▲MontyCarloHall3 months ago
[-] Smartphone keyboards dynamically adjust the "hitbox" of each key based on what's previously been typed and overall letter frequencies of the language. So when typing "Paris is the capital of Fr..." [*], the A key becomes much easier to hit than its neighbors. Fun fact: back in the day, when this tech was less refined, certain letter contexts made the hitboxes of some keys effectively nonexistent [0].
I wonder if an approach like KKeyboard with larger but statically combined keys leads to faster typing than the current approach with smaller but dynamically "combined" keys.
[*] In reality, the context is modeled using a simple Hidden Markov Model with a much smaller effective context window that could not associate "Paris" and "France." But you get the idea.
[0] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/impossible-to-type-okee...
browningstreet3 months ago
[-] Not successfully though. Half the time I hit b or n in place of space. I can type numerous words before I notice. I've thought about just making a new iPhone keyboard app with just a big space bar.
The iPhone keyboard is the least successful tech I use each day.
I did a fun experiment once to confirm it’s not me sausage-fingering but the stupid iOS keyboard. There’s an app called xKeyboard which lets you design your own keyboard. I remade the FITALY[0] keyboard in it and even though the keys are slightly smaller than on the original iOS keyboard, I can type without making any error. Yet the iOS keyboard often detects the wrong key because of those stupid hitboxes. I wish there was a way to turn them off.
[0] https://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm
egypturnash3 months ago
[-] godnyesninhatenthatnthenphonenhasnnonideanhowntonautocorrectnoutnofnwhatnmustnbenancommonnerrornatnall
reply▲rationalist3 months ago
[-] I always make the same typos in Gboard. I don't know if they adjust the hotboxes based on common letter sequences, but it would be nice if they adjusted it based on people's typing performance.
reply▲Interesting to note is how much typing accuracy decreases if you enable dual-language single-keyboard typing (e.g. Eng + Fr) on an iPhone, since targets end up having to account for two separate dictionaries.
reply▲walterbell3 months ago
[-] Need Liquid Keys to make this behavior visible, which will lead to requests for turning it off, joining the iOS Accessibility Settings Hall of {F|Sh}ame.
reply▲QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] Thanks for the thoughtful point!
Hitbox behavior is largely constrained by OS -level policies from the manufacturers, so major improvements on that side are difficult for now.
At this stage, I'm mainly trying to evaluate the layout and the input method itself - and hopefully, in the future, issues like hitbox tuning can be improved as well.
reply▲QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] I’m not sure if this fully answers the question, but so far increasing the key size alone has worked well, with no noticeable hitbox issues.
reply▲quamserena3 months ago
[-] Omg I thought this was just me. How do I turn this off? On iOS, this has been bugging me for a long time.
reply▲I would love a way to turn it off as well, this is the source of the majority of my annoying typos.
reply▲sushisource3 months ago
[-] Seriously this explains so much. I thought I was going crazy, or just becoming an old man who can't type on a phone any more.
reply▲There is no builtin setting in iOS to disable it. However most 3rd party keyboards don't have it, as implementing it without OS support is a huge pain.
reply▲Why is it hard? In principle you render an image instead of discrete buttons, and do your hit testing manually. Sure, it’s more annoying than just having your OS tell you what key got hit, but keyboard makers are doing way fancier stuff just fine (e.g. Swype).
reply▲Apple's keyboard receives more information, to put it simply. It doesn't get told that a touch was at a particular point, but the entire fuzzy area. Allowing you to use circular occlusion and other things to choose between side-by-side buttons and override the predictive behaviour when it is the wrong choice.
A third-party maker gets a single point - usually several in short succession, but still it requires more math to work out where the edges of the finger are pressing, to help determine which direction you're moving. So most just... Don't.
Are you aware of the `majorRadius` and `majorRadiusTolerance` UITouch properties?
reply▲Apple's software gets the actual mapping matrix that those use.
reply▲yjftsjthsd-h3 months ago
[-] I'm not following.
* Does this still expect you to hit every key but some of them need multiple taps?
* Are they doing fancy autocorrect-like magic to decide which letter you meant, and if so why use this instead of taking it one more step and using http://minuum.com/ ?
* Or is it something else?
I just tried this out, and the need to double-tap was a total deal breaker making words like "success" a failure.
The other problem with the way this double tapping works is that I encountered missed spaces or other weirdness if I type too quickly. It's as if it's having trouble detecting new keydown events when another key is still down for a split second.
QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] There is, understandably, a slight delay with double-tapping, so using simultaneous key presses can help improve speed when typing quickly. Thank you for your feedback.
reply▲Sorry if I was unclear, but that's the opposite of what I'm saying. It feels as if simultaneous keypresses are
not working once I type faster than a certain speed
because of the way double tapping is implemented.
I think I'd prefer tap and hold for the secondary character. Right now spelling is getting totally mangled no matter the technique of the user.
QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] Since tap-and-hold has a longer delay, wouldn’t it be more suitable as a method for various extended characters in the multilingual versions? I will check whether there is any interference between simultaneous input and double-tap and take the necessary actions. Thank you for the feedback.
reply▲yeah, I agree. It feels pretty rough to me. On older feature phones, you could accelerate this with a right arrow key which would lock to the key for key duplicates like 'cc' in success. Definitely feels like this needs a dedicated key for doing that
reply▲QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] Yes, all characters are entered with tap or double-tap, and it also supports simultaneous taps as an advanced option.
It’s fully local, with no autocorrect or prediction.
Minuum compresses QWERTY into one row, but QWERTY mini keeps the QWERTY structure to preserve the familiar typing experience.
Thanks for your interest!
reply▲yjftsjthsd-h3 months ago
[-] So like, to type "x" a person would hit the dx key twice?
I guess that's better for precise typing, but for normal prose it's probably faster+easier to just type blindly and let the machine figure out what you mean.
QWERTYmini3 months ago
[-] Both with- and without-autocorrect have their pros and cons.
This layout could also work well if predictive features are added later.
reply▲This could be a good alternative to Minuum when mixed together. The single line was great in theory, but in practice I often preferred the regular keyboard layout. Maybe the autopredict did not work all that well, at least with the multiple languages I mixed then? Going to two lines might improve it, and devices are bigger now than back then.
reply▲Blast from the past using Minuum on a Nexus 4, my second Android smartphone from my first with the O.G. Motorola Droid.
reply▲Some old Galaxy phone for me I think. And then I used it a bit on an LG G3. Only regular app I ever bought (the one other purchase was a game,
https://egamebook.com/knights/).
But it must have been great for the small Nexus 4.
I mean for one thing Minuum is dead, the play store link is 404 and the last time I tried it it didn't work perfectly with recent Android versions. Which is sad because it was great when it was still maintained.
reply▲I believe Minuum is the only app I ever paid for on the Play Store, after having followed it since the Kickstarter campaign. It was the only option that made typing on a small touchscreen feel mostly frictionless for me, contrary to the varying degrees of frustration of other options. As a result, I now hardly type on my phone.
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