Dasher

Dasher is very very cool. It's different with any traditional IME: all you have to do is only moving cursor with any possible method.

Here is how Dasher works. There are several boxs presenting a to z and a underline for space listed on the right side of screen. When you move your cursor to the right, those boxs will zoom-in; with more you move the cursor, those boxs zoom in faster. And if you move cursor up or down, you will go into different box. There are always another box-listing in a box. The size of each box present the possible of next alphabet. So you can make common words easily.

This interface is not only fun but also effective. Even with eye-tracking device, user can reach 25 words per minute!

Dasher itself is an Open Source software. There are several pre-build binary available for many different operation system. Its n-gram model works fine with Japanese. I guess we can convert any existed Chinese sentence bank into bo-po-mo-fo and then feed it to the n-gram engine. Then maybe we can get an Dasher for Chinese communication.