I have spent my entire life typing, having been born to a family of programmers, and it’s something that come almost second nature to me. I often have trouble speaking when I think too hard because generally when I am deep in thought I communicate with my fingers and not my mouth.

Still, It’s kind of an inefficient excerise, and I’ve thought quite a bit about more efficient ways of engaging in programming and online communication.

The Almaden Research Center, a research division of IBM’s based in the infamous Silicon Valley, has come up with a new method for inputing words and symbols into a computer.

It’s called Shape Writing and instead of typing individual letters you instead drag a stylus or finger accross the surface between the characters to form the words you want to use. The system remembers the paths you used to create the different words, instead of the individual keypresses, to determine what to input onto the screen.

How is this a better system? For one it is potentially quicker than lifting the fingers up and down repeatidly to form words. Also, it is much better for systems like cell phones or PDAs, where the keys can be kind of small.

In the end, a person remembers a word as a path instead of letters. An experienced user might not even have to see the letters to trace the words and would have the paths remembered, much like experienced typists do not have to look down to see the keyboard to type the correct letters.

Of course, the true “1337″ users do not need keys with the writing.

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