BeeRaider a Qwerty Challenge or Takeover?

Efficiency and Speed in typing? Try BeeRaider keyboard

 

Ray McEnaney wasn’t satisfied with other typing options people turn to with the most prominent among them being Dvorak, which aims to minimize how far the fingers travel and reduce fatigue. He thought users need to seriously commit to becoming proficient. That’s how we get to the BeeRaider, his oddly shaped keyboard that resembles a bee in flight, with two “wings” of keys arranged on either side of a radial center. The layout is larger, with the keys you need most at the center (which gives you less fatigue, McEnaney says). Keys that he considers “more useless” including Q, K and X are placed farther away.

When Ray McEnaney types, he’s confident it’s the most efficient way possible. This is a feeling he gets from his keyboard. Frustrated with the limitations of the traditional QWERTY layout, McEnaney spent the last decade designing a new one. Considering that the universal key arrangement was designed in the typewriter age patented in 1878 an alternative seems due. This one’s inspired by a bee.

He promises that anyone can become a capable BeeRaider typist in 20 minutes. The secret? Lies in the key position and the related mnemonic learning tools, through which you practice typing phrases like “I hate waste excess” and “Just before dawn starts.” It’s a little weird to type in such a fashion but it starts to feel natural after five minutes. Having the alpha characters; the keys used most often grouped together really helped memory retention as well.

 Researchers have found that using Dvorak and QWERTY layouts were unconnected to retention, “this suggests that typists know little about key locations on the keyboard, whether they are exposed to the keyboard for two hours or 12 years" sources say.

This makes the likelihood of the BeeRaider taking off more plausible; if people have no intrinsic recollection of keys, they should be open to a new way of working.

For those interested in the BeeRaider, it is available for preorders at $112.49, and you can choose between the optimized layout or the radial QWERTY design. Android users can try BeeRaider’s Android app at ($1.92), although it's tricky to use on small screens. Now you can be able to tap “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” at superspeeds.