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| A niche use case for on-screen keyboards |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-25 14:52:26 |
| When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, one of its most prominent and most controversial features was the on-screen keyboard. In as world dominated by devices with physical keyboards, it was seen as a joke, something that could never work. We know better by now, of course, but while I still prefer the physical feel and clicks of a real keyboard, a recent new endeavour of mine has made me appreciate the on-screen keyboard in a whole new way. |
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| Comment by Chris_G |
| By Chris_G on 2012-10-25 15:32:03 |
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汉字是很难 How do you say, "I'm gonna drop Chinese and take Korean instead?" |
 - Score: 2 |
| Not only that.. |
| By osvil on 2012-10-25 15:39:59 |
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In fact, what I feel it becomes "killer" with virtual keyboards is how they can easily adapt to the task at hand. Simple stuff as changing the keyboard layout when typing email addresses (making @ easily reachable, for example) or removing the space bar when typing url addresses and having a handy ".com". It is a pity that people are not expanding this capability further. That is an advantage (maybe the only?) to the classical keyboards. Personally, people complain a lot about virtual keyboards. Personally I am able to "touch type" on the ipad virtual keyboard easily if placed appropriately. It seems that for me spatial memory is more important than the touch feed back, and the iPad in landscape mode seems to have the "right" spacing. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Are you really thanking Apple for this? |
| By avgalen on 2012-10-25 15:46:27 |
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I have seen you write story after story about how awful it is when people rewrite history. Don't you realise that people have been using this kind of input forever? There is nothing new about onscreen keyboards as they have been included with desktop operating systems since at least XP. So although I am happy to hear that the onscreen keyboard on a phone is useful for you, I don't understand why you are thanking Apple. PS. Typing on a regular keyboard with the IME set to Korean will soon be a lot faster than the onscreen keyboard trick you are using now. It is really fun to see Japanese/Chinese/Korean characters built up and combine and autocomplete while you are typing on a physical qwerty keyboard PS2. I have exactly the same language experience as you with those 6 languages of which french is getting slowly worse and latin/greek are rotting away. My interests in typing in Japanese are because of my future wife |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE: Are you really thanking Apple for this? |
| By Thom_Holwerda on 2012-10-25 15:50:37 |
| "popularising" |
| - Score: 5 |
| To tell the truth, |
| By No it isnt on 2012-10-25 15:57:16 |
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I hadn't heard Gangnam Style before I followed the link from this story. I had seen it mentioned loads of times, of course, and watched Ai Weiwei's take on it earlier today[1] (with the sound off). I can understand why you like it: it sounds like 2 Unlimited. Oh Holland, how can we forgive you. As for touchscreen keyboards being more flexible: sure. Their main strength, compared to proper keyboards, is still that they aren't, you know, keyboards. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/... Edited 2012-10-25 15:59 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| I'll be damned |
| By Alfman on 2012-10-25 16:02:08 |
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I never thought you'd be right about this, Thom. I'd have never thought a physical tactile keyboard could be inferior to a flat touch screen one, but your right..if you change alphabets alot (and non-latin writers certainly do), then having an on-screen keyboard might be better than fiddling with multiple keyboards. Or even worse, trying to emulate one alphabet with a keyboard designed for another. Another (quasi) solution to this problem is keyboards with LCD buttons: http://www.artlebedev.com/everyt... In the long term, the best obvious solution will be to give touchscreens some tactile feedback that not only change visible pixels, but can dynamically produce tactile feedback similar to a conventional keyboard so we'd finally have something on par with real keyboards. It could even do braille, what a killer feature for a touch screen! Edited 2012-10-25 16:07 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by nutt |
| By nutt on 2012-10-25 16:18:44 |
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Bah, get DasKeyboard, (http://www.daskeyboard.com/) and you can change keymap as often as you like. :-) I don't think forcing you to look at the "keys" to be able to hit them is an advantage of touch-screen keyboards. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Software keyboards are possible on QWERTY devices |
| By phoenix on 2012-10-25 16:32:28 |
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Hrm, you do realise that you can install the same virtual keyboards on devices with hardware keyboards, and can even use the virtual keyboards in landscape? Right? Virtual, onscreen keyboards are not a replacement for hardware keyboards. They are supplementary, or complementary to them. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: Comment by nutt |
| By Alfman on 2012-10-25 16:38:42 |
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nutt, Haha, the geek in me wants that keyboard!! However, it'd be extremely inefficient if I were trying to learn & use a couple different layouts for different languages. When I use french keyboards, I need to see the keys since they're too unfamiliar to me. Remapping a US keyboard using a french layout is too confusing for me. |
| - Score: 2 |
| I totally agree |
| By jweinraub on 2012-10-25 16:46:56 |
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Like you Thom, I thought onscreen keyboards were silly, hard to use over the tiny blackberry keyboard. While I did buy a dual language keyboard (English/Hebrew) on ebay, what if I also wanted to write in the Cyrillic alphabet? What about Greek? I too have a thing for non-latin alphabet systems and then it dawned on me, that is what an onscreen keyboard is best for! It is a shame my Macbook Pro can't have an OLED keyboard so I can change the language on the keys with a quick click of the mouse! While I still do miss the real tactile feel of a keyboard, I am getting pretty decent at typing and auto-correct seems to help me more than make embarrassing silly corrections, but for typing something comprehensive, I still type best on a real keyboard, even a tiny blackberry keyboard, I can probably write a novel with great accuracy and speed. Just replying back to an email is still annoying, and Siri has been pretty decent with small replies (but doesn't do a good job of punctuation), I can live happily in a world where both exist, and despite the cons of an on screen keyboard, I am sure in the future they can make it better, I think I will take the onscreen over a tiny real keyboard now. The extra real-estate, contextual keyboard changes are all great. I just wish there was an alt-key so I can enter unicode characters without a third party app! |
| - Score: 2 |
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