5 ms·

If only Apple and Google engineers would understand that it's almost impossible to mistype A and Å on a qwerty-keyboard, it would be awesome.

azernik 9y ago
Are you referring to mobile-phone autocorrect issues?
- barking 9y ago
  so often an obscure word is substituted for a common one (I'm talking about swype on android), the one that springs to mind is thou for you.
pimmen 9y ago
I absolutely agree. I don't know enough about Unicode, but is the Å and Ä very close to the A in the bit pattern or something and the hasty implementation led to this nonsensical autocorrect? Because, if you've ever looked at a keyboard with a Nordic layout, A and Å couldn't be further apart. It's like thinking you mistakenly typed L instead of A on an American keyboard.
- dagw 9y ago
  I'm guessing it is because some people (like me) who don't use the nordic layout on their phones (I'm pretty sure the original iPhone at least didn't come with different keyboard layouts) just use 'a' and 'o' instead of 'å/ä' and 'ö' and expect the auto-correct to sort it out. Speaking only for myself I find this feature extremely helpful.
germanier 9y ago
On a similar note: my iPhone very often autocorrects wurde to würde and hatte to hätte when typing German. These are all extremely common words (and part of the built-in dictionary). The one it "corrects" into are even less common. As the keys are on opposite ends of the keyboard you can't mistype that. Very annoying. If someone knows how to disable that without switching off autocorrect altogether, I would be very glad to know.
- y4mi 9y ago
  you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard? i just long-press the letters if i really need an Umlaut, but generally i just type the normal one and use the suggestions to switch to the correct spelling. Autocorrection is dependent on your keyboard btw. It might be a good idea to try a different ones. I haven't really had that issue since i've switched to GBoard, but i remember struggling with the same problem before as well.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard? Yes, the German QWERTZ layout has 3 dedicated keys for äöü. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/KB_Germany.svg/1280px-KB_Germany.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/KB... (just left of the Enter key). However, the virtual keyboard I'm currently writing ^W swiping this on does not have dedicated keys for them. I have to long-press [a] to get a popup with variants, including [ä].
  - germanier 9y ago
    The dedicated äöü keys were added in some update a few years ago (there is no ß key). At that time you could only get German autocorrect with that keyboard (I think) so I got used to it. At some later point they added autocorrect for all other installed languages to that keyboard so I now use it exclusively (due to the extra keys they differ in width between keyboards which is confusing when switching).
StavrosK 9y ago
I wonder why that happens, since they use models that take into account the keyboard layout. Maybe they assume you don't have a Nordic layout and "helpfully" correct it for you?
wingerlang 9y ago
On the other hand, I've probably used A instead of Å at least 500 times in the last couple of days alone. It seems like a fair assumption if the word fits when changing.
m12k 9y ago
The thing that I miss the most on iOS (don't know if this is the case with Android as well) is for the OS and apps to just remember which language I last used when communicating with a given person. Just because I recently wrote a message to my Danish girlfriend doesn't mean I want the Danish keyboard instead of the English one when I go to write a message to my Canadian friend. Seriously, is nobody at Apple bilingual? How they've managed to release 11 versions of iOS and never implemented something as simple and useful as this is beyond me...
- maljx 9y ago
  I've been frustrated about this for years as well. Writing in three different languages daily, but always the same language to the same persons.
- henrikeh 9y ago
  I know that it is not what you are asking for, but I believe Facebook messenger indeed does this. So it is certainly not a technical limitation but purely a lacking implementation.
- hultner 9y ago
  Honestly I'd probably be fine with a combined Swedish & English keyboard for most of my daily interactions (also Swede's in general and in the tech sector in particular mix in a lot of english). However being half dane close to the german border and with a interest in language I do occasionally use other languages as well which results in me having 6 more active keyboards, and while I mostly toggle between Swedish, English and some occasional emoji it's quite a hassle to shift though half a dozen keyboards every other time.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Interested to hear what solution would be better for you. I live in Sweden and while I don’t speak Swedish everyone I work with basically does as you describe, the keyboard toggle between English/Swedish keyboards. Frankly because I work with Danes and Swedes all the time it’s usually enough to hold down A and O when I need to type å, ö, ø, etc. but I usually don’t type in those languages. It’s mostly for locations and the occasional translation.
hashmush 9y ago
I agree. A really annoying "feature". I can understand it if you use the English qwerty-layout but not when you use the Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/German layout. There is an open issue for this over at the android issue tracker. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37104657 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37104657
- hultner 9y ago
  Another annoying "feature" is that the rest of the keyboard also changes by physically moving the keys, causing me to regularly mistype certain letters when changing keyboard as you can't trust muscle memory. I'd rather like to just have dead dummy keys on those slots or something so I don't have to mess up texts by muscle all the time.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    This is my struggle living in Sweden as an American. I go to type on my coworkers keyboard and the result is a mixuture of frustration and hilarity as my muscle memory produces bad results. Some things make absolutely no sense like switching - and _ on Swedish keyboards. Other random frustration is the lack of tilde on Swedish keyboards. How can you work on Unix based systems without easy access to tilde?! Interestingly all the Swedes I work with have their own solutions to the tilde problem. Some type the alt code while others use alternative keyboard configurations.
    - hultner 9y ago
      Tilde is available with alt-carret/umlaut, that's no harder then other specials such as @[]{}() etc. But I understand the frustration, I feel the same every time you boot up a new system or VM and it defaults to american layout, changing the keyboard layout from a unix prompt when you can't find i.e. - / : = is surprisingly hard. I used to use svorak a5 about 10 years ago but eventually switched back to swedish qwerty since it was causing such confusion with coworkers. I also switch to a right-handed mouse about 4-5 years ago for the same reason with the addition that ergonomic left handed mice are pretty much non-existent, it's mainly just standard two button mice which you flip the mouse buttons on.

