iOS 9 to Feature Force Touch With Haptic Feedback, New Keyboard and Group Read Receipts

[Roadstar]

How about force touching a letter, which opens a radial menu while your finger is down while you wheel around to the accent you want, which selects when you lift your finger and the keyboard goes back to it's normal state?

Simple, one clicking action, fast.

Pay up

Still takes up much more time and effort than quickly tapping on a letter that's correct as it is and proceeding to the next one. Imagine typing your message above on a keyboard where for example e is accessible only from such a menu. Fast? Convenient? Not quite. For many languages that's still approximately the rate when accented characters are needed.

 

[oliversl]

I really want to see where iOS design goes without Jony Ive's "order" as he described in the iOS7 announce video.

 

[Lictor]

You do realize you can turn that off right?

Yes, that what I did after laughing at how ridiculous it is. So it's just useless...

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For many languages that's still approximately the rate when accented characters are needed.

Exactly. And accents actually have meanings. For instance, forêt (a forest) and foret (a drill) do not have the same meaning. It's not only a spelling mistake not to have them, but it's also a loss of meaning.

 

[subjonas]

I don't understand how some people can have a problem with the shift key. The arrow is white when it's off, black when it's being used for one letter, and a double tap adds the line on the bottom for "lock".

It's pretty obvious, and easy. I think it says more about these few who can't seem to figure it out after a few uses, than it does about the way the key itself works.

It's not obvious. It's the opposite of obvious because the keys around it are the exact same colors. If a new user can't look at the keyboard and tell right away whether caps is on or off until he or she starts typing, it's a problem. Obvious would be if it were a different color such as blue, or if the key was outlined, or better yet if the keys themselves changed to show the case of the letters.

But even if one were to learn this non-obvious method, there are still problems with it. It slows down the typing experience for two reasons: When you're typing, your thumb naturally hovers directly over the shift button, blocking your view of it. Also because the color change does not stand out from surrounding keys, you have to look directly at it as opposed to subconsciously noticing with your peripheral vision. When I'm focused on typing, I find these things irritating having to often move my thumb out of the way just to check the shift key, as well as having to take my eyes off my words and the keys that I actually do need to look at.

 

[NT1440]

Still takes up much more time and effort than quickly tapping on a letter that's correct as it is and proceeding to the next one. Imagine typing your message above on a keyboard where for example e is accessible only from such a menu. Fast? Convenient? Not quite. For many languages that's still approximately the rate when accented characters are needed.

So what is the solution? Have every letter on the screen? How is one (holding) press and a click-wheel like UI not fast?

 

[Roadstar]

And eastern Europe languages are a worst case. For a languages like French, just having the 4 most common accents and letters (ç,é,è,à) would already speed things up a lot, even if this means digging up for the lesser used accents. There is certainly enough room to add 4 keys on a 6+ !
It's especially annoying with ç, because it reads like 'k' instead of 'ss', it really slows down reading...

There's been enough room for 4 additional keys for years already. The Finnish keyboard has three extra keys and there would be room for one more in the bottom row, so a 6+ size isn't a requirement for that. My iPhone 6 has enough space and so does my wife's iPhone 5.

Just checked an iPhone 4 and the same room is available there as well.

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So what is the solution? Have every letter on the screen? How is one (holding) press and a click-wheel like UI not fast?

I don't know about you, but I've typed 3 or more regular letters by the time the selection UI would appear after a hold. To me that sounds like quite a slowdown. All extra letters would be preferable (like we have for Finnish and Swedish as three extras are all we need for typical writing), but in other cases at least the most common ones should be there.

 

[subjonas]

No, this is a hardware thing. There's nothing to sense the varied pressure in current iPhones.

You don't get what keerock is saying. He suggested a possible (albeit improbable) alternative way to simulate pressure sensitivity based on existing hardware.

 

[NT1440]

I don't know about you, but I've typed 3 or more regular letters by the time the selection UI would appear after a hold. To me that sounds like quite a slowdown. All extra letters would be preferable (like we have for Finnish and Swedish as three extras are all we need for typical writing), but in other cases at least the most common ones should be there.

But replacing the tap-n-hold with a force click (just press hard) would bring down the disparity to a more 2-to-1 ratio. Not on par, but certainly an improvement right?

I'm sorry, I don't know anything about Finnish/Swedish keyboards so I'm just trying to figure out ways that wouldn't throw the normal key alignment/placement out of whack while still improving the speed of the task.

