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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?

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For this, first hold the spacebar to get a single cursor (address bar defaults to select all), then drag the cursor itself (not the spacebar). It accelerates to the end

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

#252

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.

That's first person plural, not second person btw.

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

#253

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…

>At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. >For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why?? We need to organize and get a huge number of people to start sending text messages one day, using the autocorrect as it works, and not correcting the autocorrect . Just let it put whatever words it wants in th…

> If everyone just does this for a week, it'll completely ruin these companies' ML models

Well, that seems to be what is going on, judging from the messages I get from older and younger relatives.

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

#254

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

This should be higher up.

This right here is the one thing that you can actually do to improve your typing and lower your misspellings by a whole lot.

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

#255
The only phone keyboard that I've ever been able to tolerate is microsoft wordflow. They discontinued it, and for $reasons (who knows...) it appears to no longer work on recent versions of ios. The apple keyboard is consistently mediocre, however.

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

#256
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

And how come neither Google nor Samsung keyboards capitalize the I? Really folks, you call that ML and also put it in your CV?

good, i hate how many devices and applications make me turn off capitalisation.

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

#257

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.

Continue typing the following word and it will revert we'll to well if we'll didn't make sense. (In other words, it looks backward two words, not one.)

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh this happens to me all the time. Earlier I typed pre-sale and it put pré-salé for some reason, and it’s in English keyboard. Why have separate ones if you’re just gonna mush the auto together anyway?

Your comments are not visible because you were shadowbanned years ago. You should create a new account.

atkailash's comment is visible to me.

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

#259
Oh wow and I thought I'm going crazy, because I also make so many typos when typing on my iPhone 11 (normal size)! On any other Android phone I don't make nearly as many typos, and it just feels so much better. I never understood why, maybe the "hitbox" on the iOS keyboard keys is just smaller? Because I could swear I'm tapping the right key but somehow it often triggers a neighboring key.

Also agree with the horrible cursor movement and text selection, it is wack af on iOS

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