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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?

#261

I switched from Android to iOS a year ago. My first annoyance was the autocorrect, it was slightly worse, especially switching languages a lot, but what was unbearable was that iOS would often correct my last typed word AFTER I HIT SEND. That is a deadly sin imho. I've since turned autocorrect on again because I guess I'm just not precise enough, I try to always end with a space now. I still gets me every now and the…

On my Android phone, words got auto-replaced with the predicted word when I hit space. It was equally maddening. Suggesting words is fine, changing what I've already typed is not.

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

#263

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…

Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix.

If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again, for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid.

This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this as a full-blown Apple apologist.

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

#264
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments is that putting a phone case on the later generations of iPhones messes with the accuracy of the touch sensation of the screen. This inevitably leads to even more typo issues because you hit something "correctly" but the input is recognized incorrectly. Not sure if this impacts Android but definitely changed with iPhones

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1822/how-can-i-rec...

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

#265

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…

Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix. If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again , for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid. This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this a…

I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the iPhone not have an easy way to switch between keyboards? I just swipe left/right on the space bar to switch between Norwegian and English keyboards - but my phone isn't an iphone.

If you have several languages configured, there's a globe icon that lets you switch between keyboards. It's still a step down from Android that seems to just detect the language even if you switch mid-sentence.

If you don't mind the crashes, Gboard does this fine, generally detecting the difference between English, Spanish, and Portuguese for me. Although sometimes it wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and suggests only nonsense.

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

#267
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

thank you

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This has never happened for me.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix. If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again , for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid. This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this a…

I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.

This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll.

Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device.

Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.

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