 

[Michael Goff]

You don't get what keerock is saying. He suggested a possible (albeit improbable) alternative way to simulate pressure sensitivity based on existing hardware.

Except part of the thing that helps with pressure sensitivity is ... flexible screens. The iPhones so far don't have them. The Apple Watch does. There is no way to get pressure sensitivity on current iPhones. His method would not work at all.

 

[Roadstar]

But replacing the tap-n-hold with a force click (just press hard) would bring down the disparity to a more 2-to-1 ratio. Not on par, but certainly an improvement right?

It would be an improvement to tap-n-hold, but still it would break the flow of typing as non-accented characters would require only a quick and light tap. So yes, it wouldn't be optimal but still better than tap-n-hold.

I'm sorry, I don't know anything about Finnish/Swedish keyboards so I'm just trying to figure out ways that wouldn't throw the normal key alignment/placement out of whack while still improving the speed of the task.

Well Finnish and Swedish don't have problems (and I'm thankful for that), we already have our necessary characters in the iOS keyboards. But it was only today and this thread when I found about the issues with Hungarian and I can definitely relate to their frustrations. The keyboard is indeed the same as the US layout while accented characters are really frequent in the language. What comes to Finnish and Swedish iOS keyboards, the extra characters are in the same locations as in the Fin/Swe hardware keyboards, so that's been an easy one. What comes to the Hungarian hardware keyboards, I have no idea about the layout used there.

 

[manu chao]

Umm, could you elaborate a bit? For after all, international keyboards have been available in iOS as long as I've had an iPhone (from the iPhone 3G) and when I have a Finnish keyboard selected, I do have our additional characters ä, ö, and å available on the main keyboard (as opposed to being hidden under a and o). Pardon me if I missed something, but to me it sounds like you could take a better look at your iPhone's settings.

Apple made different choices as to which languages get extra keys for their respective non-ASCII 'letters'. Physical computer keyboards usually have three (central) rows of 12 - 12 - 11 standard-size keys. Since the western alphabet has 26 'main' characters that leaves nine keys for non-ASCII 'letters' and punctuation (and of course the numbers row on top for additional characters and punctuation). The different languages however distribute the 26 'main' characters differently: with English, German and Finnish keyboards it is 10 - 9 - 7, the French keyboard uses 10 - 10 - 6.

In iOS the English and German keyboards get 10 - 9 - 9 (as the number of standard keys per row, ie, excluding control and modifier keys), the French gets 10 - 10 - 9, and the Finnish get 11 - 11 - 9. The French exception is needed already just to get the 26 'main' characters on the screen in their required location (it also affords them another punctuation key). The Finnish modification allows them to put three non-ASCII 'letters' on the keyboard. If the German keyboard also had a 11 - 11 - 9 set of keys, it could also fit all umlauts on it (with only the 'ß', which sits to the right of the number zero on a physical keyboard, not directly available).

The standard French keyboard puts several accented characters and the ç into the numbers row, thus even adding a key or two per row wouldn't put them all within direct access (which makes typing numbers on the French layout on a normal physical keyboard a pain as you need to add the shift key for every digit). However, if you are used to the English or German layout (which for letters only differ by having the Y and Z swapped), the Swiss French layout puts the three most often used accented characters where the three umlauts on the German layout sit.

 

[DanGoh]

Don't care about any if that. I just want a better camera and better battery life.

 

[manu chao]

How about force touching a letter, which opens a radial menu while your finger is down while you wheel around to the accent you want, which selects when you lift your finger and the keyboard goes back to it's normal state?

This would work best with umlauts because there is only one umlaut per vowel to choose from (ie, a simple force touch without having to select anything would do the trick). In French, this could work equally well for 'ç', 'œ', and 'à', but then you can also have â and ô and for e you can have é, è, ë or ê.

And you still need a way to write the occasional character from another language without having its respective keyboard set-up already, ie, one would have to differentiate between, eg, what 'gesture' goes directly the umlaut and which allows you to choose from different accents (one could be force touch and other touch-and-hold).

 

[steve217]

And while they are at it maybe they should make the keys look different when you are typing capitals so its easier to tell that pressing shift has worked

Just changing the keys on the displayed keyboard from upper to lower case when shift is toggled would work wonders.

 

[ttss6]

How is the current Shift key confusing? It's gray if it's disabled/ lowercase like the Delete key and white if it's enabled like how when you push Return and the Return key turns white while its pressed. For All Caps, it's a step further with a White Shift Key with a small line underneath it which is a step further from what pressing the Shift key once does. People just like to complain.

