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I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe. I agree. The benefit of being able to rest one's fingers on a physical keyboard and feel each key

by blehn 17y ago

I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe. I agree. The benefit of being able to rest one's fingers on a physical keyboard and feel each key seems rather obvious to me. Moreover, I doubt the iPad virtual keyboard is any less cramped than a netbook keyboard.

jsz0 17y ago
I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near a real physical keyboard in terms of speed but one of the interesting things about adapting to the iPhone keyboard is accepting accuracy isn't all that important. It decodes my crazy gibberish into the correct words most of the time. The trick of auto-correction is it punishes you for stopping to correct typos. It rewards you for completing your gibberish word. I would guess the process of tapping out the rest of the word is where all the computational multi-touch magic is happening to make a good auto-correct judgement. For speed the auto-suggest feature is also very effective. If I only have to type "qu" to make the word "question" that's 3 screen taps versus the potential for at least 8 key presses on a physical keyboard. Another side effect of mastering multi-touch typing is learning the value of brevity. Obviously this post is not typed on an iPhone. You learn to compose text in a straight forward way and do more of the compositional process in your head before you start typing. In this way it reminds me of writing short notes. So multi-touch keyboards won't replace physical keyboards but I really believe they are good enough and perhaps even better than a real keyboard sometimes. For example, if you are spelling challenged you're probably familiar with the type, type, type, mouse - click - click - correct, type type type proces. On a multi-touch keyboard it either fixes your spelling as you go or you tap once to auto-correct as you type. That's actually a more intuitive process.
- blehn 17y ago
  Good points. The predictive text on the iPhone is excellent. It definitely requires a lot of trust from the user, and I think it takes a while to build up that trust. Even after a couple years, I find that I still need to make a conscious effort to let the iPhone handle my mistakes.

by blehn 17y ago

jsz0 17y ago

I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near a real physical keyboard in terms of speed but one of the interesting things about adapting to the iPhone keyboard is accepting accuracy isn't all that important. It decodes my crazy gibberish into the correct words most of the time. The trick of auto-correction is it punishes you for stopping to correct typos. It rewards you for completing your gibberish word. I would guess the process of tapping out the rest of the word is where all the computational multi-touch magic is happening to make a good auto-correct judgement. For speed the auto-suggest feature is also very effective. If I only have to type "qu" to make the word "question" that's 3 screen taps versus the potential for at least 8 key presses on a physical keyboard. Another side effect of mastering multi-touch typing is learning the value of brevity. Obviously this post is not typed on an iPhone. You learn to compose text in a straight forward way and do more of the compositional process in your head before you start typing. In this way it reminds me of writing short notes. So multi-touch keyboards won't replace physical keyboards but I really believe they are good enough and perhaps even better than a real keyboard sometimes. For example, if you are spelling challenged you're probably familiar with the type, type, type, mouse - click - click - correct, type type type proces. On a multi-touch keyboard it either fixes your spelling as you go or you tap once to auto-correct as you type. That's actually a more intuitive process.

blehn 17y ago
Good points. The predictive text on the iPhone is excellent. It definitely requires a lot of trust from the user, and I think it takes a while to build up that trust. Even after a couple years, I find that I still need to make a conscious effort to let the iPhone handle my mistakes.