

The iPad’s split keyboard has 6 invisible keys - peteforde
http://www.redmondpie.com/the-ipads-split-keyboard-in-ios-5-has-6-invisible-keys-which-you-dont-know-about/

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ender7
This is the kind of thing that separates Apple from the rest of the crowd.

In this case? A small, but nice feature. But it's this degree of perfectionism
that also means that they have the smoothest animations of any smartphone OS,
the most responsive interfaces, the most carefully constructed hardware that
feels _just right_ in your hand.

Taken together this stuff makes a huge difference, but it's only achievable
with a pathological obsession with detail. Android and Windows 7 don't have
that. At least not yet.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I don't actually like the look of iOS very much, but the attention to detail
they put into the user experience is a wonderful thing.

Perhaps it's why Apple is slow to add features, because they spend so much
time trying to perfect things.

~~~
myko
I agree with your feelings on the look of iOS, and I think the attention to
detail is generally really good. Given that I don't understand why their soft
keyboard doesn't show lower case letters when inputting in lower case.

~~~
Retric
Probably because keyboards don't and more people would find it more odd than
useful.

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raldi
What would be really slick is if the iPad remembered this and, once it
realized you do this all the time, made a note to quietly display the keys
where you want them from then on.

~~~
MBCook
It's nice to know they do this. When I was using my parent's iPad last weekend
I used the keyboard in split mode and it was quite nice except for the B key.
It bothered me to no end that it was on the wrong side. While it looks better
visually the way it is, I found it odd to type on because of that. If I had
known that I could just pretended the B was there and everything worked that
would have been great.

It would also be nice to be able to drag the split keyboard up and down.
Depending on what I'm doing, it would be nice to be able to lower it on the
screen, but that's a pretty minor complaint.

~~~
gtCameron
If you hold the bottom right key (the one that hides the keyboard) you can
drag it up and down.

~~~
raldi
So _that's_ why it has those horizontal lines on it! I can't tell you how long
I tried to figure out why they were there.

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SeanLuke
This seems to be more of a necessity than a nicety. The split keyboard struck
me as a classic Apple example of form over function: in touch typing the 'B'
key is struck with the left hand.

~~~
gghootch
Does 'in touch' refer to on devices as the iPhone or iTouch or with regular
old keyboards?

I hit the B with my left hand on a normal keyboard; fairly certain that's the
way all _professional_ typing courses teach teach you to do it.

~~~
Retric
I have been told one of the secrets to really fast typing is to use whichever
index finger is closer. With some preference for alternating hands so TB is a
clear win for the right hand.

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BrianHV
I just played around with this in the emulator for a bit and I discovered that
the feature has some subtle nuances. Clicking on the same pixel can produce
either the visible letter or the invisible letter. From what I've been able to
ascertain, within a certain range of the visible key it favors the visible key
if you're typing the first letter of a word, and favors the invisible key
otherwise.

~~~
maxmcd
Doesn't the the touch area for individual keys change size depending on what
is being typed? The behavior you are describing should be the same on almost
any key.

~~~
BrianHV
Indeed, you are correct. And the heuristic clearly isn't as simple as whether
or not the cursor is at the start of the word. Clicking between O and P
produces a seemingly pseudorandom alternation that probably has some basis in
statistics.

~~~
kevinchen
I remember that the iOS 1 videos Apple made to introduce the soft keyboard
mentioned that the size of the keys change based on the actual word that
you're typing. (It's very unlikely for a user to want to type an S after
typing P-I-Z-Z)

~~~
adpowers
Yeah, I used to demonstrate this my typing "Americ" and then touching down
directly over the 's'. Even though I pressed the 's', it was the 'a' that
appeared. You could clearly see I wasn't even touching 'a'.

I think they got rid of this feature a few versions ago because I haven't been
able to reproduce it. I suspect (but have no evidence for) that this is
related to the typing lag that was really bad in ios 2 or 3. From my
perspective, it seems they weren't able to fix the realtime correction so they
made it asynchronous and just fix up words after you hit space. This is how it
seems to perform now (and let's them offer more features like multi word
correction).

~~~
kevinchen
I just tested that, and it seems like you're correct. I recall that simply
typing stuff quickly could increase CPU usage by ~30%.