 

[subjonas]

Except part of the thing that helps with pressure sensitivity is ... flexible screens. The iPhones so far don't have them. The Apple Watch does. There is no way to get pressure sensitivity on current iPhones. His method would not work at all.

Flexible screens is the legitimate way to do it, yes. He's talking about a simulation/workaround/hack. Current iPhones can sense how much skin is touching the screen. So he suggested using the expanding surface area of a finger as it smushes down against the glass as an indicator of the amount of pressure. I believe some iOS apps already try to use this method. It works but not particularly well.

 

[manu chao]

How is the current Shift key confusing? It's gray if it's disabled/ lowercase like the Delete key and white if it's enabled like how when you push Return and the Return key turns white while its pressed. People just like to complain.

The off state is not confusing, but in its on state it looks like any of the other keys. That is where I occasionally get things wrong, mainly when the shift key changes state on its own (eg, if you delete an uppercase character it automatically switches to enabled), and don't realise it is on. And I am not complaining for the sake of complaining, I just describe a situation where I occasionally get it wrong.

 

[Michael Goff]

Flexible screens is the legitimate way to do it, yes. He's talking about a simulation/workaround/hack. Current iPhones can sense how much skin is touching the screen. So he suggested using the expanding surface area of a finger as it smushes down against the glass as an indicator of the amount of pressure. I believe some iOS apps already try to use this method. It works but not particularly well.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/how-does-force-touch-work-3606551/

I feel neither of you understand how Force Touch works, so I'm helping you out with that.

 

[Roadstar]

How is the current Shift key confusing? It's gray if it's disabled/ lowercase like the Delete key and white if it's enabled like how when you push Return and the Return key turns white while its pressed. For All Caps, it's a step further with a White Shift Key with a small line underneath it which is a step further from what pressing the Shift key once does. People just like to complain.

Well, I've used the current design from the day it was released and I still occasionally have to stop and think whether shift is on or off and typically end up with trial and error. I complain because the current design is unintuitive and needlessly user-hostile. Either switch the keycaps to the active case or make it instantly obvious whether the button is pressed or not. If you have to stop typing and start comparing the button's color to keys on the other side of the keyboard, the design has issues.

 

[MrX8503]

How many engineers does it take to get the shift key right?

Where skeumorphism worked.

 

[Roadstar]

The off state is not confusing, but in its on state it looks like any of the other keys. That is where I occasionally get things wrong, mainly when the shift key changes state on its own (eg, if you delete an uppercase character it automatically switches to enabled), and don't realise it is on. And I am not complaining for the sake of complaining, I just describe a situation where I occasionally get it wrong.

This. Before reading this I didn't realise how much the automatic switching contributes to this issue. That switching combined with non-obvious states makes this a clear usability issue that hopefully gets fixed at some point.

 

[jmmo20]

please let us have haptic feedback when using the keyboard, please please please.

 

[C DM]

How is the current Shift key confusing? It's gray if it's disabled/ lowercase like the Delete key and white if it's enabled like how when you push Return and the Return key turns white while its pressed. For All Caps, it's a step further with a White Shift Key with a small line underneath it which is a step further from what pressing the Shift key once does. People just like to complain.

It seems like some people get into a state where they might be (temporarily) confused. Personally, after the initial one or two times of using it after it was changed in iOS 7 I haven't thought about it much and can easily tell when it's on or off (again without really giving it a second thought), pretty much just like I could before the change.

 

[Lictor]

I'm sorry, I don't know anything about Finnish/Swedish keyboards so I'm just trying to figure out ways that wouldn't throw the normal key alignment/placement out of whack while still improving the speed of the task.

It's a software keyboard. Apple can put the keys wherever it wants, they're just buttons. So, there is no throwing the keys out of alignment. Moreover, the national keyboards are already different from the US keyboard. For instance, my iOS keyboards starts with AZERTY, the , is where your M is and so on. So, they already have a different design for each locale. It's just a matter of having the right keys for each locale.

 

[manu chao]

It's just a matter of having the right keys for each locale.

The actual issue is the number of keys, languages with non-ASCII letters on top of the 26 ASCII letters simply need more keys. And the characters which on physical keyboards need modifier keys will also need some sort of modifier on virtual keyboards unless you want to put them in a different place than where they are on physical keyboards. And the characters which sit in the numbers row would require a fully new line of keys added to the the software keyboard.