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With iOS7 looming, there are rumblings of the keyboard being let loose to third parties. A quick look at XCode 5DevPreview shows the new flat design applied to the iPhone keyboard, but not for the iPad. Yet.
I've seen interesting departures from the QWERTY paradigm. And I've seen comments on blogs and forums about how the regular keyboard doesn't perform. But in my estimation they overlook some functional flaws. What are some of them?
1. Keystrokes should never have been arranged in three levels. Top Level, and one underneath. Maximum.
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Lets take an iPad poitrait keyboard and apply it to landscape orienation, what can we do with the rest of the space?
If it was considered useable enough for that limited width, why waste the very same equivalent useable space out for landscape?
At left I've found room for a TAB key. At right there's bags of room for a numeric keyboard. Pictured is the Right Shift Key being
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Still room for 2 user-definable keys, 3 if you disagree with the = in the numpad area. The space bar target zone has been
And the whole whole thing occupies substantially less vertical dimension of the text area, even with said thickening.
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What can we do with the second level now that numbers have been taken care of in the first?
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There's a surprising amount of repetition between the second and third level, and you can see from my musical bias there's more space available than glyphs to fill them. What you see above is the result of repopulating what's left.
I've collected the grouping of the brackets and all the currency symbols in one place. Shift operate some cursor arrows as Page Up, Down, Home & End. Indeed Shift-Bracket would be nice to provide a closing bracket or brace ahead of the cursor.
I was tempted to split the spacebar into two for a space that auto-returned to top level, the other staying for more.
The suggestion in many places is that a swipe to select an alternative character is preferable to a Shift operation. Whatever.
..so the point is?Now I'm just a total amateur in the game. I know I'll probably get roundly laughed at for my suggestions, but if a klutz like me can solve these why can't experienced development engineers?
I'm only at the start of my development journey, at time of writing I'm waiting for my first app approval. Now I'm being somewhat coy, I have 40+ years history in Architecture, Perspective presentation, Modelling and Animation
But in the face of those clever people within the Infinite Loop, what would I know?
October 2015 Edit: It will be interesting to see how the soon to be released iPad Pro treats this. If they don't I'm may have to do it myself now that 3rd parties are allowed in. |