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rhplus
I wonder if this is actually a serendipitous bug, rather than an intentional
feature? If there's a hit-test heuristic associated with the general keyboard
area, then the edge keys might be passing off the key event to their logical
neighbor, which happens to be physically further away.

~~~
ryannielsen
iOS (neé iPhone) 1.0 automatically resized the logical size of keyboard "keys"
based on prediction models of the word you're typing. The video describing
this behavior has since been pulled, but you can read the a summary of the
behavior in this 2007 article:
<http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10114943-233.html>

So, given that pre-existing behavior, established in _iPhone 1.0_ back in
2007, do you honestly believe the iPad's split keyboard behavior is a _bug_?

This is a very intentional and deliberate decision that improves the
keyboard's usability while at the same time maintaining its aesthetics.

~~~
rhplus
I'm not suggesting that the split keyboard is a bug. I'm suggested that the
behavior of ghost keys to the left and right of the split might have not been
intentional.

~~~
ryannielsen
I understand; I'm saying those ghost keys are intentional, and are a logical
extension of the "logical key predictive resizing" behavior present in the
keyboard since 1.0.

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throw_away
I wish the split keyboard had the same popup letters the iPhone has. I can
understand how the non-split versions are big enough not to need it, but on
the split my thumbs cover the whole letter.

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iNeal
This was introduced with iOS 5. Are they just now realizing it?

~~~
Braasch
The article was posted back in February. I'm baffled as to why it's even on
the front page of HN, considering this is a relatively old and known feature
of the split keyboard. (Well, I was aware of it, at least.)

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J3L2404
The best design is the one you don't even notice.

~~~
BrianHV
I'm not entirely convinced this falls under the category of good design. As it
stands, it's a fun and useful easter egg. But good design wouldn't have
required a blog post months after the OS's release to inform users of the
feature's presence.

Good design should have some sort of affordance. In this case Apple probably
didn't want to have two instances of the keys along that border, but perhaps
some sort of faded version of the keys could have provided the necessary
affordance without cluttering up the keyboard.

~~~
sjwright
This feature _didn't_ require a blog post. It just works, and there's probably
been thousands of iPad users who've pressed these phantom keys without even
realising it.

~~~
BrianHV
Perhaps there were thousands of iPad users who used the keys without knowing
it. I don't have access to those numbers.

But how many more would have used them if there were an affordance?

And if we're talking about good (user interface) design, there's an element of
"what if everybody did it" involved. I don't want a lot of applications hiding
useful features behind invisible buttons. I think having the keys there is a
fantastic idea; I just think it would be better if they were visible.

~~~
hej
You really don’t get it, do you? That’s pretty amazing.

This is about people accidentally pressing keys on the wrong side of the
keyboard. It makes sure that those people are not interrupted in their
writing, while still presenting a clear image to the user that is not
confusing. It’s a line of defense, like the buttons that are actually a bit
larger than they are displayed – just in order to make sure that users missing
those buttons is less likely.

It’s error correction. The feature is not that there are repeated buttons on
the keyboard and users can pick which they want to use. Users are not supposed
to use those. They are not supposed to know (or have to know) about them.

~~~
BrianHV
I find the personal dig at the start of your comment unnecessary, but I
appreciate that you're engaging me in a discussion about the design aspects.

I'll grant that if you're optimizing for error correction, it's a perfectly
suitable solution. I'd even go so far as to say that's exactly what Apple was
going for when designing this. Even so, I really think this is a case where
showing that this is an option would be valuable. When I see a split keyboard,
I assume that I need to press the keys where they're displayed and frequently
have to slow down my typing to figure out which side of the keyboard the key
is on. It's nice to know I don't have to do that.

~~~
maxmcd
That's too literal. This solution is the best possible setup for all users. If
you're typing slowly on the keyboard and taking it literally you just learn
the new setup. If you're used to another device and expect those keys to be in
different places it performs as that users expects. Adding an option just
places something on the screen that should really be irrelevant for the vast
majority of users.

Also, I wouldn't take that initial comment as a dig, even if it was intended
as one. I think it says something about the the discovery of this feature that
you couldn't immediately realize the intention. The fact that it's not obvious
to everyone what this is for gives even more reason for it to be a hidden
feature.

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zashapiro
That's pretty nifty

