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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?

#311
post #211

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…

Reminds me of how much worse siri is getting every year, where it bit flips what I say to the opposite. Makes me think they're using ML models for everything which never gets anything right with %99.9 accuracy. "Hey siri turn off the bedroom lights", "Ok, turning on the bedroom". Recently tried alexa again with an old echo dot and it worked way better with basic things like I remembered it. Super sad.

My Siri experience seems to degrade over time. Months ago all my lights used to respond individually. "Turn on the floor lamp in the living room" would turn on the lamp. Now that command turns on all lights in the living room. Last week my HomePod started responding with "uh-huh" within .5 seconds of it hearing "Hey Siri" well before it's given me a chance to actually say anything.

And then there's so much trouble with connecting to the internet or even setting an alarm. Like setting a timer needs to connect to the internet even when there are zero issues with my connection. Please give me a local DumbPod.

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

#312
Best response here is disable slide to type and maybe predictive text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257455

Another approach is to murmur to your phone -- the voice to text has gotten remarkably sound. I see lots of people press the Siri button and literally murmur sotto voce, texting paragraphs impeccably much faster than typing.

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

#313
I used to be able to type quickly and successfully on iPhones without even looking at what I was typing (I’ve had them since they released and in most sizes), but that’s not been the case for at least two years. It’s bad enough I am beginning to abandon the iPhone for almost all purposes. Maybe it’s me, or my age, but no you are not alone.

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

#314

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.

In my samsung you can use the "trackpad" swiping up/down. It gives Home/End functionality.

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

#316
post #290

I honestly have no idea how people tolerate iOS keyboard. No numbers? No common characters? In 2022? Really? I often contemplate switching to iPhone to get away from Google, I've previously used 3GS and 4S for multiple years. But the keyboard is definitely in the top3 negative factors keeping me from it. PS: I can't judge modern iOS autocomplete, but on Android it's a complete garbage. Simple typos when I press a nea…

Can't you install a different keyboard such as SwiftKey?

I don't know. I thought Apple didn't allow anything core functionality from 3rd parties, like browsers, UI skins etc.? Currently I'm interacting with iPhones only when I need to fix something on my friends iPhone, I'll check alt keyboards next time.

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

#317
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?

GP is saying he would like not to but cannot shut it off because they’re not using autocorrect but text replacements. It does make sense in the general case to sync text replacements, just not if you’re using it in place of autocorrect

You’re correct, sorry for the confusion.

Phase 1: iPhone w/o autocorrect but with text replacements.

Phase 2: iPhone and macOS, but text replacements are synched without option to disable. I don’t want autocorrect or replacements while typing on a real keyboard.

Phase 3 (reluctantly): iPhone with autocorrect, macOS without it, and no text replacements.

tl;dr it would be nice if I could disable text replacement on a per-device basis.

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