azernik 9y ago

Are you referring to mobile-phone autocorrect issues?

barking 9y ago
so often an obscure word is substituted for a common one (I'm talking about swype on android), the one that springs to mind is thou for you.

pimmen 9y ago

I absolutely agree. I don't know enough about Unicode, but is the Å and Ä very close to the A in the bit pattern or something and the hasty implementation led to this nonsensical autocorrect? Because, if you've ever looked at a keyboard with a Nordic layout, A and Å couldn't be further apart. It's like thinking you mistakenly typed L instead of A on an American keyboard.

dagw 9y ago
I'm guessing it is because some people (like me) who don't use the nordic layout on their phones (I'm pretty sure the original iPhone at least didn't come with different keyboard layouts) just use 'a' and 'o' instead of 'å/ä' and 'ö' and expect the auto-correct to sort it out. Speaking only for myself I find this feature extremely helpful.

germanier 9y ago

On a similar note: my iPhone very often autocorrects wurde to würde and hatte to hätte when typing German. These are all extremely common words (and part of the built-in dictionary). The one it "corrects" into are even less common. As the keys are on opposite ends of the keyboard you can't mistype that. Very annoying. If someone knows how to disable that without switching off autocorrect altogether, I would be very glad to know.

y4mi 9y ago
you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard? i just long-press the letters if i really need an Umlaut, but generally i just type the normal one and use the suggestions to switch to the correct spelling. Autocorrection is dependent on your keyboard btw. It might be a good idea to try a different ones. I haven't really had that issue since i've switched to GBoard, but i remember struggling with the same problem before as well.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard? Yes, the German QWERTZ layout has 3 dedicated keys for äöü. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/KB_Germany.svg/1280px-KB_Germany.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/KB... (just left of the Enter key). However, the virtual keyboard I'm currently writing ^W swiping this on does not have dedicated keys for them. I have to long-press [a] to get a popup with variants, including [ä].
- germanier 9y ago
  The dedicated äöü keys were added in some update a few years ago (there is no ß key). At that time you could only get German autocorrect with that keyboard (I think) so I got used to it. At some later point they added autocorrect for all other installed languages to that keyboard so I now use it exclusively (due to the extra keys they differ in width between keyboards which is confusing when switching).

StavrosK 9y ago

I wonder why that happens, since they use models that take into account the keyboard layout. Maybe they assume you don't have a Nordic layout and "helpfully" correct it for you?

wingerlang 9y ago

On the other hand, I've probably used A instead of Å at least 500 times in the last couple of days alone. It seems like a fair assumption if the word fits when changing.

m12k 9y ago

The thing that I miss the most on iOS (don't know if this is the case with Android as well) is for the OS and apps to just remember which language I last used when communicating with a given person. Just because I recently wrote a message to my Danish girlfriend doesn't mean I want the Danish keyboard instead of the English one when I go to write a message to my Canadian friend. Seriously, is nobody at Apple bilingual? How they've managed to release 11 versions of iOS and never implemented something as simple and useful as this is beyond me...

maljx 9y ago
I've been frustrated about this for years as well. Writing in three different languages daily, but always the same language to the same persons.
henrikeh 9y ago
I know that it is not what you are asking for, but I believe Facebook messenger indeed does this. So it is certainly not a technical limitation but purely a lacking implementation.
hultner 9y ago
Honestly I'd probably be fine with a combined Swedish & English keyboard for most of my daily interactions (also Swede's in general and in the tech sector in particular mix in a lot of english). However being half dane close to the german border and with a interest in language I do occasionally use other languages as well which results in me having 6 more active keyboards, and while I mostly toggle between Swedish, English and some occasional emoji it's quite a hassle to shift though half a dozen keyboards every other time.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  Interested to hear what solution would be better for you. I live in Sweden and while I don’t speak Swedish everyone I work with basically does as you describe, the keyboard toggle between English/Swedish keyboards. Frankly because I work with Danes and Swedes all the time it’s usually enough to hold down A and O when I need to type å, ö, ø, etc. but I usually don’t type in those languages. It’s mostly for locations and the occasional translation.

hashmush 9y ago

I agree. A really annoying "feature". I can understand it if you use the English qwerty-layout but not when you use the Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/German layout. There is an open issue for this over at the android issue tracker. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37104657 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37104657

hultner 9y ago
Another annoying "feature" is that the rest of the keyboard also changes by physically moving the keys, causing me to regularly mistype certain letters when changing keyboard as you can't trust muscle memory. I'd rather like to just have dead dummy keys on those slots or something so I don't have to mess up texts by muscle all the time.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  This is my struggle living in Sweden as an American. I go to type on my coworkers keyboard and the result is a mixuture of frustration and hilarity as my muscle memory produces bad results. Some things make absolutely no sense like switching - and _ on Swedish keyboards. Other random frustration is the lack of tilde on Swedish keyboards. How can you work on Unix based systems without easy access to tilde?! Interestingly all the Swedes I work with have their own solutions to the tilde problem. Some type the alt code while others use alternative keyboard configurations.
  - hultner 9y ago
    Tilde is available with alt-carret/umlaut, that's no harder then other specials such as @[]{}() etc. But I understand the frustration, I feel the same every time you boot up a new system or VM and it defaults to american layout, changing the keyboard layout from a unix prompt when you can't find i.e. - / : = is surprisingly hard. I used to use svorak a5 about 10 years ago but eventually switched back to swedish qwerty since it was causing such confusion with coworkers. I also switch to a right-handed mouse about 4-5 years ago for the same reason with the addition that ergonomic left handed mice are pretty much non-existent, it's mainly just standard two button mice which you flip the mouse buttons on.