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Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

ios-countdown.win

421–430 of 826 posts

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#421
I watched the video and immediately tested it on my iphone. It's true?? About 50% of the time, typing "Thumb" resulted in "Thimb" or "Thjmb", while the visual feedback on the keyboard showed u being pressed instead!

Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been. It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the…

I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been. It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the…

Not always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#424
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help. What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.

It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)

I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links)

But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#426

@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the keyboard as "broken" and autocorrect as "nearly useless". Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video. As for the underlying issue, I have experienced similar typing issues on my…

I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations. For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points: - autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes - autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words - swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are univer…

> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words

This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type!

I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there o…

It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much. Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.

Extremely common pitfall in UI engineering. If you treat all input as a queue that's divorced from output, you end up with situations like this.

It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:

- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.

- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.

- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.

Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#428

@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the keyboard as "broken" and autocorrect as "nearly useless". Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video. As for the underlying issue, I have experienced similar typing issues on my…

I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations. For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points: - autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes - autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words - swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are univer…

I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard.

Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle?

Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#430
What the hell is this?? If the product has terrible issues, just leave! Why are you grovelling before a corporation, begging for fixes, when you have other options?

I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.

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