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Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#141
As an android user, I thought it was just me that was unable to type on iOS, relieved to hear that I'm not alone.

But also, I've noticed that typing on Android has gotten worse too as phone sizes went up. I make noticeably more typos on my >5inch pixel devices than I ever did on my <5inch nexus devices. It's still far better than iOS, but I would've expected larger screens to equal better typing experience.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#142
In general, a lot of things calibrated for the generation of users after 2010 lost something.

I assume for the keyboard, it's focusing on making it easy for the general population to express their day to day thinking, which makes sense. But if you are using more diverse words than the general population, more complicated phrasing, technical jargon, or multiple languages, the keyboard will fight you.

It's also true for google search results quality, youtube suggestions, UI that electron apps expose and so on.

I can clearly see I'm neither a market nor a technical target for a lot of people creating products today.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#143
I've found iPhone to be weirdly inconsistent. Like sometimes, autocorrect will recognize my name and autofill it, other times it won't. Also true with OTP recognition from text messages - sometimes it will detect automatically, sometimes it won't.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Settings->General->Keyboard->"." Shortcut on?

OMG!!!! I thought I was somehow actually pressing period for years! I didn't feel like I was but I never noticed I wasn't actually pressing it and it was instead auto inserting periods. WTF! Thanks!!!!

IM PRAYING THIS FIXES IT. I really cannot express how annoyed I’ve been at the search bar keyboard in Safari. This has been such a huge sticking point.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#145

Vent: I'm on Android and still haven't seen a well done cursor scroll. It usually requires me to select the position accurately which is PITA. I wish there was a simple way to do that.

Can I also vent about the lack of undo? I consider undo one of the most essential features of any computing device. How is it still simply not supported on the most widely used computing platform?

Try tapping with three fingers to bring up a set of editing operations including undo & redo.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I’d type out a correct spelling of a word and it’d correct it to another word that’s totally unrelated to the context of the sentence, like your Quake example. Infuriating when in a rush.

For me it always turns “well” into “we’ll”. I have no idea why. I rarely type in the second person, and grammatically they’re not substitutes. It’s maddening.

Yes! This does my head in. The number of times I've sent 'We'll done!'

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#148

Try disabling slide to type. I don't use it, so if it's on, it introduces inaccuracies.

You are a godsend.

Will see how it goes, but it does seem to be better now.

This crap should be disabled by default and iphone needs to request signing 20 agreements before it gets enabled

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#149

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next. If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It m…

Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. I don't know why everyone isn't using NNs and the likes as augments to existing code so that they keep what already works fine, but rather, they feel they can just replace it, which leads to all the problems we see now in Google, in autocorrect, and so on.

>Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy.

The problem is that if you do machine learning, you just throw data at it to correct wrong behaviors. It's difficult to marry this with a logical approach, like dictionary frequency. Which one do you weight how much? 50:50? What if the user dislikes one of the two models more often, do you add another layer of machine learning here?

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#150

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next. If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It m…

I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

The beauty of heuristics / expert-rules based AI. Understandable, easy, fast.
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