The Tap: An Ipad Keyboard Without The Actual Keyboard

Tapped out with traditional typing? This new wearable might provide a situational solution.

- Leif Johnson

I’m a bit of a fussy writer. Sometimes I even find the mere sight of my words dropping across the screen as I write discouraging and intimidating, so I’ll drop a sheet of paper on my MacBook screen to keep from seeing what I’m writing. I’m thus always hunting for something that removes this frustration from the process.

Imagine, then, my curiosity when I was told about the Tap (go.macworld.com/ tapp), a Bluetooth “wearable mouse and keyboard” that lets you “type” on iPhones and iPads (and Android devices) without touching a keyboard or touchscreen. Instead, it uses a system of finger taps from a single hand that works with varying degrees of success on any surface. It looks a bit like cyberpunk brass knuckles, or perhaps a minimalist 21st-century update to the Nintendo Power Glove. And somehow, unlike similarly ambitious devices such as the Google Glass, the$150 device even looks kind of cool.

Tap co-founder Sabrina Kemeny demonstrated the Tap while attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It’s a testament to how well she feels the device works that she evaded telling me how to use it directly; instead, she watched as I opened the box, slipp edit on, and learned to type by making gestures alone by following the instructions in the Tap Genius app (go.macworld.com/tpgn). Jony Ive, Apple’s design guru, might be proud.