Tablet Fitaly 5 Sliding

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Type Even Faster with Sliding

The main purpose of Fitaly is fast and easy typing on a Tablet PC. Most characters can be entered with one or two taps. When you want to be fast, two taps may sound like slowing you down. When upper case letters are frequent, as in addresses, repeated shifting can be cumbersome. Similarly, when letters and digits are intermixed, toggling the Letter panel abc and the Number panel 123 may be inconvenient.

This is why, to be even faster, Fitaly offers sliding: Sliding happens when you tap on a key and move the pen sufficiently far before releasing it. The slide can go far beyond the key on which you initiate the slide.

The following paragraphs describe default standard slides on Fitaly. All slides can be customized, and Fitaly 5 lets you define many more slides. When you slide a letter, a preview window is displayed with all choices defined for that letter in the direction of the slide as shown in the picture below. Moreover, the Fitaly macro language  enables you to define slides that do more than just text. For example, you can launch an application or a photo with just a slide.

Fitaly with Slide Preview

Slide Metrics

There are two distances that you can configure in the sliding options that will have an impact on your sliding.

The sliding distance is the minimum distance that you need to slide to get your first slide choice. If you slide less than the sliding distance, it will be assumed that your intent was just to tap.

The slide step is the additional distance you need to slide to get the next slide choice.

Slide metrics

The sliding distance and the slide step together enable you to use multiple slide choices for a given key in a given direction. These choices are displayed in a preview window that pops up above Fitaly as soon as your pen has reached the defined sliding distance. The highlighted selection in the preview window is the slide you will get if you lift the pen up at that point. To advance to the next choice, all you need to do is slide a bit more, the slide step being the distance increment that brings you to the next choice.

Slide Preview

The preview window displays the available choices you can get for the key from which you slide in a given direction.

Slide preview window

The selected choice (launch acrobat) is the one you get if you lift the pen at that point.

The choices you can get are completely customizable. With the Fitaly Editor you can define the slide choices for any key in any direction: words, symbols, phrases, addresses, emails, URLs, and macros. The preview window shows the slide entries as you defined them and they will be inserted as such. Moreover, what you see in the preview window can also be a display form that is a description of slide entries that expand longer text strings like a whole paragraph or execute a macro as launching an application like Acrobat. A display form is especially recommended for slides producing long strings in order to make sure that the preview window does not take the whole width of the screen. A short or more descriptive display is also easier to recognize.

Sliding for Capitals

If you use the Slides for Customization option, you should dedicate one direction for capital letters only.

Capital letters can be very frequent, and it is quicker to access them with a slide in a direction to which you have not assigned multiple choices. It allows you to slide far enough (> sliding distance) without taking chances to select anything else by mistake.

Furthermore when the capital letter is the only slide choice defined for a letter in a given direction, you will get the slide preview on the key itself as shown in the picture below.

Slide for Capitals

If you use Sliding for Caps only, sliding a letter in any direction will produce the corresponding capital letter.



Sliding for Digits or Punctuations

Unless you opt for the half cells option for the Punctuation-Digit panel you have to choose whether a tap should produce digits or punctuations. 

If you choose the tap for punctuations (Punctuation direct), you can produce the digits shown in the lower triangle by sliding those keys in any direction:

Sliding for digits

Vice versa, if you choose the tap for digits (Digits direct) you can produce the punctuations shown in the upper triangle by sliding those keys in any direction.


 

Sliding for Accents

Fitaly uses sliding to accelerate the entry of accented letters: sliding a letter to produce an accented variation is significantly faster than doing a tap on an accent key, followed by another tap on a letter.

Accent slides are defined by default for the five directions shown in the image below. The directions for the grave accent (North-West) and the acute accent (North-East) are quite intuitive, as the direction of the slide corresponds to the slant of the accent:

For the other directions, this is more of a convention. In any case, what you get for the grave, umlaut, acute, and circumflex directions are the same letters that you obtain by a tap on the accent block. For example, this means that a slide up from s gives ß.

With the Fitaly Editor you can of course rearrange your slides dedicated for accents.
If you don't use accents at all you may also delete the corresponding slide definitions.

 

Sliding  for Delete

Even though Fitaly does not have a Delete key per se, it is very easy to delete text. A slide on the Backspace key in any direction is all it takes. You can also slide to the right on either of the space keys.


Sliding for Alt

The Alt key is also a key you can easily produce by sliding the Escape key in the North direction. This is the default slide definition which you can, of course, change in the Fitaly Editor if you prefer to slide on another key.



User Manual
Fitaly Options
Sliding
Expanding Abbreviations
Fitaly Editor
Fitaly Macro Language
Panel Reference
Character Reference
How do I?
Tablet PC Fitaly Forum
Fitaly License
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