To take the program out for a spin, just click the Start button. The program will display two "words" to type. The "words" will not be real words; they will be a random set of lower case letters. Begin typing the letters. When you reach the end of the first word, press the space bar. The second word will move over to the first word position, and a new second word will appear. Keep typing until the program notifies you that you are done.

Simple, right?

But that's just the beginning. Let's look at the real power of ?The UgLY TypInG PrACtice ProGrAM!.

In it's simplest form, a custom practice list is just a list of the characters you want to practice. For example, if you wanted to practice the 8 home keys on the keyboard, your practice list would be:

      asdfjkl;

You simply put those letters in the Practice List Pattern Box and click the Update Custom button. Now, ?The UgLY TypInG PrACtice ProGrAM! will create "words" using just those 8 characters.

That's great, as far as it goes.

But suppose you have some characters you need to practice, and you would like to practice them mixed in with other characters. Also, you want to be sure that the characters you need to practice appear often in the practice words.

No problem!

      a 5 b

tell ?The UgLY TypInG PrACtice ProGrAM! to use the letter "a" five times as often as the letter "b". You can put as many frequency modifiers in your practice list as you want, as long as you use only one frequency modifier for each practice letter. So, if you wanted to practice lower case letters and numbers, but you wanted to have numbers appear 10 times as often as letters, you could use the following practice list:

      abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5 10 6 10 7 10 8 10 9 10

The number 10 after each of the numerals 0-9 does the trick. Ugly, isn't it?

But it works. And it works great.

You can make several different practice lists and save them in a text file on your computer. Then, when you want to use one of them, just copy and paste it into the Practice List Pattern Box, click the Update Custom button, and you're good to go.

Why does the second word move to the first word position each time you complete typing the first one? This is very distracting.

The good news is, you will get used to this movement very quickly. The reason for doing this is to allow you to look ahead to the next word while keeping the active part of the screen small. It is important, for speed, to allow a person to look ahead to the next word. However, I wanted to make the active part of the screen small, so people could use a small window on their screen while doing a drill. Therefore, moving the words seemed like a good approach.

Can this program be used as a complete typing program?

No. This program is designed as a supplement to a complete typing program. It is intended to provide focused practice for characters that you need more practice on.

How do you enter a space as a practice letter in the practice list?

A space cannot be entered as a practice letter in a practice list. A space in the practice list is used only as part of a frequency modifier. During a drill, since you must end each word you type with a space, you should get plenty of practice using the space bar.

Typing randomly generated words does not seem as if it would help with real typing. Why not use real words?

From my experience, I can type real words faster than I can type the words made up by this program. I believe this occurs, because certain character patterns are common in a language, and our brains can recognize and allow us to type quickly whenever we encounter those patterns. That can be both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength, because it increases our typing speed for words that contain those common patterns. However, it can also be a weakness, when typing uncommon combinations of characters; these types of combinations may prove difficult and error-prone if we have only practiced typing real words. Engaging in at least some practice with randomly generated words helps us master typing of any combination of characters. And it may help us more quickly get proficient at typing real words. It certainly can be expected to help with typing the unusual sequences of characters found in areas like scientific formulas and programming languages.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, typing real words and sentences gives very little practice with punctuation. Therefore, it can be hard to gain mastery of these characters when practicing with real words. By including non-letters in a practice pattern and giving the non-letters a frequency modifier, you can be sure you get plenty of practice with those characters.

What browsers work with this program?

The program has been designed to work with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

I get strange behavior sometimes when using Firefox; sometimes when I press space, the page scrolls down, and when I press single quote, the "Find Word on this Page" function gets invoked. What is going on?

I'm not sure why this behavior happens. I've spent some time trying to prevent it, but I have not figured out a way to do this. Fortunately, this behavior only seems to occur at the end of a drill, so its effect is less severe than it would be if it happened during a drill. I wish I could figure out how to get around this problem, but so far I can't.

How do you calculate typing speed?

The calculations I use probably result in a lower speed than methods used by most other programs. Words Per Minute (WPM) is the total number of characters typed, not including spaces, divided by 5 characters per word and divided by the number of minutes the drill took. The Adjusted WPM is the WPM minus the number of mistyped words; multiple typing mistakes within a single word only count as one error. The calculation of Adjusted WPM is a reasonably good calculation for periods of typing up to about 7 or 8 minutes. However, it gets less useful as the length of a drill increases. Here's why.

The longer you type, the total number of errors can be expected to keep climbing. This is true, even if the number of errors per minute stays low. However, WPM would tend to stay pretty constant. Therefore, if one typed long enough, the number of errors could be expected to be greater than the WPM, resulting in a negative value for Adjusted WPM. For example, if a good typist typed for 120 minutes, that typist could easily have 120 errors but still be considered to be quite accurate. However, if that same typist typed at 90 WPM, the Adjusted WPM would be 90 minus 120, or negative 30 WPM. Clearly this is a ridiculous result.

Fortunately, a single drill typically lasts no more than a few minutes. For drills of a few minutes, this method of calculation compares well with methods of calculation used by other programs.

Did you used to have a TV Show about Home Improvement?

No, but thanks for asking.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Bug Reports? Cash to Donate?

Contact Rob at uglytyping@goingup.us.