More Apple-like response?
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:45 pm
Cyril/Guys,
This past week I played around with a friend's iPhone and was pretty shocked at how dramatic the difference was with the virtual keyboard on it versus all the virtual keyboards on the Droid. I could type much faster and rarely hit a wrong key where on the Droid I seem to hit one all the time.
The first thing that struck me was just how much space their keyboard APPEARS to have. Their screen is slighly larger but not by much. Could that be the only difference?
That got me thinking about hot spots for keys. With the iPhone I got the impression that the accuracy was due in large part to it having a much smaller hotspot for each key. That got me wondering if, perhaps, having a test feature where we could dynamically select the size of the acceptable hotspot might show better or worse results than the default. For example, what would happen if each key could only be hit by touching a single pixel at the dead center of each key? Would that be impossible to hit or would it reduce incorrect "neighbor key" hits? I'd be curious to find out.
Then the other thing I'd be curious to see if Cyril could pull off in Pro has to do with the iPhone's ability, in any input box, to utilize a Magnify feature simply by holding the space in an input box. Hold your finger there and bang, you zoom in where you are and can easily move left or right a character or two. I go nuts now when I want to remove just a single letter and often end up on the wrong side if it several times before I can get the cursor where it needs to be.
I realize this is a bit out of scope but it is related. It's all part of a better virtual keyboard experience even if it isn't just hitting the keyboard. Cyril, do you even have access to be able to do something like that?
Thoughts?
This past week I played around with a friend's iPhone and was pretty shocked at how dramatic the difference was with the virtual keyboard on it versus all the virtual keyboards on the Droid. I could type much faster and rarely hit a wrong key where on the Droid I seem to hit one all the time.
The first thing that struck me was just how much space their keyboard APPEARS to have. Their screen is slighly larger but not by much. Could that be the only difference?
That got me thinking about hot spots for keys. With the iPhone I got the impression that the accuracy was due in large part to it having a much smaller hotspot for each key. That got me wondering if, perhaps, having a test feature where we could dynamically select the size of the acceptable hotspot might show better or worse results than the default. For example, what would happen if each key could only be hit by touching a single pixel at the dead center of each key? Would that be impossible to hit or would it reduce incorrect "neighbor key" hits? I'd be curious to find out.
Then the other thing I'd be curious to see if Cyril could pull off in Pro has to do with the iPhone's ability, in any input box, to utilize a Magnify feature simply by holding the space in an input box. Hold your finger there and bang, you zoom in where you are and can easily move left or right a character or two. I go nuts now when I want to remove just a single letter and often end up on the wrong side if it several times before I can get the cursor where it needs to be.
I realize this is a bit out of scope but it is related. It's all part of a better virtual keyboard experience even if it isn't just hitting the keyboard. Cyril, do you even have access to be able to do something like that?
Thoughts?
