo:

To try Fitaly for the Pocket PC, you can download a fully-functional demo version. We invite you to share your impressions on the Fitaly Forum for Pocket PCs and your suggestions for future versions are welcome on the forum.

Shortcuts and the Glossary Viewer
The Information Menu
Character Reference
Character Index
Fitaly Index

Version 3 Release Notes
Download Demo
Pocket PC Fitaly forum
Textware Solutions