Frontype

The keyboard is a beginner's first obstacle. We all know someone, without computer experience, who types slowly, using only his index fingers. There are different books and programs for training someone in the use of a keyboard, but experience is the best and only solution. That is why Frontype approaches the problem differently. it is not a software filled with instructions, images and games which should teach you faster typing skills. It will only display a keyboard on the screen. As you type on your keyboard, the corresponding key on the virtual one will be highlighted.

The download weighs in at only 2 Mb, which should not be a problem, even for a slow Internet connection. Installing it will not take long and you can run it on Win XP, Vista or Win 7. If you have at least a Pentium 4/Athlon XP processor and 256 Mb of RAM, the application will run smoothly.

As mentioned before, when you run Frontype, a keyboard will be displayed on the screen. As you type, the corresponding keys on the screen will be highlighted. The virtual keyboard will behave exactly the same way as the real one. For example, if you press and hold the Shift key, it will be highlighted on the screen and all the letters will be displayed in upper case.

Beginners often look at the keyboard as they type, pause, look at the screen and back at the keyboard. With this application, instead of looking down, at the real thing, you can look at the screen the whole time and see both the keyboard and what you are doing. To make it more comfortable, you can set the color and transparency of the keyboard. This can be done from the general options panel, which can be accessed from a pop up menu, after clicking the application's system tray icon. With time, you can set a higher and higher transparency, until you will not need the keyboard at all. It is like using training wheels on a bicycle.

Besides color and transparency, you can also set what part of the keyboard to be displayed on the screen. It is possible to display only the letters, and the surrounding keys, the scroll ones, the function keys, the num pad or all of them. Frontype can launch automatically at system startup and you can set it to display the keyboard only when a certain program is launched.