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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?

#351
You're getting older and keyboards are getting worse.

I would love to see videos of Tim Cook typing on his iPhone. Like with a camera recording his fingers tapping/swiping and the screen itself, side by side. I wonder if he gets frustrated with the poor quality or if he's received some Official Training that lets him make effective use of the keyboard.

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

#353

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…

Thank you for explaining this, I've had the same experience as the OP so was very interested when I saw the title.

And I echo their sentiment that the 1st gen SE is the best phone I've ever had. Just bought 3rd gen SE (hardware on the 1st gen SE was dying) and while it's decent, I really miss the form factor of the original.

The very first thing I do in VS is to disable the git plugin and the AI assisted autocomplete. I've never found that autocomplete to be better than having the ability to predict what autocomplete was going to suggest.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, they should limit the text fields that auto-correct to a very limited set of applications. It becomes very problematic when attempting to type words in a foreign language. Just last week I was attempting to type a foreign word into a translate box on a webpage in Safari and the browser or page kept removing characters I had entered, presumably it was proactively auto-correcting but it was completely un…

Or some press-hold-stop autocorrecting this field. I hate when it autocorrects e-mail addresses for some reason

I have my e-mail address as a text replacement. It works ... about 1/10 of the time. The Apple keyboard didn't show text replacements when it wanted to suggest a password. (Not sure if that's still true). The google keyboard is just flaky about using the replacements. I'm usually stuck manually typing through it and fighting autocorrect, sometimes without the benefit of autocorrect suggestions.

Meanwhile, I had to delete the omw replacement which, 100% of the time, replaced with the overly enthusiastic "On my way!".

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The gem in that tweet screed is this comment: > This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection “guess wrong” and erroneously fix broken typing. I work on automation a lot, and this is so hard to communicate to the endless stream of non-tech types that just want to “tweak” the algorithms to be a little bit smarter. Trust is an asymmetric prop…

In terms of automation, I'm a fan of the 80% solution. 100% automation tends to be fragile in the non-perfect case so often it's useful to automate most of it and let a human make important decisions.

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

#356

I’ve changed my keyboard settings and am very happy with the iPhone keyboard after readjusting. My settings: Auto Capitalization: On *Auto-Correction: Off Check Spelling: On Enable Caps Lock: On *Predictive: Off Smart Punctuation: On[1] *Slide to Type: Off Character Preview: On “.” Shortcut: On The ones with an asterisk make the biggest difference, and you may have to readjust to not having crazy touch targets. [1] I…

Thank you.

When you make keyboard software with nine different toggle settings, most/all of which are unknown to 90% of users until they read a HN comment buried 43 pages down, you've lost the plot. :-)

Didn't Apple used to promote a design principle, sometimes to a maddening extreme, of minimizing user options/settings because they were too confusing? (e.g. single-button mouse) The ios keyboard apparently adheres to an opposite philosophy.

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

#357
No, and it's not just iPhone. The same class of problems is present on Android as well.

It's because they keep getting ideas, want to make things more complicated and need to justify budgets. IMO mobile keyboards (and in general mobile input and UI in general) were a solved problem 5 years ago and should've gone into maintenance mode.

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

#358

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…

This particularly infuriates me when it corrects words I've already fixed prior to the one I'm typing. There's a better highlight animation when it does it in iOS 16, but I still miss the animation most of the time (because I'm focused on the word I'm typing, not words back).

I want an option to disable that, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way other than turning off autocorrect altogether (which I've been alternating it on and off lately trying to figure out which one aggravates me least; I also briefly returned to SwiftKey [RIP] to see if its ancient less recently trained ML autocorrect model was better).

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, thanks! Hopefully I remember that when I need it.

It just works!

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