{"id":2087,"date":"2012-09-10T12:09:29","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T19:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2012-09-10T14:22:19","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T21:22:19","slug":"xbox-360-needs-a-better-keyboard-ui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/10\/xbox-360-needs-a-better-keyboard-ui\/","title":{"rendered":"Xbox 360 Needs a Better Keyboard UI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update<\/ins>: This post was drafted back in October 2009. I had submitted it as feedback to Microsoft\/Xbox 360, but never really heard back. Steam just announced their Big Picture<\/a> which featured a keyboard system (Daisywheel) very similar to mine (I know there are quite a few differences), so I decided to publish this post.<\/p>\n

During the past Xbox 360 beta, I had made the following suggestion to the Xbox 360 team.<\/p>\n

I’ve always found the keyboard UI to be clunky and difficult to use with the controller. I understand the chatpad or a keyboard would make it more easy, but I’m pretty sure most people using the Xbox 360 still use the controller to type in text. When I found out I could redeem codes via their website, it was a blessing. Typing those 25 character codes always took an inane amount of time. Now that they plan on releasing Twitter and Facebook and other apps that can require a lot typing, it’s ridiculous to use the existing keyboard UI with the controllers to type.<\/p>\n

That’s what got me thinking of a better keyboard UI with the current controllers.<\/p>\n

Currently we use the L-joystick for moving the cursor up\/down\/left\/right and hitting A to select a character. To enter 1 character, I may have have to move the cursor up to 15 steps.<\/p>\n

One thing I’ve been thinking of is that we have 2 joysticks, each with 4 axis with 8 degrees of control, which we do not take advantage of. 8 x 8 is a total of 64 possible characters. If you consider the center position (joystick in relaxed position) to be another state, that’s 9 x 9 = 81 possible characters.<\/p>\n

Here’s a rough sketch of what the UI would look like:<\/p>\n

\"Xbox<\/a><\/p>\n

To type the number ‘1’, all I would have to do is point the L-joystick left, point the R-joystick up, and then push on R-joystick. Each letter would only take 3 actions (move L-joystick, move R-joystick, push on R-joystick).<\/p>\n

That leaves the buttons (A, B, X, Y), bumpers and triggers to do other stuff like delete or move the cursor. You can even dedicate a button to switch back to the current keyboard mode. The D-pad would be perfect for this job.<\/p>\n

As you may have noticed in my sketch, there’s a lot of empty spaces. I originally thought of putting every single character (symbols, numbers, both upper and lower case characters) on that, which is still a viable idea. Another option would be to drop that down to 5 circles (center, up, down, left, right), each circle having 8 possible characters like it is now, giving me 40 characters, which is about the same amount of characters on-screen today. You would then use the D-pad to toggle between upper and lower case, as well as symbols.<\/p>\n

Of course there’s still more stuff to flush out, but I thought the idea was sound.<\/p>\n

Also, given that the PlayStation 3 has a similar controller, I could see this being used on their console UI also.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update: This post was drafted back in October 2009. I had submitted it as feedback to Microsoft\/Xbox 360, but never really heard back. Steam just announced their Big Picture which featured a keyboard system (Daisywheel) very similar to mine (I know there are quite a few differences), so I decided to publish this post. During … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Xbox 360 Needs a Better Keyboard UI”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[1113,454,1114,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}