Recent comments

• A better iPad keyboard, 27 June 2010:

  The idea of a “flickeyboard” sounds great, but I have to say it still leaves me a bit hesitant. I know that the iPad will never be a true computer replacement, at least as far as typing is concerned, but typing is one of the things I do a lot of, and I can’t help but think that having to learn a “new” way of typing would put me off…

• A better iPad keyboard, 13 May 2010:

  I meant the original article….not the first comment.

• A better iPad keyboard, 13 May 2010:

  Ditto.

• A better iPad keyboard, 24 April 2010:

  Ross,

  interesting idea, but if you look at your mock-up, PC keyboards and Mac keyboards, you’ll se that Apple generally doesn’t print additional characters on a keyboard. Your mock-up illustrates why: The additional glyphs are *very* distracting and make it harder to pick out the main glyphs. I could see a smaller selection of glyphs like on a Mac keyboard, though. And maybe have a little scrolling animation to change the contents of the key caps while keeping the layout the same, and showing the current glyph bigger than the other one.

  The select key feels too geeky for me. Mode switches are *evil*. Tap-and-hold to get the selection with handles, and then moving both nodes sounds just fine to me.

  Oh, and simple correction: “decide I want to change I to we, when I delete the I the shift key is engaged and I end up typing You instead of you.” ‘You’ should be ‘We’.

• Snow Leopard’s Giant Step Backward, 16 April 2010:

  Don’t you have a way in the Mac to specify which extensions are opened with which applications? In Windows, in the File Types dialog box, you can map an extension to an app. e.g., if you want gifs to always open in PhotoShop instead of Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I would suspect if they changed the underlying code to open by extension, then they should have added that capability, too.

• iPad: the world has changed, 29 January 2010:

  It’s still lacking tactile feedback. I can type very fast even with my eyes closed on my computer, but there’s no way this can work without feeling the keys under my fingers. So I’d say that this keyboard is suited only for casual typing.

  That said, many people need to look at the keys even on a physical keyboard. To those people, it’ll make much less of a difference. Context-dependent keyboard arrangements are great too. This isn’t something you can do well with a physical keyboard.

  So, I’d probably put Excellent instead of Outstanding for the iPad’s keyboard. It’s better on the flexibility that a regular physical one because it can rearrange itself, but worse for heavy typing where you can benefit a lot from tactile feedback.

• Snow Leopard’s Giant Step Backward, 21 January 2010:

  Peter, I think LaunchCodes will work great for you. I use TextMate every day, and I no longer have the problem of files opening in TextEdit.

Feeds

Recent articles