Right I'm starting to get to the end of my tether with the software keyboard on my Android phone (S8) and also on my iPad Mini (stock Apple keyboard).
They're just awful. The one thing I'm most annoyed about is the complete lack of innovation with the layout. Touch screens were supposed to allow button placement where it suited best not sticking rigidly to bygone input methods.. yet almost every popular keyboard I can see still crams everything into the bottom half of the screen. The usual layout. Punctuation and enter keys all crammed into the nooks and crannies at the bottom where you (or certainly I) manage to hit them more often than the letter keys I'm intending to hit.
My favourite mistake seems to be trying to hit the space bar but hitting either the 'n' or 'm' or period keys which then causes endless problems with auto-complete.
Then there's auto complete and spell checking which in every keyboard I've tried are inexplicably combined into the same function. Seriously this is super frustrating. Auto complete can aggressively add in words you obviously never wanted but turning it off also turns off some nice basic error correction which tends to work reasonably well. But combined with auto-complete it means you end up typing away quickly and when you read back there's the most random of crap populating the text to the point sometimes you don't even know what you were trying to type in the first place!
I kind of miss the good old T9 predictive text of old Nokia style phones. The predictive text was based largely on how many key presses were made and guessing from the keys you pressed what word you intended. It worked far more often than not and when you fumbled the wrong key it did a good job predicting what you meant. Now with modern keyboards I type in a couple of letters, accidentally hit space and get an 8 letter word filled in in its place! It just is user unfriendly and makes no sense. It's seriously pissing me off now.
They also seem to be really quite glitchy and slow at times, this on a £600 latest handset. The Google keyboard was awful for this. Constantly had issues when for a split second it thinks I'm trying to swipe and it messes up. Then even simple things like trying to highlight text or place the cursor in the right place can be poorly designed and never put it in a logical place.
It's getting to the stage where I have some simple ideas for a decent new software keyboard experience and if I had even the slightest idea where to start I'd seriously consider designing my own alternative.
So... does anyone know of ANY software keyboards that are consistently good, that give good error correction when you make obvious mistakes but without inserting words you clearly never intended to type and don't run slowly or erratically!? I've tried Swype and Swift key and they all have their idiosyncrasies that don't gel with me. HELP!
TL
R Software keyboards on phones and tablets seem to be universally awful for me and I've yet to find one that works as well as it should in this day and age. Poorly designed layout and features that works against the user more often than works for them. Or maybe I'm just hopeless.
They're just awful. The one thing I'm most annoyed about is the complete lack of innovation with the layout. Touch screens were supposed to allow button placement where it suited best not sticking rigidly to bygone input methods.. yet almost every popular keyboard I can see still crams everything into the bottom half of the screen. The usual layout. Punctuation and enter keys all crammed into the nooks and crannies at the bottom where you (or certainly I) manage to hit them more often than the letter keys I'm intending to hit.
My favourite mistake seems to be trying to hit the space bar but hitting either the 'n' or 'm' or period keys which then causes endless problems with auto-complete.
Then there's auto complete and spell checking which in every keyboard I've tried are inexplicably combined into the same function. Seriously this is super frustrating. Auto complete can aggressively add in words you obviously never wanted but turning it off also turns off some nice basic error correction which tends to work reasonably well. But combined with auto-complete it means you end up typing away quickly and when you read back there's the most random of crap populating the text to the point sometimes you don't even know what you were trying to type in the first place!
I kind of miss the good old T9 predictive text of old Nokia style phones. The predictive text was based largely on how many key presses were made and guessing from the keys you pressed what word you intended. It worked far more often than not and when you fumbled the wrong key it did a good job predicting what you meant. Now with modern keyboards I type in a couple of letters, accidentally hit space and get an 8 letter word filled in in its place! It just is user unfriendly and makes no sense. It's seriously pissing me off now.
They also seem to be really quite glitchy and slow at times, this on a £600 latest handset. The Google keyboard was awful for this. Constantly had issues when for a split second it thinks I'm trying to swipe and it messes up. Then even simple things like trying to highlight text or place the cursor in the right place can be poorly designed and never put it in a logical place.
It's getting to the stage where I have some simple ideas for a decent new software keyboard experience and if I had even the slightest idea where to start I'd seriously consider designing my own alternative.
So... does anyone know of ANY software keyboards that are consistently good, that give good error correction when you make obvious mistakes but without inserting words you clearly never intended to type and don't run slowly or erratically!? I've tried Swype and Swift key and they all have their idiosyncrasies that don't gel with me. HELP!
TL
R Software keyboards on phones and tablets seem to be universally awful for me and I've yet to find one that works as well as it should in this day and age. Poorly designed layout and features that works against the user more often than works for them. Or maybe I'm just hopeless.
