After a couple of weeks with my iPad, I have to say that I am disappointed with its virtual keyboard.

I never learned touch typing (whatever that means; is there another kind? Slam typing?). I get along very well without thinking about which finger goes to which key. On the iPad, my fingers go to the correct place as accurately as they do on a real keyboard. The loss of tactile feedback doesn’t slow me down at all, except for the shift key, as I will describe in a moment.

What slows me down—way down—is typing anything other than lower case a to z, space, comma, and period. Those, of course, are the characters you can type with one keystroke. Anything else requires either the shift key or a switch to a different keyboard layout, accomplished by two large keys on the main keyboard and two small keys on the auxiliary keyboards.

The shift key slows me down because Apple has been very sparing in representing the state of the key. Pressing the shift key draws its arrow with a blue fill. That’s a curious choice, because when my finger is on the shift key I cannot see its arrow at all. Yes, there are two shift keys, but my eyes want to go to the one under my finger.

The glyphs on the keys are all upper case. I would have liked the key glyphs to be lowercase, switching to uppercase when the shift key is pressed. That would tell me immediately what is going on, even if some keys are obscured at the moment.

Most of my irritation with letter case comes from Apple’s attempt to press the shift key for me, for example after a full stop. Even with auto capitalization turned off, the keyboard still tries to type uppercase letters when I don’t want it to. For example, if I type “In summary, I propose that” and decide I want to change I to we, when I delete the I the shift key is engaged and I end up typing We instead of we.

The auxiliary keyboards slow me down because they do not stay on screen long enough for me to learn where all the characters lie. To type a plus sign you have to tap the .?123 key to bring up the numeric keyboard, then tap the #+= key to bring up punctuation keyboard. By the way, .?123 is an odd label. You can already type . and ? from the main keyboard.

To type a + requires four taps: the .?123 key, the #+= key, the + key, and finally the ABC key to get back to the main keyboard. At that point my concentration is gone, and whatever I was going to say next has to be thought out again.

After a couple weeks I have made no progress toward learning the whereabouts of any auxiliary keyboard keys other than the numerals at the top of the numeric keyboard.

Many people, perhaps most, type a ! or ? more frequently than an apostrophe. I am not among them. It takes three taps to get an apostrophe in place. And although the proffered glyph is a properly curved apostrophe, the rendered glyph is a plain straight abomination.

Worst of all, despite all those keyboards there are no arrow keys. Selecting a single character by dragging, or placing the insertion point at a particular spot, is just not easy. I use arrow keys all the time on a regular keyboard, and I want them on my virtual keyboard.

One of my big frustrations vanished when I discovered that you can type an apostrophe by flicking the comma key upward. What a clever and useful feature! How did I miss it? Was it mentioned somewhere? At any rate, I submit that the flickable key idea can be incorporated into the entire keyboard in such a manner that the virtual keyboard rivals, and perhaps excels, the tactile keyboard.

Here’s how it would work.

1. Every key would respond to up, down, left, and right flicks in addition to taps and holds (a hold pops up a menu for certain keys, showing diacritical options).

2. The four characters produced by the flicks would be drawn on the key.

3. The shift key and the auxiliary keyboards would be removed.

4. Taking the place of the shift and keyboard keys would be keys for managing the selection and cursor position, and keys for families of quotation marks, parentheses, and hyphens.

Forgive me, but I cannot resist calling these flickable keys flickeys.

Here’s how a flickeyboard might look (click for a full size view):

Obviously, this is a US flickeyboard; localized keyboards would differ in the placement of some symbols. How it works should be self-evident. A few ideas merit a closer look.

Flicking down on any letter renders it in uppercase. Flicking downward with two or more fingers anywhere on the keyboard toggles Caps Lock, which is identified by swapping the uppercase and lowercase labels on the flickeys.

The top row of flickeys mimics the operation of the top row of keys on a standard keyboard. Numerals 1 through 0 are right where you expect them to be; you simply flick upward to type the numeral. Flicking to the left produces the symbols associated with holding the shift key while typing a number key. Flicking upward with two or more fingers swaps in a numeric keypad.

Flicking to the right produces some symbols that appear on the iPad punctuation keyboard. Currency symbols are grouped together; in a happy coincidence the yen symbol appears with the letter y and the euro symbol appears with the letter u. Multiplication, division, addition, and equals symbols are placed on three adjacent flickeys.

In this mockup, the second row of flickeys has not been assigned any characters. That’s 27 possibilities.

A quotation mark key replaces the left shift key. With one key you can easily type the four typographer’s quotes, or the abominable straight mark. This, I submit, is an improvement over the shift-option-bracket combinations used on a Mac desktop.

Flicking upward on the bottom row of letters mimics the option key combinations used to type diacritical marks.

At the right of the third row, three punctuation keys provide related symbols. The comma and semicolon use the same flickey. Full stops—period, exclamation, and question mark—appear on the period flickey, as does the colon. The rightmost flickey provides hyphen, en hyphen, em hyphen, and underscore.

To the right of the space bar, two keys provide matching delimiters: parentheses, brackets, braces, and angle brackets.

The space bar shows a command symbol to denote that holding the space bar in conjunction with a another flickey mimics the command key; space-z invokes undo, space-v invokes paste, and so on.

The leftmost key on the bottom row does nothing when tapped; it responds only to flicks, and it moves the cursor left and right, or line up and line down. Up-left and down-right flicks mimic the Home and End keys.

The select key (which is not a flickey), when held, turns any cursor movement into a move-and-select. It works in conjunction with the key to its left, or with taps in the document. For example, you can select from the cursor to the beginning of the line by holding the select key and tapping at the beginning of the line. In other words, it creates selections exactly as the shift key does on a regular keyboard.

If users find the layout too busy with all those labels, one possible solution is to toggle the visibility of the flick labels by means of an added key or a flick. Another is to put an opacity slider to the left of the a key.

The flickeyboard takes advantage of the iPad’s ability to do things that cannot be done on a conventional keyboard. A single, simple, intuitive movement replaces the typewriter-era paradigm of holding a modifier key while tapping a character key. You see all the characters all the time, unlike physical keyboards that require a keyboard viewer application to show you where some characters hide.

It shouldn’t be too terribly difficult for someone to write an app that would let us try out this concept. A github project, perhaps?

(Edited 24 April 2010 in response to Uli’s comment.)