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

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191–200 of 422 posts

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

#191

Wow, thank you for posting this, I was just thinking this! Most people here focus on autocorrect, which isn't such a big problem for me since I'm used to having it off. But what the hell is wrong with the cursor placement? It is so incredibly broken, it has a mind of its own, and never goes to where I mean to put it. Simply tapping on text puts it in the wrong places, but holding and dragging cursor or holding and dr…

Tap and hold on the space bar to get something akin to a trackpad to move the caret around.

The thing I can never figure out how to do is move the cursor very far, eg to the other end of a url in the address bar. Spacebar trick only moves the cursor so far. That’s mostly only useful if the text field has word wrap because you can move it up and down.

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

#192
The SE was the best phone I ever had, and even though the screen was smaller, I rarely made typos. Copying and pasting text was a breeze.

I can't even tell how I'm supposed to select text correctly on my new iPhone. I think I need to look up a YouTube tutorial.

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

#197
Same experience here.

I actually thought this was a me problem and not an iPhone problem. I figured I was just getting lazy and had become too reliant on autocorrect to clean up my mistakes over the years.

I do notice that I tend to type much faster than I did 5-10 years ago. If I deliberately slow myself down like 30% I'm able to type almost flawlessly. Does this resonate with anyone else?

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

#198

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.

You might not know that you can forward-delete letters with Shift+Backspace, instead of backspace. The Samsung and BlackBerry keyboards both support this.

Personally, I still use the BlackBerry keyboard on my Samsung phone because it has features that no other keyboard has. Namely:

- Word predictions are on the keys themselves, and you select them by "throwing" them onto the page (see [screenshot 1]). This means there can be 6+ predictions on screen at any time, and since they're literally on the key you're about to press anyway it is so quick to just select the prediction instead of typing it out fully. On other keyboards the predictions are above the keyboard and using them means taking your eyes away from what you're typing.

- Autocorrections are shown on the space key before you actually hit it, and if you don't want the autocorrection you can swipe up on the space key to select what you actually typed (see [screenshot 2]).

- You can backspace a word with a left swipe across the keyboard. This is HUGE. When backspacing is this easy, when you make a mistake it's almost always faster to delete the entire word and retype it again from the beginning than it is to move the cursor. You can also backspace multiple words at a time by swiping with multiple fingers (great for editing URLs).

- Swiping down across the keyboard cycles through the various symbol layers (you can create a custom layer), and selecting a symbol automatically moves back to the letter layer (you can sticky the symbol layer by opening it normally with the ?123 key).

- The ?123 also acts as a Control key, so you can use common keyboard shortcuts like cut, copy, paste, undo, and select all.

[screenshot 1] https://ibb.co/jVTPg7Q

[screenshot 2] https://ibb.co/p1PTM1S

On non-BlackBerry Android phones the BB keyboard was never officially available, but someone made a cracked version that still works great even though it hasn't been updated in years. But you have to dig around to find the APKs ever since the website got taken down.

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

#199

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.

For me [on Android, which is just as excerable] it's changing "has" to "had", which it does every fucking time. No matter how many times I change it back. I'll re-read what I've written and find I've been jumping between past and present tense like a grammatical kangaroo.

One thing that could vastly improve the suggestions would be to only insert a proper noun if I've first tapped the shift key. Here again, Android has the infuriating habit of suddenly inserting a person, city or country name into the most prosaic of sentences.

My other major annoyance with this kind of typing on mobile is that; once the fuckwitted algorithm has made a ridiculously wrong choice, when you spot it a word or two later and go back to correct it, all the corrections offered are variations on the wrong word it chose, rather than alternatives for what could have been chosen initially.

And the very nature of typing on mobile means you're looking at the keyboard, not what's appearing on-screen [as people can do, to various degrees, on 'real' keyboards]. So, unless you're looking up at the screen between every single word, to make sure it's correct, a lot of the correcting has to be done belatedly. So the errors tend to pile up.

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

#200

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.

Third person?
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