14 DAY TRIAL // Most typing tutor applications are cute and full of eye candy to appeal to young children. They also have elaborate game-like systems to fool them into thinking they are playing when they are actually learning to type. While all that is great when trying to get your children to learn how to blind type, it is not exactly the kind of thing you would appreciate. While arguably, people either learn to type before a certain age or never bother trying afterwards, preferring to play the letter version of whack a mole with their index finger, there are exceptions out there. If you want a clean, simple typing tutor that simply helps you practice blind typing without any of the bells and whistles, there are not a lot of choices out there.
Fortunately, while there are not a lot of such programs out there, there are some, such as TypeTrainer4Mac.
What it does
TypeTrainer4Mac is a typing tutor, which, like all typing tutors helps you learn how to blind type. It presents you with random strings of characters that you need to type out and keeps track of your mistakes and typing speed.
From a functional point of view there is a little key difference between this program and others like it? However, from a design point of view, TypeTrainer4Mac is an exception in that it does contain any bloat features or pointless eye candy.
Learn blind typing
When I first fired up this program I was a bit disturbed by the random characters string it presented me with. Most other similar programs have built in text that they use as bases for lessons. However, the more I thought about it, the more the TypeTrainer4Mac approach made sense?
The entire purpose of blind typing is to learn how to type blindly while looking at something else, such as the monitor or books. It is a very robotic thing, and as such, it works on a different principle than handwriting, where you do have to look at what you are writing. This is why using text that makes sense, and can be remembered to any degree is a bad thing. It's too close to normal writing, and the tendency is to remember the next bit you have to write and look at the keyboard while you are typing it.
The random text approach is good because the string does not make sense and you get used to simply typing whatever is there, and since you can't memorize it, there is no incentive to look at the keyboard because it will not make things go any faster. Another big part is how the program does not actually show you any letters on the reference keyboard that is on screen, just the number of the finger you need to use to type that letter.
Of course, the program also lets you use nay text file as a basis for the lesson so you can practice on actual text once you get the hand of things.
Make up your own rules
While TypeTrainer4Mac keeps track of the mistakes you make and insists on those characters in the next string of letters, it also lets you take a freestyle approach to learning how to blind type.
At any point, you can customize the keys you want to focus on. Pressing the select button will present you with a keyboard layout where you can select the characters you wish to be working on. This is a simple matter of clicking or unclicking the desired keys but can be practical in case you want to do something different than the lessons the developer envisioned would be good for you.
Keyboard layout savvy
Regardless of your keyboard language and layout, TypeTrainer4Mac will work for you. It has been tested with almost all of the keyboard layouts supported by Tiger and will work perfectly. All you have to do to work on a certain keyboard layout is to select it from the input menu once in the program.
It will automatically relaunch itself with the appropriate setting and update both the selection window as well as the generated text strings themselves.
The Good
Clean interface design and approach. Lacks all the bloat and focuses on the job exclusively.
The Bad
If you are used to other programs you will miss the feedback part of the learning process. While TypeTrainer4Mac does keep track of the mistakes u make and gives the same characters back to you for practice, it does thins in a invisible, behind the scenes way. As such, there is never any real feedback and progress has to be measured by you.
The Truth
A good tool for learning how to blind type, with a very different approach of the whole process. Like all things different, it is up to you to decide whether that is good or bad.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
